Building Trust

Trust is a valuable currency. It is earned, exchanged, and has the power to influence outcomes in any human interaction. It has been a fundamental element in commerce throughout history, playing a crucial role in facilitating trade, establishing business relationships, and ensuring economic growth. As discussed in previous articles, it is at the core of creating a strong positive corporate culture. But it remains underappreciated in many organizations. This article will explore pathways to build trust in organizations as a first step to escape the doom of Kingdoms of Mediocrity and move towards becoming Flywheels of Excellence.

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In my first article, “True Ownership”, I argued that trust is a key pillar of an ownership-mindset culture. Without it, employees don’t see value in thinking like owners, in going beyond their job requirements to create value for the organization. Their relationship with the organization becomes very transactional, short-term minded (keeping the job, getting the salary). This lack of trust is self-reinforcing: the organization also doesn’t trust the employee and treats them transactionally as well, perpetuating a cycle of mistrust.

Trust is hard to build and easy to lose. Building it takes time, effort, and patience. It requires transparency and consistency, supported by strong ethical and fairness principles, which I further detail below.

Open and transparent communication requires sharing information openly, honestly, and in a timely manner. It includes admitting mistakes, addressing concerns proactively, and maintaining active communication channels. This reduces uncertainty and fosters understanding of the companies’ values, its vision, and strategy. But even more importantly, it positions the employee as a valued stakeholder, as someone who is trusted with information to better perform in their roles and responsibilities, someone that is an actor of change and not a powerless victim of it.? This requires courage from leadership.

This also requires empathy and respect from leadership. This means understanding and acknowledging the feelings and perspectives of employees, as well as treating them with dignity, valuing their opinions, and actively listening to their concerns. This fosters a sense of psychological safety and creates positive emotional connections, powerful fuels of trust.

Reliability and consistency requires organizations to follow through on their commitments, meet deadlines, and deliver on promises. Consistency builds a track record of dependability, providing employees with the confidence that they will be treated in a fair way, and ultimately recognized for going beyond the call of duty. This requires discipline from leadership.

Of course, none of the above works if honesty, fairness, and ethical conduct from leadership does not underpin everything the organization says and does.

To be clear, it all starts with leadership. This is not something that can be built bottoms-up in an organization.?

And it is also self-reinforcing: by acting this way, the organization should expect its employees to behave similarly, and act decisively if they don’t.? From their standpoint, employees will understand strong actions against people that don’t embrace this bond of trust.?

Relationships become more strategic and longer term, and leaders and employees become less self-focused and more mission-focused, since they understand that building a better organization will pay dividends for them in the end, and that taking shortcuts is not an acceptable pathway to success. Ultimately, more and more employees start behaving like owners, building momentum to establish a culture I call Flywheel of Excellence.