HAS TRUSTING CAUSED YOU PAIN?

They say people don’t leave companies, they leave damaging relationships. How many times has lack of Trust made you want to walk away?  Do you trust your employees, your boss, your team, your colleagues, your employers?

Do you trust yourself?

This article is about how trust relates to conflict in the workplace.

Sitting having breakfast, I glance across at the coffee table, and the blood red front cover of People Management magazine yells, “WHAT EXACTLY IS YOUR PROBLEM?!” with the tiny subtitle in white at the bottom, “How to tackle workplace conflict – before the shouting starts”

Now the article does not fully meet that promise of showing how, (it would be quite difficult in an article anyway) although it has, like most such articles, lots of shoulds, musts and ought-tos as advice.

It reminds me how much workplace conflict centres on issues of Trust. My approach to working with teams in particular, has since the mid 1980s been oriented to team coaching. Rather than propose team-building away days, I focus on aiding them to deal with the work itself and how to speed results by increasing mutual acceptance and respect and therefore Trust, and by learning how to collaborate and co-operate better. The luxury of working with newly-formed or forming teams has been quite rare in my team coaching career, yet when it has happened, those teams rapidly gel and become effective.

Although Bruce Tuckman’s 1960s observations of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing has been shown not always to be a controlling factor, it does enable a way to demonstrate how Trust at each of those four stages of group development has a part in what goes on.

Tuckman observed that when a group of people comes together for the first time or two, with the intention of working together, typically people tend to focus on finding out who is who, how this is going to work? They pay attention to detecting if there is a pecking order, and they reserve judgement, hold off on voicing their opinions. They may even arrive with existing prejudices about certain people in the room, and the nature of the group’s task. Two early researchers into team working, Dave Francis and Mike Woodcock, would call this phase a kind of “Ritual Sniffing.” The result is, attention is more on detecting interpersonal dynamics, which leaves little energy available for getting the task started.

Trust at this stage tends to be absent because it is too early to tell. People are more likely to be guarded and not take risks.

After a while, some will begin to voice concerns, perhaps about little or no progress, or they may take advantage of others’ reticence and offer opinions. If there is a formal leader who may or may not effectively take the lead, some may consider they have better ideas. The reason this turns into a Storming phase is partly because people begin to drop their guard and voice judgments and opinions, show irritation with others or just forget good manners. Trust now may become threatened as people start judging and jumping to conclusions with limited evidence. A skilled and competent leader will recognize a need to accelerate this phase and bring the group’s attention to lowering negative assumptions, giving people the benefit of the doubt, and looking to think through how best they can learn to work cooperatively. 

Helping people voice any views and concerns, introduce themselves and deliberately get to know one another aids the building of Trust, based on the level of transparency. This is can be a critical phase in the establishment of a new team moving into Norming, in particular with project teams who are commonly time-limited.

Creating agreements about how to deal with potential disagreements, how to organize and establish communications can lead to implicit or even explicit forming of ground rules. This is the time to give attention to deliberately and explicitly working on Trust-building, and in my observation has always paid dividends. The lack of it has many times led to delays, longer-term disharmony and failure, or at least to the need for expensive rescue remedies (consultants; coaches etc.).

If adequate levels of Trust are established freeing team members to get on with Performing their task without feeling the need to be on-guard and protecting themselves, this is not necessarily the end of it! We all have experiences of how fragile Trust can be and how little it takes to fracture it.

Contributors to conflict

Jeff is the HR Director, and Lydia is the Director of Nursing. They are at war! She needs new staff, urgently. She’s under pressure and she finds his prevarication infuriating. What’s the matter with the man? He keeps waffling about needing more information, and what she needs is a simple decision so that she can get on with the job! There is no way she could trust him – he cannot even make a simple decision. There may even be some hidden agenda, and she wonders what is his real reason for delaying?

He finds her insufferable! She has no people skills whatsoever – how can she be a Director of anything? She charges into his office demanding to talk about how many people she needs and what is he doing about it. And when he asks her, reasonably he thinks, to send him a note of her requirements so that he can estimate costs and timescales, she storms off saying she is not doing his damned job for him! The only thing he could trust her to do is go marching off to the CEO and make a formal complaint about him. She certainly doesn’t listen and he imagines she could be quite vindictive, and not someone he feels comfortable having as an enemy.

These poor people are the victims of two totally different ways of perceiving the world. Psychologist Carl Jung observed through working therapeutically with many thousands of patients, that there were a short series of (he called them) psychological types, combinations of individual traits that would predict the way a person responds to what happens. Observations made by John Grinder and Richard Bandler of NLP fame identified these traits or tendencies as unconscious perceptive programs or “meta programs” underlying each person’s ways of making sense of the world and therefore of behaving in any given context.

Jeff and Lydia in the example have different meta programs. Jeff relates to other people in introverted fashion, and has a preference for receiving information in written form, giving him time to process what it means before making decisions. When it comes to understanding new ideas or data, he works better with established facts and what is known to work. He has a strong sense of fairness, morality and decency, and his decisions stem from a sense of what is right. And when it comes to organizing and managing, he takes a fairly flexible attitude, being open minded and prepared to change direction if new information or the situation dictates.

Lydia on the other hand gets her best ideas from talking with other people. She is much more extrovert. Writing things down feels like a waste of time to her. She is quick-witted and decisive, understands facts and data in a practical way and reaches conclusions while other people are still thinking about it. This gives her an air of impatience, and her decision-making is analytical and based on facts and data. In her view there is no room for namby-pamby “is it fair or decent?” There’s a job to be done and she is good at organizing her thoughts and people and getting on with things. Once she knows what she is doing, she is quite inflexible. Changing your mind always slows everything down, and why would you if your mind is made up?

