A few years ago, I remember reading a glowing interview with the CEO of a large Australian firm about the organisation’s sharemarket success and his new strategic plan. Everywhere you turned there was a business magazine promoting the words of the CEO and his ambitious Asian Pacific focused strategy, while he mocked other Australian companies for not following suit.
Over the years, I have worked with many low trust teams to improve their performance. Repeatedly, I still see well-meaning leaders inadvertently destroy trust in their teams.
Trust is the cornerstone of business. It’s the basis of every human relationship, every interaction, every communication, every initiative, every work project and even any strategic imperative you need to accomplish.
When it comes to helping companies build trust internally, one of the things I learnt pretty quickly is that if 1-2 members of the executive team do not support any initiatives to improve trust then all subsequent efforts will fail.
Thanks to our tribal ancestry, we see ourselves in terms of other people and groups. Evolution has taught us that it is beneficial to live in tribes, where we can share out the work of daily survival.
In today’s pressure cooker business world, there is greater uncertainty and risk for people and organisations. It’s during these turbulent and unpredictable times that trust issues begin to surface, sometimes unbeknownst to leaders. Used to the times when things were predictable and the stakes low, leadership didn’t even need to consider trust. But throw in some instability and fear, and all of a sudden trust problems can become a strategic execution derailer.
Take two teams. One has team members who are low in trust, while the other is high in trust.
Despite what collaboration software experts would have you believe, few companies have big issues with trust within teams. When it comes to improving trust within organisations, the number one issue I have found is collaboration across teams.
A few months ago a good friend of mine had a business that went into administration. It was only three years ago we celebrated over lunch that he had 35 employees and impressive revenue and profit. Then, the perfect storm happened. Poor strategic execution and decreased sales saw his business decimated in a tough industry. Underlying all of the obvious issues was a CFO who fraudulently stole $1 million dollars. Together, it brought the company down and it not longer exists in its previous form.
Over the last decades, marketers have gradually learnt that selling products by promoting rational features doesn’t work. People buy based on their emotions. Research has found that rational features only account for 15% of the decisions we make. Subconsciously, the majority of the decision process is dominated by our emotions. In the words of Brian Carroll, an experienced marketer, “People often buy on emotion and backfill with logic.”