The world needs more high-trust leaders. Leaders, who support those around them, respect other people’s viewpoints and who are open to being challenged and challenging others to bring out their best. Leaders who trust people and believe in them.
To continue to grow and solve today’s tricky business challenges, requires organisations to adopt new ways of working, in order to stay relevant. Unlocking the value by enabling cross-functional collaboration; between finance, HR, marketing, sales, operations and technology and so on, enables cultural agility. The first place to start is with the C suite.
As someone who speaks at leadership conferences to help leaders understand how to identify and maintain trust, I often get requested about what team building exercises need to be designed into the conference program to help employees build trust with each other. What is interesting is that I commonly come across three common misperceptions of how you foster trust in a company that actually do more harm than good.
Talk to anyone who works in a company and pretty soon you will be regaled with examples of poor leadership behaviours. Whether it’s the funny story about the leader that hoards information or the one about the employee who finds out they have a new line manager to report to when they fill in a leave application, examples of poor leadership are about as common as lice on primary school children. And just as frustrating to eradicate (lice that is, not children).
When it comes to developing a high-performance culture – trust matters. In fact, twenty years of research from Great Places to Work Institute found that trust between an employee and their direct manager, as well as the organisation at large, is the number one predictor of employee engagement. In other words, if you want to measure employee engagement, measure how much people trust their direct manager and the organisation. The benefits are huge – 51% more employee engagement, 40% less burnout, 18% more productivity, and 40% more loyalty to name a few.
Typically, leaders in big organisations ask me “I trust my team, but I don’t trust management at large or even the culture. How can I build trust in a low trust company?” It’s a good question that can be difficult for an individual to overcome without the right strategies.
Every organisation consists of a complex network of strategic relationships that coordinate work through making promises to one another. Even if we are talking about 10 or 10,000 employees, people need to rely on each other, in order to exchange information, ideas, services and goods.
Creating a high trust culture boils down to every employee knowing they can rely on every person around them. When employees trust management and the organisation, they are more willing to collaborate, share information, support each other and find ways to create synergy. It means everyone is committed to performing at a high level and helping their peers achieve as well.
Why is that successful and well-managed companies struggle with change and disruptive innovation? Too often, what got companies to where they are now, isn’t what will get them to the future. Established organisations continue to do the same things, in the same way, every day, that they don’t realise that these habits no longer translate into future success. Over time, their focus morphs into managing risk, rather than managing potential opportunities. The fall out is accidentally managing themselves into brand oblivion.
One of the indicators of a low trust culture is that gossip rules the airwaves. All you have to do is walk into the kitchen and you will hear employees gossiping about their boss or one of their peers. It might seem harmless, but it points to a culture that is hard to shift. That’s because people are more comfortable with complaining than actually doing anything to improve the situation. Excuses and blame abound.