Who Trusts Whom?

Author: Dave Crisp

25 Jul

A number of topics reminded me in recent weeks of the Proust quotation: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. This applies, for one, to the usual way we look at trust in organizations..

One of the measures relevant to engaging employees is always whether they trust management. But isn’t it even more relevant to ask whether management trusts employees.

That is – to ask whether leaders believe employees have the capacity to contribute meaningfully. A great many managers treat employees as cogs in the machine. They don’t want or expect employees to bring their brains to work, just their hands as has often been observed. Follow orders, produce what’s asked of you when we ask. Shift to the new strategy when we tell you to. All formulas for disengagement on a massive scale.

Effective leaders take calculated risks. And one major area of risk is trusting employees to come up with useful ideas and then supporting and helping troubleshoot with them through the inevitable organizational hurdles – no budget, tried that before, not workable for any number of reasons.

Now it’s likely the manager isn’t going to fully understand or see the idea in the same light of certainty as the employee. In fact, highly effective leaders often spend lots of energy encouraging employees to try ideas that neither of them is completely certain about. If either was completely certain it wouldn’t be a very creative, novel, untested idea with the potential to dramatically improve things, but just a moderate extension of what’s already known to work.

It takes courage to encourage (notice the similarity of words) a subordinate to take a risk that may reflect badly on both of you at some point. That’s why it’s so important in companies to establish a culture in which ideas, pilots, trial and error and reasonable mistakes are supported and promoted. That way managers feel supported in supporting their employees’ ideas in turn.

So when we look at trust, it’s important to see that it works both ways and, as with all strategies, starts from the top. If top managers don’t support risk-taking and trial and error and don’t trust employees to be testing things that seems a bit outside the box, how can we expect employees to blindly trust managers? This becomes increasingly true day by day as we evolve into an era in which every organization’s survival depends on continual creativity and improvement – so much so that no single senior executive or executive team can possibly come up with, let alone test, enough ideas to sustain competitiveness into the unpredictable future we all face.

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