Managers who don’t engage and inspire their staff are failing to gain their trust – and the further removed they are the worse it becomes.
These are the findings of a poll carried out by the British Association of Communicators in Business (CiB), that quizzed 4,700 people.
The report found that 70 per cent of respondents said they totally trusted their boss – a figure that drops to just 40 per cent for the boss’s boss. A further step removed and the figure falls to just 33 per cent.
One respondent said: “The higher up the chain you go, the less they deal with people and the more we are just units of production. It doesn’t matter what people say, we are all expendable as long as the shareholders can keep making a profit.”
CiB national chairman, Suzanne Peck, commented: “Excellent communications are vital if we want to get the best out of people, yet too many managers fail to engage and inspire their staff, falling back on platitudes and meaningless business jargon.
“No employee is going to trust any manager who they don’t know or who can’t talk to them like a normal human being.”
One Response
Communication – Essential but insufficient
To engage, inspire and motivate people are key management tasks. No person will trust anyone who behaves badly toward them, whatever the relationship.
However, good communication skills are not, in themselves, sufficient to manage well. The content needs to be in a coherent framework which communicates the right expectation to the receiver’s mind.
I know senior executives of large organisations who are excellent in their ability to lead, inspire and motivate. The trouble is as the management message,culture, expectation filters down the weakest link in the chain corrupts it. How many managers blame their boss when they have to do something dramatic?
Of course allowing that to happen is bad management but not many organisations manage their internal communication, culture, expectations, values and performance as well as they attend to their outside world appearance, their marketing.
Three words sum it up: honesty, openess and above all respect for the individual as a human being.
Why do people find that so difficult?