Trust at the workplace

Trust is not between roles or designations, it is between two people. Trust is a human emotion and affects people. Not roles. So when people tell me, "Oh, there are always going to be trust issues between sales and manufacturing," I tend to disagree. A sales head and a manufacturing head who can build inter-personal trust can overcome this dilemma and forge a formidable partnership.

So how do you re-establish trust in the workplace? It is not really as difficult as it feels, at the outset.

Go back to thinking about your college days when some of the members of your college group had a falling out or stopped speaking to each other. What processes were usually followed? Well, there were typically three approaches:

Trusted adviser/mutual friend: This is where a third party, who has been observing this issue, decides to take a stance. This person will usually speak to each one of the "warring parties" either alone or together and will usually enable rapprochement. It is vital that this person is trusted by both parties. Otherwise chances of success are slim. While this strategy worked wonders with friends back in school and college days, it works in the office too.

Authority : When the above approach fails, typically some friend would reach out to a parent or teacher/counsellor and ask them to get involved. This is not the best approach because chances are that the two parties will resolve because of the pressure of an authority figure. However, in many instances, the forced engagement does lead to rapprochement.

Time: This approach is adopted when both the strategies listed above have failed and you decide to leave it to time. Though it can work, this is also an acknowledgement of the fact that sometimes trust gaps just cannot be resolved.

When occurrences of such trust gaps are high, collaboration across peers is low, a thorough examination of the above is in order and the HR/OD professional or a leader would do well to self-examine some truths that he believes in and might be causing these complications.

Trust gaps in the workplace can destroy an organisation by taking the focus away from the outside world, to the inside world. They take away organisation energy by taking the focus away from the customer, to the self. They reduce competitive advantage by slowing down decision making. Decisions made in silos, without involving key stakeholders run the risk of being ineffective. Such situations present a divided front to the rest of the organisation and affect the followership. Organisations have to pay attention that they have processes that enable and don't disable trust - distances, communication costs, travel for face time are all key areas that need to be looked at.

The author is Gurprriet Siingh, country head, YSC India. Re-printed with permission.
Link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trust-workplace-gurprriet-siingh?trk=prof-post