Management Through Trust

Between the Global Peter Drucker Forum , held on November 14 and 15 on the theme "The Next Knowledge Work", and the Cité de la réussite on November 23 and 24, focused on "Trust in Question", two events where Forvis Mazars Group is a loyal partner, we got the opportunity to reflect on management through trust.

There is a romantic vision of management that doesn’t always account for the practical complexity of being a manager. To avoid falling into contradictory directives, let us take a specific angle: management is a social technology. Like any technology, it has evolved and refined itself but has also created its own applications, often disconnected from the needs it was originally meant to serve. In today’s terms, it is a "generative" social technology.

Initially, when it became necessary to organize industrial work while accounting for the lack of skills among unqualified workers coming from rural areas, trusting their ability to quickly learn and become skilled craftsmen mastering complex tasks was not economically reasonable. Work had to be organized into isolated, easily repeatable tasks under the supervision of a foreman, in exchange for a salary often higher than that of a skilled artisan. However, trusting workers in the same way one trusted a craftsman with long-acquired knowledge transmitted through apprenticeship would have been futile. The only trust involved was that of worker solidarity on one side, and the chain of command between supervisors, engineers, and company owners on the other.

After World War II, professional life became mechanized (trust in machines was easier than in human goodwill) and then moved toward the tertiary sector. Efficiency had to be gained through organization, leading to the rise of office careers over sixty years. Trust became a stronger demand but could only be earned through hierarchical professional advancement. Trust could be earned in physically less violent social environments. This was the era of "petty bosses" (though less so than in the industrial world) but primarily one of colleagues.

At the very end of the 20th century, the ongoing technological revolution accelerated the intellectualization of work, progressively reducing its physical arduousness. Yet, the more intellectual work becomes, the more it resides in the "black box" of the individual’s brain, making effort less controllable. Only the result of work becomes visible, and even then, it is difficult to attribute it solely to one individual.

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society - Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation, 1972.

The major shift in this 70-year evolution is that performance is now measured by results, not effort. Over time, this has necessitated trusting the individual for the effort provided and evaluating and remunerating only the result of that effort. Being a manager initially meant not trusting the effort made, thereby controlling, motivating, and encouraging it. Traces of this initial conception of management persist: the concern about engagement.

Engagement is the proof of trust for the anxious manager. If we think about it, engagement is hardly needed in a perfectly productivist world. Faced with a disengaged yet highly efficient employee and an engaged but ultimately unproductive one, you would hesitate—perhaps you are hesitating even as you read this. The crux of the problem is the lack of documented correlation between engagement, productivity, and trust. The most striking example today: managers’ trust in employees working remotely. Surveyed employees estimate, at 87%, that they are as effective or more so, while only 12% of managers share this view. Regardless of who is right, a significant misunderstanding and growing mistrust exist, leading to poor management based on paranoia.

What Could Management Through Trust Look Like in 2025?

The usual answers to this question mainly focus on the manager’s attitudes, their ability to generate trust, or at least not damage it. Less common but increasingly popular is the theory of psychological safety, which examines team dynamics and trust between colleagues. But are there organizational conditions or limits to trust?

This is the focus of more recent research in management, itself based on slightly older anthropological studies. In short, trust and communication are the most effective means of coordinating human activity up to a certain scale (between 100 and 230 people). Beyond that, they become dysfunctional and require more structured forms of organization and hierarchy. However, these larger structures, in turn, erode individual, interpersonal, and organizational trust.

In the famous trust equation, widely used in our professional services fields, the numerator multiplies competence, reliability, and intimacy, while the denominator is composed of the toxic factors of narcissism and self-interest. Everything in this formula is clear, except perhaps the notion of intimacy. This intimacy, in reality, defines the circle of trust. The entire challenge of management through trust lies in setting a size limit for operational groups that generate efficiency and growth, ensuring that human trust is not crushed by the monumentality of the organization. Furthermore, it involves valuing each of these communities within the larger structure.

In short, management through trust is about enabling leaders of large, monumental organizations to preserve the autonomy of "small," human-scale units without imposing monumental directives, and to value this operating mode beyond these individual communities.

At Forvis Mazars Group , one such recently created community is called Ubuntu, meaning "I am because we are". It is a community that started informally among partners who could play a leadership role in the future, but without guarantees. A strong mutual trust animates this group of 65 partners from about 40 countries, making it a unique network of coordination and acceleration, driven by a dynamic that transcends their small, friendship-based group.

Finally, in the equation of management through trust, all the complexity lies in the ability to generate chosen subordination, an "obedience of friendship" that uplifts rather than diminishes. This was the subject of the Cité de la réussite debate, “Autonomy and Responsibility: Daring to Manage Through Trust,” with Maud Bailly , Fabienne Arata-Camps , Bertrand Dumazy , and Jean-Michel Blanquer , on Saturday, 23 November 2024 at the Louis Liard amphitheater in La Sorbonne.