If you would like to develop a culture of candor in your own organization or on your own team, you can take several steps. The first is not the most intuitive. You might think the first step for cultivating candor would be to begin with what’s easiest: having the boss give copious feedback to her staff. I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.

Once you have a workforce made up nearly exclusively of high performers, you can count on people to behave responsibly. Once you have developed a culture of candor, employees will watch out for one another and ensure their teammates’ actions are in line with the good of the company. Then you can begin to remove controls and give your staff more freedom. Great places to start are the lifting of your vacation, travel, and expense policies. These elements give people more control over their own lives and convey a loud message that you trust your employees to do what’s right. The trust you offer will in turn instill feelings of responsibility in your workforce, leading everyone in the company to have a greater sense of ownership.

We decided that rather than putting more rules and procedures in place, we would continue to do two other things:

1. We would find new ways to increase talent density. In order to attract and retain the best people, we would have to make sure that we offered the most attractive methods of compensation.

1. We would find new ways to increase candor. If we were going to remove controls, we would need to make sure that our employees had all the information they needed to make good decisions without management oversight. This would require increasing organizational transparency and eliminating company secrets. If we wanted employees to make good decisions for themselves, they would have to understand as much about what was going on in the business as those at the top.

In order to fortify the talent density in your workforce, for all creative roles hire one exceptional employee instead of ten or more average ones. Hire this amazing person at the top of whatever range they are worth on the market. Adjust their salary at least annually in order to continue to offer them more than competitors would. If you can’t afford to pay your best employees top of market, then let go of some of the less fabulous people in order to do so. That way, the talent will become even denser.

If you have high talent density and organizational transparency firmly in place, a faster, more innovative decision-making process is possible. Your employees can dream big, test their ideas, and implement bets they believe in, even when in opposition to those hierarchically above them.