Creating a Culture of Trust

I’m often invited into an organization as a consultant during a period of crisis. As a consultant, I go into an organization simply to assess the behaviors that lead to that period of crisis. It is very common for me to observe a lack of trust between management and employees, and also sometimes between different leaders on the management team.

There are many behaviors that can be seen as a result of lack of trust within a culture:

1. Puppet Master Behavior, otherwise known as micromanaging. While often explained by a manager as “wanting to ensure things get done in the ‘right’ way," it is often simply a display of lack of trust between a manager and the people he/she is “leading.”
2. Informational Fort Knox. This is when you can observe information is treated as power to be wielded rather than knowledge to be shared. It is easy for an outsider to observe this as the withholding of information.

Informational Fort Knox can happen bidirectionally in an organization. From managers to employees, it sounds something like: “They don’t need to know that information. There is no reason to share it.” While the manager is justifying withholding information based on need, the behavior of withholding information is often interpreted as lack of trust that the employees won’t act in a responsible manner with the information.

From employee to manager, it sounds something like: “I’m not going to tell him/her that. ‘No good deed goes unpunished'.” This type of statement often speaks to the common employee experience of bringing important (often “negative”) information to his/her manager and the manager responding by “shooting the messenger,” or simply taking his/her emotional response out on the employee. This ensures that manager will never receive vital information (positive or negative), limiting the manager’s ability to be successful.

3. Crickets. This phenomena can bee seen when a manager is having a meeting and when the manager asks a question, every person sitting around the table responds by saying nothing. You can hear the sound of crickets in your head.

Crickets is often due to fear or indifference on the part of the employees. The experience of fear occurs most often because the employees have been embarrassed, ridiculed, or in some way been made to feel “less than” others. Indifference occurs when the employee or group of employees becomes disengaged from his or her job. There are a variety of reasons that create disengagement –- one is the belief that questions are perfunctory. There is no reason to answer any question because nothing will every change.

Building Trust

Trust is not a phenomenon that requires radical or exceptional behaviors between managers and employees. A psychologist named Aneil Mishra found that the development of trust requires four daily behaviors to be practiced routinely. These four behaviors are:

1. Reliability: This means integrity. Do you do the things you say your going to do? Reliability also involves metrics and rewards. Do the people in your organization understand what they are being measured on? Are they being measured on things they can control? Can they access rewards reliably and do they understand the consequences not only of poor performance but also of exceptional performance?
2. Openness: This is about transparency and authenticity. Do the people in your organization know and understand what is important to leadership? Does leadership discuss challenges, successes, and the "big picture" or do they believe employees are there to simply do their job without asking questions?
3. Competence: This is about the experience of employees having or gaining access to the skills they need to excel at their job. Do employees have those necessary skills and if they do not, can they acquire them at work?
4. Concern: Do leaders in an organization respond in an authentic way? For example, do they take a genuine interest in the people that they are leading?

The experience of Reliability, Openness, Competence, and Concern (ROCC) must be seen as being placed over the level of risk or vulnerability a leader is asking for from an employee. In a mathematical formula, it looks like this:

If, as a leader, you want you employees to take risks, if you want them to be vulnerable, you must first offer them the experience of ROCC. And when it comes to developing trust in organizations, as a leader, you must remember three critical words: you go first!

As long as you are in a position of leadership, as long as you have the authority to hire and fire others, the authority to take away a person's primary stream of income, you will never be at the level of risk and/or vulnerability that your employees feel.

Therefore, if you want to build trust in your culture, remember it is developed from four daily behaviors (Reliability, Openness, Competence and Concern), and you go first!