12 - Building Trust within Organizations
The foundation of fear is uncertainty. When there is the uncertainty of what might occur or whether it will occur at all, the mind freezes, not knowing what to do or when to do it, or if anything need be done at all. You cannon plan for what you do not know.
The same is true in our relationships with people - and especially so, because most of our work involves interacting with people. We must rely upon their support and assistance, but are uncertain of whether they will provided it. They may choose not to be supportive, or they may even wish to prevent us from succeeding. This uncertainty undermines the effectiveness of individual relationships and the performance of an organization as a whole.
Fear and anxiety are reduced, and even removed, by certainty. People can cope with the knowledge that something specific is definitely going to occur, they can make preparations even if it is something very bad. They can also approach other people with greater confidence if they have a sense of how they are going to behave. Essentially, this is trust: a sense of certainty in the behavior of others. Trust is "the social glue that holds teams together."
Inefficient organizations often have toxic cultures in which trust is not existent. People do not know what to expect, and predict that others may be unsupportive or hostile toward them. They may even trust in people to do the wrong thing, but see no options that will enable them to succeed.
In many instances, mistrust is an exaggeration of low expectations. More often than not, these expectations are ill-founded: most people do not seek to be hostile and obstructive to others proactively, but are often very guarded because they expect hostility from others. And in that way, they are primed to act in a manner that makes matters worse. A person asks for help expecting not to get it, and the manner in which they approach the other party causes suspicion that they have a hidden agenda. They expect another person to take advantage of them, so they conceal information - and the other person senses (or discovers) the concealment and treats them as a threat.
Trust is an essential element in human society. If we believed that others were perpetually hostile and out to harm us, we would see society as a danger rather than an asset and avoid associating with others at all. As it is, trust is a leap of faith: we must trust in another person to keep their promises, and we will often be harmed in some way if they fail to do so. So by trusting in them, we are making ourselves vulnerable to them.
There's a bit about expectations and communication. Very often people expect things of others without asking, and believe that they will behave in a certain way - and when they fail to do so there is the sense that trust has been violated. But a person cannot reasonably be held to keep a promise he never made. Likewise, unclear communication may create the impression of a commitment that was not intended, which also leads to a sense of betrayal. Very often, trust is "broken" by a person who never committed.
An abrupt injection of statistics: trust is a societal issue. In 1959, 56% of people agreed that most people could be trusted. In 1998, the figure had fallen to 30% - though a 2011 survey placed the figure at 33% (which is not much better). This is significant because, as stated earlier, trust is often about perception - a person who regards others as untrustworthy will treat them as if they are, and the other party will react accordingly.
The media declaims that western civilization is on the decline - that social institutions and the fabric of society is deteriorating. And if trust is the glue that holds society together, than it is the decrease in trust that has caused societal deterioration.
Trust in the workplace
A person's inclination to place trust in others is often treated as an innate and indelible character trait - but like many characteristics, it is neither innate nor indelible. A person's experiences constantly adjust their willingness to trust others in future. It makes perfect sense for a person who has been betrayed will have a difficult time trusting the person who betrayed him.
And this experience is generalized to others: if betrayed by an employee, the loss of trust extends to other employees of the same company; if betrayed by a colleague, the loss of trust extends to other colleagues in the same office. The greater the betrayal, the greater the effect on trust. However, this also works in terms of winning trust: if he finds one employee or colleague to be honest and dependable, he is more willing to place trust in other members of the same group.
So where you find a find widespread problems of trust in an organization, it is because people in that organization have largely had negative experiences with others, and it will take significant time and effort to rebuild their trust. If one person is distrustful in a company where most people are trusting, it is an individual problem. But if multiple people feel the same way, it is a systemic problem that must be addressed on the organizational level.
A problem in assessing trust is that "trust is like love" - people know when they trust/distrust others, but often have difficulty articulating the reasons. It is also difficult to get to the roots of trust because it is a social norm to be trusting of others. If you ask "do you trust me?" the only acceptable answer is "of course I do" whether the person really trusts the other or not.
(EN: What the author doesn't mention is that trust is often desired by people who have ulterior motives - the "con" in "con artist" is about gaining the other person's confidence in order to take advantage of them. So when a person seems too eager to gain your trust, the natural inclination is to become defensive and suspicious.)
Lack of trust is particularly poisonous to innovation. A person must believe that their ideas will be given fair consideration and that they will be appreciated for their contributions. If they believe they will be punished for making suggestions, that they will not be taken seriously, that their ideas don't stand a chance of getting a fair hearing or being implemented, or that someone else will take the credit for their work, they will keep their ideas to themselves. Even the perception that there will be a bureaucratic mountain of red tape discourages people from attempting to innovate.
