This is the first section of our Fundamentals series on TRUST. See all our Fundamentals here.
We intuitively know trust is important for organisational life and outcomes. We hear statements like “The thing that it comes down to, is trust” or “..a lack of trust”, “they just can’t trust them” or “That’s different I can trust him or her” and “You can’t trust management to… or “You can’t trust employees to…”.
But do we know what we mean when we speak of trust or the lack of it?
And how much of a difference would it have to make; and in terms of what, for us to pay it more attention? You know, the kind of attention we pay to procedures, policies, technical systems, technical skills, KPIs and all the other items we class as required for successful business outcomes.
The Importance of Prioritizing Trust in Organizations
There is a strong case for paying attention to TRUST as a key means of shifting culture and performance outcomes in organisations.
- We work in complex systems full of people. People interact, and the currency of those interactions is TRUST. It’s the glue and the golden thread in human based systems’ performance and underpins so many other aspects of organisational functioning.
- We have reached the limit and found the disadvantages of fear and threat based leadership and management rooted in job security and money. If we want to go further we need to flip to the other side. That would be TRUST.
- High performing teams, not just talented individuals, are the source of human potential that will raise the game for organisations. Patrick Lencioni’s work places a lack of trust as the foundation of the 5 dysfunctions of a team.
Why Cultivating Trust Should Be a Priority for Your Business?
Now to the bottom line. What exactly has trustworthiness been found to be linked to in organisations?
12 Business benefits that come from trust:
- Increased revenue
- Increased engagement
- Increased job satisfaction
- Increased commitment
- Greater efficiency
- Greater Information sharing
- Greater innovation
- Decreased negative safety outcomes including decreased accidents, incidents and defects
- Decreased stress
- Decreased turnover
- Greater organisational resilience during crisis or rising to a challenge
- Greater influence over others
With a list like that, the question is “Why would you not make cultivating a strong foundation of trust a priority for your business?”
Despite the answer to this question being a list as long as the one above, there is a way through. Lets begin by exploring potential obstacles.
Why are we putting off cultivating a strong foundation of trust as a priority for business?
Trust is about being willing to be vulnerable to the consequences of an uncertain reaction from another outside of your control. It really counts when we are taking a risk with something important to us. How much trust we have is based on how confident we are of a reaction we expect to be shown.
Here are some of the ways working with trust in organisations, and life for that matter, challenges us.
The Emotional Nature of Trust
It is emotional. Feelings and emotions are not the components of organisational functioning with which we are keen to work. They are considered inconvenient, a sign of weakness, something to be managed and ideally prevented from interfering with the logic and rational decision making.
How is that working out for us so far? Most of us recognise the frustration that comes from implementing decisions and systems only to find they are not well received and fail to deliver as we hoped they might.
Humans sense data with our bodies and it goes straight to our emotional brain centres before we even know we need to make a decision. To ignore our emotional reaction, or to believe we can control it all, is in itself irrational. The findings on trustworthy and emotionally intelligent leaders and organisations shows us acknowledging the need for trust is an important advantage for success.
It points to the heart of human relationships and that doesn’t work with our traditional, more mechanical view of systems.
Trust is Volatile
Trust is volatile, variable and does not travel in straight lines. Our cause and effect thinking, and need for control and predictability in systems, means we are naturally challenged by something that does not conform to rules of a simple model we can apply over and over. People trust differently around different things; with different people, and in different situations. It can run low and rise up and we may have no idea why.
Trust resides in people, who happen to be inherently variable, because we are a product of multiple factors including current situations, culture, old stories and experiences, our values and beliefs.
Trust Takes Time, Effort, and Consistent Attention
It is not instant and it’s not easy. Along with clean cause and effect relationships, we tend to prefer quick wins. We like the low hanging fruit to get us going, see movement and motivate us. Trust can be quick and strong but it predominantly takes time and effort. Most of all it requires our consistent and committed attention. That does not conform with spreadsheets of interventions to create clear outcomes and generate outputs. It is not our traditional measure of success- a tricky and complex variable that makes it a hard sell as a KPI.
The Need to Develop the Mindset, Knowledge, and Skills for Trust
We cannot demand, instruct, train or threaten people to trust. We cannot mandate it like a standard or a procedure- it doesn’t conform to our usual methods of management. In fact the more we incite fear or create a sense of threat, the further away trust moves. It calls into question our ability to work with trust, to create, sustain and repair it when it is lost. Do we have the mindset, knowledge and skills to work with it, given where we have been?
So compelling and yet so daunting. What to do with this?
Read the next section of our Fundamentals Series for some ideas.
