Building trust in increasingly challenging environments
Article Type: Viewpoint From: Strategic Direction, Volume 25, Issue 7
Nicola O’Connell talks to international management guru Kevan Hall about the importance of trust during times of uncertainty.
Trust is a critical element in an organization’s culture. Trust is vital to management credibility, workforce loyalty, creativity, challenge and open communication.
Those organizations with high levels of trust innovate faster and attract and retain top talent. Job satisfaction, commitment and loyalty are also all closely aligned to perceptions of trust.
When trust is lacking, employees’ performances are affected, loyalty is compromised and a culture of low morale is created, significantly reducing the overall success and prospects of an organization.
“There are many specific benefits achieved by high levels of trust,”says Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration (www.global-integration.com)and author of Speed Lead®: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies. “It can lower transaction costs (the costs of checking and monitoring relationships); it can increase willingness to share information and knowledge;it can increase willingness and confidence to take risks to do with ambiguity and to come up with creative solutions; and it can enable decentralized decision making, which speeds up responses.”
Yet building trust is becoming more challenging. In society as a whole, trust has been reducing consistently since the 1950s and well-publicized business scandals in recent years, such as Enron and WorldCom, have led to an overall reduction in trust in business.
In the current economic climate – with yet more stories of large-scale fraud emerging – the challenge is set to become bigger still. Employees are faced with daily uncertainty and distrust.
At the same time, many more employees are working in large, international and virtual organizations where they rarely get to meet colleagues face to face and where objectives often compete and sometimes conflict with each other. All of these factors can subtly undermine trust.
Defining trust
Many academics have attempted to define trust but there are some common elements running through the different definitions, namely that trust is about a confident expectation of behaviour; it is about confidence that people will co-operate and not take advantage; and it is set in a context where individuals are vulnerable in some ways.
Managers initiate trust, so it is their actions that determine whether or not employees feel their company is acting with integrity and in their best welfare.
There will always be inevitable barriers, as Kevan explains. “When managers evaluate the trustworthiness of their people they tend to focus on competence and reliability of subordinates. Individuals themselves tend to pay more attention to relationship and benevolence issues,” he says.
“Managers are subject to trust dilemmas. To a certain extent,management in itself is about control and sometimes managers are put into positions where their obligations to the organization – perhaps due to cost-cutting directives – conflict with their obligations to their people.”
2 Developing and maintaining trust
In developing trust in teams and organizations, Kevan suggests that there are three key themes: formation, maintenance and recovery (in the event of a trust breach).
He says: “Trust formation is a critical stage because very important interactions happen and the behavioural patterns that a team or organization will exhibit are set very early in the process.
“In virtual teams in particular, these patterns tend to persist. Virtual teams are not good at re-establishing relationship norms once they are set, so we need to get this right at the beginning. The perceptions set at the early stage become a filter through which subsequent interactions are evaluated. If there is initial distrust, future action will be seen through that lens and it is hard to change.
“In the beginning of a virtual team people are keen to get on with the work, they have little experience of each other yet but are normally willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. But if there is lack of clarity on the purpose of the virtual team, this can cause a problem. If teams start fast and start to deliver quick wins then trust grows as a result of performance.
“Our job as managers is to create an environment where people can succeed and provide some social opportunities for people to begin to get to know each other.”
There are many ways in which a manager can help to develop fairly quickly,says Kevan, such as developing a good reputation themselves; using mutually trusted third parties to create an initial good impression; getting a face-to-face meeting as quickly as possible (or using videoconference); and allowing team members to add value to each other by bringing new skills or perspectives.
Ongoing interactions are critical to maintaining and continuing to build long-term trust. Once initial trust has been established, individual experiences become more important in maintaining it than managers’ behavior.
More points of connection need to be created – both social and business relationships – and technology can be used for ongoing, regular small-scale communication (Instant Messenger or text chat, for example, can be used to replace those “water cooler moments” that help to cement trust).
Says Kevan: “At this maintenance stage, it is also important to establish an equitable share of communication. Teams that have trust problems tend to be characterized by only one or two people dominating the communication.”
3 When trust is breached
Building trust takes time and effort, yet just one untrustworthy incident can destroy it. “After a trust breach people are hypersensitive to future actions; they become even more critical of potential trust problems. Most trust breaches are minor but if they are not dealt with the perception can become bigger than the reality,” says Kevan.
The first step is to acknowledge the problem and the feelings around it. If it is a “competence breach” (I made a mistake) then an apology helps,but in the case of a “character breach” (I showed lack of integrity)apologizing merely admits and reinforces a lack of integrity. It is also helpful, initially, to involve a trusted advisor to help the injured party get some perspective.
Once the breach is put into perspective, the person at fault should accept responsibility and either offer to make amends or show a desire to have reconciliation. “Then you need to let go and move on,” says Kevan.“Trust is never completely destroyed if both parties want to continue the relationship. I would strongly recommend face to face for efforts to repair trust.”
Building and maintaining trust is neither simple nor rapid, but it is worth the investment. Due to time constraints and other responsibilities, it is not always high on our management agenda. Says Kevan: “You need to remember that the greater the pace of change and environmental uncertainty, the more we need trust but the harder it will be to build, maintain and repair. All managers should be aware of the value of trust and how to nurture it.”
What can managers do to create and maintain trust?
Kevan’s recommendations include:
Demonstrate your trust in individuals, to them and also publicly so that people see that you are giving trust first.
Reduce controls on others as this builds and demonstrates trust; you also build their confidence (self trust) to do things for themselves.
Encourage participative decision-making – enabling people to agree objectives and constraints so they are committed to the deliverables rather than having them imposed.
Delegate authority and the responsibility that goes with it (one without the other undermines trust).
Discuss and negotiate clear mutual expectations (trust can be undermined by unspoken assumptions not being met).
Encourage open communication.
Allow others to influence you as a manager.
Give rewards and sanctions for trustworthy and untrustworthy actions.
Help people to learn new skills and capabilities, as this builds trust from both sides.
Be accessible in a timely manner when people need you.
Nicola O’ConnellNicola O’Connell is a freelance journalist based in London, UK. E-mail: niki@noconnell.demon.co.uk
