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1. Trustworthy Leadership
Building trust in any team or any organization, like many other things, must first start at the top where leaders are trustworthy and they show a deep level of integrity. One of the studies I focus on in the book is by Human Capital Institute, it was called Building Trust 2013: Workforce Trends Driving High Performance. And a key data point, there were many, but a key data point that came from that survey was that employees – and this was employees from all over the world, different types of companies, employees in what they defined as high-performance organizations – so companies that continue to generate positive financial returns and steady growth – those employees believe their leaders, managers, and even their fellow peers to be highly trustworthy people. So a culture where people walk the walk, the leader’s words match their actions consistently, day in and day out. They live the values of the organization, both on and off the battlefield, so to speak.
And consistency is so important. I’ve made this mistake so many times in my own organizations, or even at a group of senior leaders where, you know, there’s not enough alignment. Or we think there’s alignment, but before we start disseminating information, we realized soon – later – there was a lack of alignment, and therefore different messaging is being permeated throughout the organization. Therefore, people get confused and they start not to trust any of the messaging and just stick with what they’re doing and not really follow that path, because they don’t know which path to follow. So consistency in, voice consistency in messaging, but also consistency of behavior.
There’s nothing that damages trust more in any company or organization than unfulfilled promises, inconsistency in behavior and action and words, because even if people are initially trusting of their managers, their leaders, they’re going to start backpedaling. And that trust will be quickly deteriorated. Like in any relationship, whether it’s a marriage, or a friendship, or a business, or a sports team, trust takes a long time to build and seconds to destroy it. And there’s a lot of different things that can damage trust in an organization, like throwing your team under the bus instead of finding out what the real fire is that needs to be put out. You got clients calling that are angry because they’re not getting the quality of service they want. And instead of bringing the team together and finding out what’s really going on, sometimes the knee-jerk reaction is to bring the team together, scream at everybody, you know, threaten that your people are going to get fired because you might lose a huge piece of business, but that’s not the way leaders build trust.
2. Transparency of Communication
Another important thing is transparency of communication. Now I realize we talk a lot today about the importance of transparency. It’s going to mean something different in every organization. Different organizations are going to be transparent about some things, less transparent about maybe other important financial details; not all information and data needs to be disseminated to everybody all the time — that can just confuse people more. But when you can provide the important data, the important information, the important communication that can be done transparently, then people are going to feel like they’re part of the team. They’re going to, again, further emotionally connect to what we’re trying to accomplish and not feel like they’re being kept in the dark. Because that also causes vertical silos and sometimes horizontal silos to further emerge in organizations, because data and information and transparent communication, not flowing seamlessly across the organization.
The same thing applies to the military. When we entered these conflicts after 9/11, we were essentially a very siloed, top-down, overstructured 20th-century organization. But we realized that, to move at the speed these wars required, we had to decentralize controls and communication mechanisms, break down those vertical and horizontal barriers so that we can have better communication flow, both inside our organizations and externally with our agency partners and coalition forces and other branches, because we’re fighting a very fast-moving, decentralized enemy. So we couldn’t disseminate transparent communication seamlessly enough. So we had to put new mechanisms and structures in place.
3. Authentic Empowerment
Another critical way to build trust in the organization is to have truly authentic empowerment at all levels. And I know, again, some business buzz words we’re throwing around here. We talk a lot about empowerment, but what I’ve seen — and sometimes in my own organizations, it’s something we talk about, but we don’t necessarily execute it well. We have a team that we want to empower with important work, but we say, you know, you’re getting empowered with this important project, but then we micromanage the hell out of them all day long. Or we empower people with unimportant work and let them run with the ball. And people quickly know how inauthentic a gesture that is because they’re not doing meaningful work. And today’s workforce cares deeply about doing meaningful work and understanding exactly what their work does for driving mission success, for helping the customer, for making the world a better place. Whatever that vision is, they need to know exactly, day in and day out, what they’re doing and how that work matters. But the problem is even when we can take it that step forward to authentic empowerment. we give the workforce meaningful work to do, but then they don’t have necessarily the proper training, the proper tools, the proper resources to get that work done. And therefore we’ve set them up to fail, which destroys trust.