Trust Me: Relationships at Work Are Foundational to Organisational Success

We all know that trust is key to any relationship, from your first friends in school to your spouse. Without trust we withdraw, are less supportive, less empathetic. In personal relationships, we are very aware of how impactful trust is. Imagine not being able to trust your spouse, or a parent, or a friend. Think about the challenges of not trusting your child. We can easily articulate how this undermines the very essence of the relationship. A sense of trust is what bonds us to each other. We often talk about how much we love someone in our personal live, but actually, trust comes first. It’s essentially impossible to have a loving relationship that isn’t a high-trust one.

High-trust relationships in the workplace are the foundation to organisational success.

I say all this about personal relationships because no one struggles to understand how fundamental trust is in that context. As a psychologist, I know that there is no relationship without trust. But as an organisational psychologist specifically, I see how people underestimate that the same vital elements of trust exist in workplace relationships. Lack of trust at work breaks down relationships just as much as personal ones. Perhaps worse—unlike a personal relationship, people stay in toxic professional relationships because it fuels their ability to take care of themselves and their families.

So how do we build more trust at work?

To be frank, building and maintaining trust at work is not easy. In fact, it’s hard and getting harder. Two things have been studied extensively enough that I think we can accept them as truths. The first is that greater diversity in the workplace leads to greater positive outcomes. Diversity of talent in large-scale, global organisations is the only way to be competitive in a complex international landscape. We need employees who understand local culture, specific histories, social norms and other unique elements of each market.

The other truth is that it is harder for humans to bond with people not like themselves. That’s primal and hardwired. As a species, we look for familiarity and for patterns. Anything that disrupts our understanding of the world, is perceived as a threat. It’s just a simple survival skill. I recently wrote about schemata and confirmation bias in the workplace. Our brains—for practical reasons, not emotional reasons—tells us to back away from anything that is different. It’s a sign of danger. You would be reluctant to enter your house late at night if the door was standing ajar.

So, building trust across diverse teams is both vital to success—and working against basic human instinct. On the upside, those who achieve both will have far more leverage than those who don’t. Again, think of trust in personal terms. To be blunt, how much more efficiently do households operate where couples trust each other, where children trust their parents. It’s not just a matter of happiness in some vague sense. If I trust my partner, I don’t have to check to make sure that they picked up the children or paid the mortgage or chose wisely when investing. Those are all major decisions. Imagine the stress if any one of those things were in question due to lack of trust.

Now put that in a professional environment. As a leader, do you trust your team to lead projects, build strategy, or even to just ‘really’ be working from a remote location. Consider the time and energy wasted when you have to check on colleagues or direct reports whom you don’t trust to deliver what you need? And then scale that inefficiency across a 10,000-person company. Now scale that inefficiency to a 50,000-person company across 20 countries. A troubled household with problems the size of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Trust isn’t academic. It’s actually impacting your bottom line.

A Gallup poll found that when followers strongly trust their leaders, one in two are engaged. When they don’t, one in twelve are engaged. Now imagine a bear economy or a disruptive, divisive world event (pick any recent one you like). People who don’t trust will protect themselves. Remember, to trust or not, is a primal response by the human brain. Your caveman brain evolved when it was hunting and gathering while running from bears. Now it runs from unemployment, but with the same hypersensitivity as any other threat. Employees who don’t trust their leaders will depart faster from an organisation that is struggling. They panic more easily, with a go bag by the door. Even if they don’t leave, people at low-trust companies report 74% more stress, 13% more sick days and 40% more burnout.

High-trust organisations are fundamentally a lot of high-trust relationships, starting with leadership.

The higher the stakes or more senior your role, the more that trust matters at work. This can be small things like we trust our colleagues to give us honest feedback. We trust those in compliance roles to protect whistleblowers. We trust those who are responsible for our professional success to advocate for us when we’re not in the room. And depending on whether or not those trust needs are met, we turn around and replicate that high-trust dynamic—or not—with our own teams. C-suite teams must build high-trust relationships among themselves. Even the largest organsiation is essentially a professional household, and only as strong as the foundational trust it is built on.

This article first appeared on The Robert Kovach Blog.

Dr. Robert Kovach has spent his entire career working as a trusted advisor to senior leaders wanting to improve the effectiveness of themselves, their teams and their companies. Prior to starting his own consulting firm, Robert led the global executive assessment and development team for Cisco. Earlier in his career Robert held leadership roles with RHR International, PepsiCo, Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School and the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.