Trust is one of the most important factors that influence performance of a team. If you buy a car with a V8 engine, the minimum expectation is that the car would fire on all eight cylinders, right? Now I don’t know much about cars, but let’s say, hypothetically, that the vehicle is firing only on three of the eight cylinders. I guess that, at the very least, the car wouldn’t perform as well as it would with all eight firing.
The same thing can happen to organisations. If confusion, politics and employee engagement issues creep into your organisation and become the status quo, then your organisation will not perform as well as it could. You could have the best and brightest talent, from the best schools, with the most experience, but you will never fire on all eight cylinders – unless you decide to do something about it.
There can be many reasons why an organisation can be less effective than it could or should be, but in this article, I would like to focus on one with you, which I think is one of the most important factors of all: trust.
What is trust?
There are typically two types of trust that can come to mind, and Patrick Lencioni expands on these in his book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.
There’s the type that is built once you get to know someone. You know how the executives on your team will perform, and you can sort of predict how things are going to go with them. This is called predictive trust.
The second type of trust, and the most important one, is called vulnerability-based trust. In a nutshell, when a CEO or MD creates this type of trust in their teams, executives know that they can come to work as they are: human beings. When there is vulnerability-based trust, people can be open and honest; they don’t have to worry about navigating office politics, and they can speak up when they think there’s an idea out there that might not be good for the company.
Trust (or lack of trust) filters down
If a leadership team can’t be open and honest with each other, the fruits of such behaviour will come out sooner or later further down the organisation. They will come out in words or actions of the leaders, but they will come out. And what is the message leaders send to employees? Don’t be open and honest around here because we aren’t up at the top.
Far from being a soft issue, a lack of trust in organisations has enormous practical implications for the effective running of the business. Let’s take a look at a few areas where this could play out.
Feedback
In an organisation without trust, the culture of feedback is ineffective, at best. You can ask your employees for feedback, but if people can’t say what they honestly think or feel because of fear or politics, they will hold back. You will never get an accurate understanding of what is happening on the ground. While it’s true that you can ask for anonymous feedback through surveys and other means, if push comes to shove and there’s a lack of trust, employees will not stick their necks out if they think the comments could be traced back to them.
Most employees in organisations are on the ground and have a feel for the way things are. So the faster constructive feedback makes its way up the ladder, the better it will be. In effective organisations, a culture of feedback can help leaders make decisions and changes much more quickly than those who don’t have one.
Mistakes
We all make mistakes – we are human. However, sometimes there is this unwritten rule that you can’t make mistakes at work, or at least that you can’t be caught making one. This, too, is disastrous. It is much better for someone to be able to admit their mistake and move on rather than to have a culture that encourages covering it up and perhaps discovering it when it has become more costly.
When there is genuine trust, the mistake comes out quickly, and the organisation can recover rapidly. Obviously, if someone is making mistakes all the time and not addressing them, that could point to a competency issue that needs to be addressed.
Weighing in
If someone wants to bring up an idea, whether with their boss or in a team meeting, and there is no trust, people will tend to hold back. They will think things like:
- I don’t want to make waves
- I am new here, so I don’t want to get in anyone’s bad books
- I don’t want to say something that might make my boss look bad
- This is probably a stupid idea anyway, and I don’t want them to think that I am incompetent
Steve Jobs said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” If you foster a culture of mistrust, people will tell you what you want to hear, and there will be a massive amount of potential left unfulfilled.
Staff/Employee Turnover
Lack of trust leads to disastrous politics: what can’t be said out in the open will come out in side conversations. Politicking is frustrating and draining, so it’s no surprise that it affects employee productivity and engagement so much. And because of this, we can see that politics lead to staff/employee turnover as well. Unfortunately, it’s usually going to be your best people who leave first – they will be able to find a job elsewhere. Turnover is very expensive. Just think how much time and energy it takes to onboard new people and get them up to speed, not to mention the hefty costs of recruiting someone!
Break the Cycle
So next time you are at a meeting with your executive team, and you see that people are holding back or that there is some unresolved conflict among team members, take a bold step: say that you will all be doing things differently from now on. People will need to start being franker with each other.
And if you want people to follow you, for it to be credible, it all needs to start with you, the leader.
