Evaluation Managers and Supervisors TIG Week: Learning and Transparency: Two Components of a Human-Centered Workplace Culture by Robin Horner and Michael Arnold

Date: Friday, July 11, 2025

Hi. We are Robin Horner, Principal and owner of Radiance, and Michael Arnold, Partner and Co-Executive Director of Informing Change. Radiance and Informing Change are strategic learning and evaluation firms that support leaders in social justice, equity, and systems change efforts. Like other firms, we have been creating space for learning and holding transparency as key features of the values shaping our workplace cultures. Recently, we discussed how these show up for us. We’re sharing some of our reflections to add to new and continuing conversations around values-based leadership.

As organizations that center learning in our work, we want to model this within our workplace cultures. However, as many readers of this post know, time, competing priorities, and diverse interests can pose challenges in busy consulting environments. Our firms have worked to bake in learning opportunities to tackle these challenges.

• Brainfood: Monthly Lunch n’ Learns allow staff to engage in learning together by discussing a wide range of topics of interest beyond strategic learning and evaluation. These create opportunities for staff to lead interactive discussions and encourage them to develop creative approaches for engagement, such as using mural boards, designing game-like approaches, bringing in art and music, and trying out mapping approaches.
• Choose Your Own Adventure: We encourage staff to take up professional development opportunities for their work and skill-building. The self-directed nature of this can be a strong motivator. When resources are available, we fund or supplement fee-based opportunities. Staff with similar PD interests—for example, building familiarity with specific software or skills—have created their own learning groups or limited learning series.
• A Learning Agenda: We place learning as a standing item on staff meeting agendas. Whether a prompt at the conclusion of weekly meetings (“What did you learn this week?”) or specific project share-backs, these provide routine ways for all of us to learn together.

Transparency is a necessary, rewarding, and challenging part of bringing learning into leadership. It is a core value at the heart of our leadership. How much transparency is too much or too little? And how do you balance the fears and strengths that come with vulnerability? These questions are always in front of us, but our commitments to integrity, equity, and changing systems for the better compel us to keep running toward, not away from, transparency. We do this by:

• Modeling openness to risks and sharing how our mistakes help us grow.
• Openly sharing financial information with our teams, even when things look grim.
• Providing formal and informal routes for staff to let us know when we are falling short or succeeding in meeting our stated values.

We will likely never get the balance 100% right for everyone and will never be ‘perfect’ in our leadership. However, this is secondary to the benefit to our company culture that comes from not giving up on our own growth and continual learning. We encourage others to keep at it and share their lessons openly. In a world that continues to harm through obfuscation, shining your light and putting your values into practice is more important than ever.

Rad Resources

We like talks given by Corey Newhouse of Public Profit and Komani Lundquist Cedano of Via Evaluation about upholding human-centered workplace principles. They gave us this workbook to share here and help folks think through how to keep aligning practices with values.

We’re listening to Liberated AF: A Workplace Revolution, where Sangita Kumar and Fong Marcolongo of Be The Change lead conversations about “what it really takes to build inclusive workplaces.”

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Evaluation Managers and SupervisorsTIG Week with our colleagues in the Evaluation Managers and Supervisors Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Gov’t Eval TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.