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:
Hire for Trust
Many companies claim that hiring the best people is “job one,” but traditional hiring systems don’t make it easy. From innovative interview tactics to involving your team in the decisions, using smarter hiring practices can result in hiring honest, accountable team members who create and sustain a culture in which people can count on one another.
First, don’t assume that technical skills and knowledge trump character, especially when hiring on the managerial level. Favoring knowledge over behavior-based questions that help you understand someone’s personal attributes completely overlooks the candidate’s integrity. Moreover, traditional questions such as “Why do you want to work here?” tell you nothing about a candidate’s ability or potential performance.
So ask questions that determine character. For example, ask when the person has tackled extra work to help their organization or team meet critical goals. Or when they put their clients’, coworkers’, or company’s interests ahead of their own. Have the people they’ll be working closely with join in, since the team will think of questions you may not have considered. To show that you trust the team’s judgment and value their input, if anyone has reservations, take that feedback seriously.
Finally, check those references! People who are fired for breeding distrust are serial job hunters. Do your research, and learn from other companies’ mistakes.
The Society of Human Resource Management found that 53% of companies that checked references uncovered falsities about the length of previous employment, and 51% discovered false claims about past salaries. It also found that 61% of candidates lied about their college credentials. Checking references might seem tedious, but replacing bad hires takes a lot more time and money.
Make Positive Assumptions About People
In both your personal life and your work life, you’re bound to encounter people who take advantage of you, and these painful experiences can make you cynical. For managers, that cynicism can manifest as negative assumptions that employees are lazy, are incapable of directing their own behavior, or lack integrity. Managers who hold negative assumptions micromanage, lock up needed supplies, withhold important information, and create senseless rules and policies, causing even the best people to lose passion for what they do.
Years ago I worked with an executive who told me he wanted his employees to act like owners — but he refused to give keys to plant workers who arrived before the office staff. He clearly wasn’t making a positive assumption that employees could be trusted to enter and exit the building as they pleased. How were they supposed to feel ownership if they weren’t even allowed a key to the building?
To demonstrate positive assumptions, show that you reject micromanaging. Give challenging assignments with the clear and confident belief that your expectations will be met. And promote transparency. Don’t hide information based on the assumption that people will mishandle it. Try adding a “through the grapevine” agenda item to meetings as a fun, informal way for people to share company information they’ve heard so you can either confirm it or debunk the rumor.
When managers demonstrate positive assumptions, employees respond in kind. A management action or decision that might normally be questioned or unpopular is accepted because employees trust that there is more to the story. This provides everyone with a level of comfort during times of rapid change and growth.
Treat Employees Fairly, Not Equally
Most traditional companies have been told by HR that it’s essential to treat everyone the same way in order to mitigate risk. But doing this strips people of their individuality and unique abilities to contribute.
Case in point: If two employees request time off for personal reasons, you wouldn’t automatically give both of them two weeks of paid time off. You’d naturally consider the surrounding circumstances as well as each employee’s tenure and performance.
The same logic applies for disciplinary issues. Weigh the potential risks of one-size-fits-all disciplinary policies against the real costs of turnover, low morale, and corresponding decreased performance. Traditional discipline policies are rarely effective and tend to cause an escalating cycle of threats and minimal resolutions. A better approach is to have adult discussions that seek to determine the cause of a problem and to expect employees to identify and act on their own solutions. This counseling-style approach is quicker, is more respectful, and provides significantly better results.
When people believe their leaders are looking for the causes of performance issues so they can facilitate a solution rather than where to place the blame, they have enough trust to admit errors or mistakes upfront and accept personal responsibility in taking actions to solve them.
Create a Zero-Tolerance Policy for Deceitfulness
Most companies take steps to ensure their employees aren’t violating the company’s trust in them, but high-performance companies value trust so much that they implement and enforce zero-tolerance policies for betraying it. It starts with communicating the clear expectation that any violation of trust, no matter how small, is completely unacceptable — and that people who do violate that trust will lose their jobs.
For example, an employee who worked at one of my clients’ companies for 15 years was well-liked by management and the owners. But when he was seen taking one of the company’s five-gallon water bottles out to his car, he told a colleague, “Let’s just say you didn’t see this.”
The company would have given him the water if he had asked for it and needed it, but by taking it and trying to cover it up, he violated trust. Management was visibly upset the day he was terminated but heard no outcry from his fellow team members, proving that even little white lies can destroy trust.
To use a related example, most companies have a zero-tolerance policy for being at work under the influence. That’s because safety is paramount. The same is true for a culture where trust is paramount — it’s not OK for people to be a little deceitful. Even those “little white lies” are unacceptable.
The flip side of a zero-tolerance policy about lying is that management must be held to the same standard and admit mistakes. We all mess up eventually. If you’re capable of acknowledging your own shortcomings and accepting responsibility, your team will trust and admire you for it.
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to use good judgment to take risks, to operate with principled motives, and to hold positive assumptions. And you get what you give. When you create bureaucracy to protect yourself, you not only fail to execute those essential duties, but also instill unease and mistrust in employees. But by tearing down barriers and making trust a top priority for everyone, you can expect loyalty, dedication, and high performance from those who will ultimately determine the fate of the business: your people.
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