Trust the five-word reason

OUT OF THE BOX

It's a memory that makes Robert Galford shudder. As managing partner of the Boston-based Centre for Executive Development, he had seen many chief operating officers (CEOs) lose the trust of their organisations.

But the worst case was at a Fortune 500 company where the CEO kept blinkers on until the very end. When one of his decisions came under fire, he made a passionate plea to the members of his board. The strategy was viable, insisted the CEO, all he needed was to convince the senior managers to see it the way he did.

When the directors refused to budge, he turned for support to his top management team. "When he looked around for defenders, they were all gone. The team did not support him because they did not trust him anymore. It was like watching the earth open and him fall in," says Galford.

That could never happen to you, right? As a leader, you're certain that your top managers trust you implicitly and that you have your organisation's support. Then you should have no problem taking this small test Galford has devised to gauge whether your organisation trusts you or not. All you need to do is honestly answer one question: "How do I know for a fact that I am trusted?"

One of the biggest delusions leaders suffer from is the naïve belief that they are trusted by their employees. No leader likes to think trust is an issue in their organisation. Right about now, most of you would like to skip reading any more because you feel this is one issue that just doesn't apply to you.

The harder your urge to turn the page, says Galford, the more you probably have a trust issue festering in your organisation. "It's rare to find someone so self-aware who will say: I don't have my people's trust. Nobody in a leadership role will want to believe that they are untrustworthy," says Galford, whose consults at organisations like Chrysler, Johnson & Johnson, IBM and Morgan Stanley.

Still there? For the brave few who took the test and came up with a shaky prognosis, the next step is to find a way to pin down your suspicions.

A good tool for tracking trust is a culture and climate survey. When done intelligently, such surveys can track employee trust levels. A quicker, more intuitive ploy is to check if the organisation is losing key people it would like to retain.

Says Galford: "If a company looks at the reason why people are voluntarily changing jobs, regardless of what they say publicly or tell the corporation, it usually boils down to what I call the five-word reason: my boss is an idiot. The real reason people leave is because they feel stymied and constrained by the leadership of the organisation."

Usually, by the time people are leaving the organisation, the trust has broken down to a large degree. Leaders who want to pre-empt trouble have to set up objective mechanisms for getting feedback on trust well before the storm breaks.

Galford tells leaders to find themselves a truth-teller or two in the organisation. They are people whose well-being in the organisation is not affected by incurring the anger of the leader. Nor do these people have to curry favour to retain their jobs.

Also, it helps if the truth-teller does not have a direct reporting relationship with the leader, but is one or two levels down in the organisation hierarchy. Says Galford: "A small squad of truth-tellers is very critical. Ask them: how am I doing? Is this working?"

That's because trust in an organisation doesn't come about by building strong bonds between the people who report to the leader. Instead, it's the cumulative effect of three kinds of trust: strategic trust (is the top leadership making the right strategic decisions about where the organisation should go?); organisational trust (are processes and procedures in the organisation fair and consistent?); and personal trust (does the leader have personal characteristics, such as open communication, impartiality, that inspire trust?). Employees are constantly tracking top management's performance against all three scores to define that moment's level of trust.

Just how tenuous is the bond between top management and employees? Development Dimensions International conducted an extensive survey of trust in the workplace, with two results worth highlighting.

One, senior management had the biggest influence on organisational trust. Two, senior management was the least-trusted group, falling behind in comparison with frontline leaders, peers and other teams. Clearly, "the emotional glue that holds organisations together" gets easily unstuck.

Ironically, no company questions the importance of trust. Every manager agrees that trust is directly linked to performance, and that without trust no strategy can be implemented.

Yet, as the survey shows, most managements take trust for granted. Don't be lulled into believing that other organisations have trust issues, and your company doesn't. Your confidence could be misplaced. Trust me.