By Sue Bingham
Three years ago, 37% of CEOs were concerned about a lack of trust in businesses, according to the PwC Annual Global CEO survey. Across industries, that number has climbed to 55%.
A high level of trust between managers and employees defines the best workplaces and drives overall company performance and revenue. As Stephen M. R. Covey writes in The Speed of Trust, “When trust goes down (in a relationship, on a team, in an organization, or with a partner or customer), speed goes down and cost goes up.… The inverse is equally true: When trust goes up, cost goes down, and speed goes up.” Because less than 50% of lower-level (nonexecutive, nonmanagerial) employees trust the companies they work for, employers have to carefully consider how they can build trusting relationships with their employees.
Employees who don’t trust their managers usually point to big-picture, obvious things: Their superiors skate the edges of ethical behavior, hide information, take credit for others’ hard work, or flat-out deceive people. Over my many years of helping organizations create high-performance workplaces, I’ve seen firsthand how untrustworthy managers damage morale and productivity. If employees are tight-lipped about problems until their manager exits the room and then suddenly have lots of things to tell me about his secretiveness, bullying, and penchant for pitting them against one another, the problems are easy to identify.
Less-obvious causes of distrust tend to originate more from the traditional environments in which leaders have been mentored than from specific behaviors of well-meaning managers. For example, traditional leadership training often focused on rule enforcement, which is akin to parent-child communication and not how trustworthy adults function. Today, leaders in high-performance workplaces don’t write policies around the few bad apples; instead, they expect people to act in the best interests of the company and one another. While it’s hard to fix problems you can’t see clearly, there are four ways to address these less-visible factors:
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About the Author: Sue Bingham is the founder and principal of HPWP Group. She works closely with company leaders to analyze their organizations and facilitate the implementation of commonsense systems that have a positive impact on their organizations’ bottom line. She has a passion for helping companies embrace and transition to high-performance work environments. Sue is the bestselling author of Creating the High Performance Work Place.