If you sometimes feel uneasy in your organization, join the club: According to the authors of Trust Matters, 90 percent of the people they surveyed say they have never worked in a place with an open, supportive, trusting atmosphere.
But that's not to say it can't be done. Nor that an organization shouldn't at least improve. This book is a realistic step toward clarifying the value of trust within a company and the costs incurred when trust is gone. For leaders, it offers eye-opening examples of why trust matters, and discusses how to distinguish between intentions and actions. (Sometimes, they admit, it may not be possible to protect yourself from a nasty surprise if a colleague is harboring a hidden agenda.)
Children, the authors write, exercise a keen sense of who is real and who is fake. Unfortunately, this is often a skill we lose or "decide to ignore" once we reach adulthood and are pummeled by competing motivations, such as ambition, wanting to be accepted by others, the desire for status, and so on.
As the authors write, "Trust is not just something that happens or doesn't. It requires a conscious commitment and ongoing attention. It is dynamic: It can be lost and it can be increased."
In their view, the building blocks of trust in an organization are:
- Authentic communication—"People need to feel they are being told the truth, even if they do not like what they hear."
- Competence—the ability to deliver on good intentions.
- Supporting processes—systems that indicate trust. (Monitoring employees' e-mail, for example, is not a way to engender trust.)
- Boundaries—a framework of agreed goals that also gives employees the freedom to experiment.
- Contact—personal contact lets people get to know each other and build trust face to face.
- Positive intent—"For trust to exist it is important that we believe that the intent is positive, even if a person does something that undermines trust in some way."
- Forgiveness—If people are ever going to take well-considered risks at work, they need to know that the occasional mistake won't be held against them by the organization.
Trust is often such a dark and suspicious topic for organizations, but Trust Matters takes the high road: Among the authors' parting words of advice is the idea that trust is a two-way street. "Trust is not only earned; it must be given. If you trust people, they usually live up to it."
Table of Contents:
List of figures and tables
Preface
The contract
- Building bridges or building walls?
- The power of trust
- The cost of lost trust
- The great destroyers of trust
- How leaders build trust
- Trust matters in business
- Building customer trust
- Trust in times of change
- Building a culture of trust
- Measuring trust
- Attitudes to trust
- Final word: The basic laws of trust
Appendix: Trust survey
Notes