Harvard Business Review: The Enemies of Trust by Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau Try an experiment sometime. Ask a group of managers in your company whether they and their closest managerial colleagues are trustworthy and, if so, how they know. Most will claim that they themselves are trustworthy and that most of their colleagues are as well. Their answers to the second half of the question will likely reflect their beliefs about personal integrity; you’ll hear things like “I’m straight with my people” or “She keeps her promises.” A little later, ask them whether they think they and their colleagues are capable of building trust within the organization. Because we’ve asked this question many times, we’re pretty sure we know what you’ll hear: A sizable percentage will say they have little or no confidence in the group’s capacity to build and maintain trust. What accounts for the gap between the two sets of answers? With their differing responses, the managers are simply acknowledging a fact of organizational life: It takes more than personal integrity to build a trusting, trustworthy organization. It takes skills, smart supporting processes, and unwavering attention on the part of top managers. Trust within an organization is far more complicated and fragile than trust between, say, a consultant and a client. With a client, you can largely control the flow of communication. In an organization, people are bombarded with multiple, often contradictory messages every day. With a client, you can agree on desired outcomes up front. In an organization, different groups have different and often conflicting goals. With a client, you know if there’s a problem. In an organization, there’s a good chance you don’t, even if you’re in charge. If things aren’t working out with a client, either party can walk away. That’s not usually an option for people in an organization, so they stick around. But if they think the organization acted in bad faith, they’ll rarely forgive—and they’ll never forget. Trust within an organization is further complicated by the fact that people use the word “trust” to refer to three different kinds. The first is strategic trust — the trust employees have in the people running the show to make the right strategic decisions. Do top managers have the vision and competence to set the right course, allocate resources intelligently, fulfill the mission, and help the company succeed? The second is personal trust —the trust employees have in their own managers. Do the managers treat employees fairly? Do they consider employees’ needs when making decisions about the business and put the company’s needs ahead of their own desires? The third is organizational trust —the trust people have not in any individual but in the company itself. Are processes well designed, consistent, and fair? Does the company make good on its promises? Clearly these three types of trust are distinct, but they’re linked in important ways. Every time an individual manager violates the personal trust of her direct reports, for example, their organizational trust will be shaken. As difficult as it is to build and maintain trust within organizations, it’s critical. An established body of research demonstrates the links between trust and corporate performance. If people trust each other and their leaders, they’ll be able to work through disagreements. They’ll take smarter risks. They’ll work harder, stay with the company longer, contribute better ideas, and dig deeper than anyone has a right to ask. If they don’t trust the organization and its leaders, though, they’ll disengage from their work and focus instead on rumors, politics, and updating their résumés. We know this because we’ve seen it happen many times and because a high percentage of consulting engagements that seem to be about strategic direction or productivity turn out to be about trust, or the lack thereof. The building blocks of trust are unsurprising: They’re old-fashioned managerial virtues like consistency, clear communication, and a willingness to tackle awkward questions. In our experience, building a trustworthy (and trusting) organization requires close attention to those virtues. But it also requires a defensive game: You need to protect trustworthiness from its enemies, both big and small, because trust takes years to build but can suffer serious damage in just a moment. We’ll take a look at some of those enemies, discuss trust in times of crisis, and explore the ways to rebuild trust when it’s been breached. The Enemies List What do the enemies of trust look like? Sometimes the enemy is a person: a first-line supervisor who habitually expresses contempt for top management. Sometimes it’s knit into the fabric of the organization: a culture that punishes dissent or buries conflict. Some enemies are overt: You promise that this will be the last layoff, and then it isn’t. And some are covert: A conversation you thought was private is repeated and then grossly distorted by the rumor mill. Because any act of bad management erodes trust, the list of enemies could be endless. Practically speaking, though, most breakdowns in trust that we’ve witnessed can be traced back to one of the following problems. Inconsistent Messages. One of the fastest-moving destroyers of trust, inconsistent messages can occur anywhere in an organization, from senior managers on down. They can also occur externally, in the way an organization communicates with its customers or other stakeholders. Either way, the repercussions are significant. Consider the manager who tells employees in May that he’s going to hold weekly brown-bag lunch meetings to discuss relevant issues in the marketplace. He implies that enthusiastic participation will be reflected in employees’ performance reviews. But he then cancels the lunch the second, fourth, and fifth weeks because of his travel schedule. In week seven, he drops the idea entirely because, as he says, “With the summer here, we really can’t count on a good turnout.” When he reintroduces the idea in October and insists it will work this time, do you think his employees believe him? And when it’s time for performance reviews, do you think they are confident and trusting? No. They are confused and skeptical.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:15:18 +0000
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