During our weeklong series about developing employees' dreams in the workplace, Boyd Clarke's words of wisdom are worth keeping in mind. Sometimes, the most effective way to help people achieve their potential is to be as honest with them as possible—even when the truth may hurt.

One of the pitfalls that often comes up when we talk about faith and work is the idea that Christianity is inherently bad business practice.Sometimes, we feel that we need to value being "nice" over making the right, often tough, decisions that are sometimes necessary for businesses to survive and flourish. 

Boyd does a great job of pointing out something really important. As managers and bosses, our responsibilities are both to our employees and to our businesses. Being honest, open, and consistent is the best way to respect employees while remaining faithful to the standards we have to uphold, and to help them understand where improvement is possible. Transparency is key. 

Want to hear more? You can find this and dozens more videos over at the High Calling YouTube Channel.

TRANSCRIPT: One of the things that I have valued more than anything else, as an attribute of a manager, is transparency. It's the desire to be open, not to have hidden agendas, but to able to deal with people in a straight forward a manner as is possible. I think it's enormously important, because I think one of the things that I've seen with management of employees—where people get in trouble most frequently—is that they're afraid to confront or to deal with things directly that may be holding the employee back. It's hard to say to people, "You have a real weakness here, and if you don't deal with it, I'm going to have to deal with it." But if you don't have that kind of transparency, they're not going to grow . . . they're not going to be what they need to be. So dealing with people transparently and directly is incredibly important.