Trust is also difficult for managers because many of them were trained by textbooks that still hearken to the industrial era, in which unskilled workers performed simple tasks at the behest of management, who made all the decisions and gave all the orders. Managing employees who have more expertise, and ceding decision-making to a subordinate, are uncomfortable propositions for managers who still believe that maintaining power means dominating their subordinates and keeping all decision-making authority to themselves.
A trusted employee is an empowered employee - and consequently, an employee who is more engaged. The authority to make decisions and having a sense of personally contributing to the success of the organization creates a greater sense of meaning in work, which translates into lower turnover, lower absenteeism, higher productivity, and many other economic benefits. This pertains not only to the rank-and-file workers, but to managers at every rung. In many instances, front-line managers are just as rigidly constrained as their charges.
Another benefit of trust is flexibility. An employee who is rigidly controlled feels he has no latitude to do anything but follow orders. He will continue to follow the same orders until he receives different orders. He will not adapt to changes in the environment of contingencies even when it is obvious to him that standard operating procedure will do more harm than good.
However., trust must be an organizational goal. Managers of companies with toxic cultures must work hard to both regain the trust of their employees and to develop employees that can be trusted (particularly when they have become accustomed to not being trusted). It is a matter of managing organizational culture - and until the organization has empowered its people , nothing can "trickle up" from the grassroots.
The human face of trust
There's a brief mention of the difficulty that technology has created in establishing trust. Trust is a distinctly human quality, and it is difficult to build trust in someone when all we have of them is a series of emails. Technology has dehumanized individuals and separate them. (EN: this goes on for a while, dancing around the central point: that trust is most quickly and firmly established through face-to-face encounters.)
Trust in action
Trust is requested in words and earned in actions. To ask someone to trust you is not to earn their trust, but to convince them to act as if you had - it is like asking for credit on the promise of repayment rather than a track history. Ultimately, the only way to find out if you can trust someone is simply to trust them - and keep an eye on their behavior.
If trusting others seems risky, that's because it is. Trust requires accepting that you will be vulnerable and that you have put the outcome in the hands of another person. You can never be sure that your trust will not be misused, even by a person who has been trustworthy in the past. While we tend to increase the amount of trust we place in individuals over time, some of our greatest and most damaging betrayals occur when we have accepted a significant risk to someone who has been trustworthy in the past.
Trust is necessary in organizational life simply because nothing is an individual effort - if a person were able to do something himself, he would not need to trust someone else to do it. And if we put the task in someone else's hands but spend an inordinate amount of time monitoring them, then we might as well have done it ourselves. The division and specialization of labor, which are the chief benefits of organizations, requires delegations and hand-offs.
The author remarks on credited trust- we generally give people a certain degree of trust because we have assumptions about their behavior. Where there is no explicit promise, we are testing our own assumptions, as they have made no commitment. There is also the notion of earned trust - which is also an assumption: because a person has fulfilled our expectations in the past, we expect them to fulfill our expectations in the future. But again, this expectation is based on our assumptions.
(EN: Assumed trust is also the tool of manipulative people. They pretend that you have broken a commitment, or violated their trust when you made them no promise, to make you feel indebted to them. So ensuring that expectations are explicit is in the interest of both parties.)
It's remarked that the dynamic environment of modern business requires a great deal more trust. When people interacted with the same individuals in the same ways for decades, trust could be built up over time. Now that people change jobs every few years and their roles and responsibilities shift rapidly, there simply is no time to build trust.
(EN: Another thing the author fails to mention here is the importance of reputation - particularly in a digital age in which misdeeds are not at all private, having a reputation for fulfilling promises is essential. This is why it is in the interest of an individual to fulfill their promises and earn trust.)
(RE)Building Trust in Organizations
There is a bit about the manner in which the media has created distrust on the cultural level. Advertisements are notoriously dishonest, with brands constantly making false promises in order to gain sales. The news media thrive on scandal in which politicians, executives, policemen, clergymen, and others in roles that ought to be trustworthy have behaved abominably. There is a non-stop stream of propaganda that seems to convince us that nothing and no-one should be trusted.
Building trust is a matter of two things: setting expectations, then meeting them. Setting expectations is critical to ensure there are no unreasonable or unrealistic expectations - it's a matter of clearly communicating intentions so that others are not surpised when we fail to do something that we never committed to doing. Meeting expectations is the simple act of delivering on a promise, or resetting expectations when unexpected obstacles arise.
Most often, the problem is in the promise rather than the keeping. People tend to set grand promises in order to be trusted (or to gain something from others), and then find that they cannot deliver what they had promised. Typically, they entered into a bargain with the full intent of keeping their word, but found themselves unable to do so.
Trust is rebuilt the same way in which it is built. Trust in others to be trusted by others. Give trust in small amounts and gradually increase the amount that is extended (or given to others).
Trust is essential to organizations, and the more trust exists "almost everything else is easier and more comfortable to achieve."