Personal Preferences as a barrier to Trust 

Conflict arises frequently as such attitudinal differences disguise people’s good intentions. People under pressure tend to judge others harshly, interpreting their behaviour as driven by ulterior motives. Trust can only be established when these two people find out that they both want the same thing, and that their differences are due to nothing more sinister than a combination of personal preferences for ways of communicating and getting things done.

Team Management Systems (tmsdi.com) is an effective way to help team members recognize the different ways that people operate, and reveals the specific range of preferences operating among them. First introduced in the mid 1980s by Charles Margerison and Dick McCann, it has stood the test of time as a stable and powerful indicator of team dynamics, and a valuable way to help build trust and confidence though mutual understanding and learning to play to strengths. Many conflicts have been headed off or healed over those three decades when I have introduced TMS to coaching projects. It is a rapid and effective way to accelerate groups or teams through the Storming phase and get them quickly to Norming and being able to perform successfully. Understanding and acceptance of personal preferences can be a valuable component of the Trusted Leader’s Toolkit.

Gossip and Secrecy – destroyers of Trust

What usually gets labeled as gossip is a guarded sharing of opinions, either about someone or a situation. Its guarded nature presupposes lack of Trust, either that the person being talked about might react adversely, or that the opinions (judgments) being offered may not be acceptable to others and could jeopardise the person making them. Trust is automatically undermined where someone feels unsafe. Those opinions may also be expressing lack of Trust in the first place. And of course, the gossiping may even be untrue or intended to create mischief, to undermine or deliberately misinform fomenting lack or loss of Trust. This kind of gossip contains seeds of conflict.

Having been entrusted many times with helping to resolve conflicts in and between teams and individuals, gossip has often been central to its origins. And there is one further element, which I have described as acting like acid in etching conflict, and that is when someone is sworn to secrecy. “Please don’t tell anyone I told you this…” The most open and powerful antidote to this, is for the listener to say, “I can’t (or won’t) promise not to say anything, so just don’t tell me if it’s a secret!” Learning how to recognize gossip for what it is and either challenging it, or refusing to indulge in it is a key competence for all team members, and is a powerful and effective contributor to building trusting relationships.

Sinister Secrets

She is his boss, and they have both built a reputation in the organization for their creativity and forward thinking. He has promoted a number of successful changes, particularly with regard to corporate communications and culture and the two of them are hailed as a highly effective team. They even have the popular nickname of The Terrible Twins. He is being asked by the CEO to lead a high profile project, and this is where the trouble starts. 

He is tasked to present the project plan to the Executive Board. Behind closed doors, she accuses him of by-passing her, and as his boss, she chooses to deliver his presentation. In the meeting, she declares (untruthfully) that there were some flaws in his thinking, and that he has asked her to present on his behalf. The CEO raises his eyebrows, but invites her to continue. She delivers exactly what he prepared, implying that this is her thinking. This began a six months chain of events leading to his resignation.

Bullying is an instance where secrecy is central to the destruction of Trust. The bully, in private, picks on, criticizes or, from a position of power or privilege over the victim, makes life and work difficult for them. At work, demanding that someone meets impossible deadlines or overloading them with tasks allows an overpowering supervisor to justify their behaviour in terms of performance improvement. Or they may either openly or covertly imply that the receiver’s job or reputation would be at risk if they exposed their mistakes or inability to comply. Naturally, Trust is impossible when safety on any level is under threat. And the most common weapon the bully has is ensuring secrecy on pain of exposure – straightforward blackmail.

In my experience, this is the most complex of conflicts to resolve, due to the victim’s risk or lack of courage to accuse, and often to the secret nature and deniability without concrete evidence of the manipulations involved. Loss of Trust is often permanent and irretrievable. 

Solutions can lie in changes of culture rather than in individual cases of conflict resolution.

Resolving Conflicts and Restoration of Trust

Two high-profile teams in an international aid organization have been in dispute for some years. Although they are meant to complement one another in their activities, their collective egos make their disagreements more important than the work itself, and cracks have been showing publicly for some time. Commentators suggest their differences have become so entrenched that a solution is hard to imagine. Each team agrees on one thing, which is that operations would be better managed by just one team instead of two. The problem is that each team thinks the other should be disbanded in favour of themselves.

Is there a solution? It is interesting that these two collections of individuals behave similarly to a pair who are in conflict. Each time the other team voices its opinion to justify its views, the opposing team reacts with strong emotions, and turns collectively deaf and blind, hearing and seeing only its own expectation of what is being said. Just like closing your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears, and shouting, “LA-LA-LA-LA!!!” 

In addition to all that was said earlier, disputes like this arise over personal dislikes, opposing or different opinions (usually about how to do things) or judging, assuming and misinterpreting others’ motives. These destroyers of Trust affect teams or groups as well.

A key part of a Trusted Leader’s Toolkit is the capacity to act on observations that present risks to building Trust, just a few of which are presented here, and to head them off. 

One way of dealing with what happens after Trust has broken down, and good working relationships need to be restored is the subject of my next article relating to Trust in the workplace.

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If this resonates with you, please make contact:

The Trusted Leader’s Toolkit – please see www.bitnerphillips.com for more information

? Bill Phillips November 2019 All rights reserved.