Building trust is not as simple as one, two, three. Sally Bibb shows why and looks at what it means to genuinely build the foundation of trust that a company needs to be successful over the long term.
In today’s financial markets, earnings account for barely more than 50 per cent of a company’s market value. The other 50 per cent comes from the firm’s intangibles, ie their non-physical assets.
This is according to research, by Baruch Lev, cited in the article ‘Making Intangibles Tangible‘ in Strategic Finance, December 2006, by Ulrich, Smallwood and Sandholtz.
Ulrich et al developed what they called the ‘Architecture for Intangibles’ to help CEOs understand and boost their value-adding intangible assets. There are four steps to their framework:
- Keep your promises
- Create a clear and compelling strategy
- Align technical competencies
- Enable organisation capabilities
They go on to give a ‘how to’ list to help leaders to implement the stages of their model. They say that leaders who make and keep promises build credibility, confidence and conviction, and then give an example of a high profile leader who lost stakeholders’ trust and sacrificed the reputation of the company. So far, so good.
They then make a leap from step one, ‘keep your promises’, to giving the following tips for building trust. This is the aspect of their model that I would like to respond to in this article.
Their tips are:
- Promise less, deliver more
- Be humble in public, confident in private
- Start small
- Anticipate and update
Granted, theirs is a small and simple model that is probably not designed to be a comprehensive guide to the issues they raise.
However the tips they give belie the complexity of the issue and, I would argue, are not the most important ingredients to building trust. They say ‘promise less, deliver more’. That suggests behaving in a way that is not necessarily authentic – why not promise a lot if you have every intention to do so and the confidence that you can?
They say ‘be humble in public, confident in private’. Why not be confident in public if it is a genuine and well-founded confidence? And what has ‘starting small’ got to do with building trust?
How about ‘anticipate and update’? Yes, communication is a key factor if you are to build and maintain trust but there is a much more important aspect to communication – that is to be open and truthful.
Undertaking certain activities and displaying particular behaviours to build trust suggests developing trust as a means to an end. This is a paradox. Let me explain.
Genuine value
Trust is a value. It is something that is either important to you or not. You are either a trustworthy person or you are not. It is an absolute. You cannot be partially trustworthy or trusting. If trust is not a genuine value it shows. The more someone tries to display trust-building behaviours the more others will feel manipulated and the less they will trust them.
Senior teams who spend their time working out what their values should be have got it wrong. They should be trying to elicit what their values actually are, spending time clarifying and agreeing them and then be consciously aware of expressing them.
Strangely enough, high-trust organisations usually do not talk about trust or list it on a statement of values. Trust is just the effect of the values that the leaders have and of the supportive processes that are in place. They hire people for whom trust, openness and honesty are non-negotiables.
There are a number of characteristics (below) that can be identified in a genuinely high-trust organisation. These characteristics interact with each other to create an environment where, for the most part, people trust and are trusted. I say for the most part because it appears to have total trust all of the time. What is important is that it is something that is held as genuinely important by the leaders and employees.
Shared values: Value-led organisations are those that create trusting cultures. Integrity and honesty are the essential values without which trust cannot exist.
A shared mission or goal: This is important – people need to be ultimately pulling in the same direction and to have a commitment to goals beyond just their own.
Open and authentic leadership: Quite simply, the leader sets the tone. People pick up on the leader’s values and motivations whether or not they are explicitly stated. It is not possible to create a culture of trust if the leader is not trusted and does not trust others.
A culture of consensus not force: To coerce someone implies that unless you exert that pressure they won’t fulfil a commitment or do the right thing. Trusting cultures are ones where people do things willingly.
An atmosphere of enjoyment and fun: Innovation companies have shown that the most productive environments for innovating are ones where people can have fun – they are less afraid of making mistakes so will try out new ideas.
A desire to learn not blame: In a culture of blame people cannot trust others and be open. If people detect even a hint that someone will be blamed for something going wrong, trust is destroyed.
Honest and authentic conversations: This is a basic requirement for trust. Without this there will always be a holding back of information and misunderstandings.
All of these factors, combined, make up the company culture. And the core distinguishing factor of a high-trust culture is a leader for whom trust is really important. High-trust organisations invariably have not consciously tried to become so. Trust is such a deeply held value of the leader and is so ingrained in the culture that it is not something that is deliberately focused on.
Just as in a trusting personal relationship where the two people involved are naturally trusting and trustworthy people, they do not deliberately set out to build a trusting relationship – that is a by product of their values.
A key factor of creating a culture of trust, whether in a one-to-one relationship or in an entire organisation, is that you have to start by trusting. To wait until someone proves that they are trustworthy does not work.
Trust cannot, as Ulrich, Smallwood and Sandholtz have suggested, be treated as a step in a process in the same way as, say, ‘Creating a clear, compelling strategy’ can. Trust is about values and it is about relationships. Above all, it is about authenticity. It cannot be created by following a step-by-step model.
Sally Bibb is a writer and organisational change consultant. She is co-author of ‘A Question of Trust: The Crucial Nature of Trust in Business, Work and Life, and How to Build It’, published by Cyan. She can be contacted via her website at www.sallybibb.com
HR Zone has three copies of Sally Bibb’s book, ‘A Question of Trust’ to give away. For your chance to win a copy, simply email <a href="mailto:editor@hrzone.co.uk" editor@hrzone.co.uk by 5pm on Friday 10 August. Please write “Sally Bibb book offer” in the subject heading and include your full postal address. The first three people to be drawn will each win a copy. Good luck!
2 Responses
Trust and Respect
Well done Sally, what a great article, I fully agree with your statements concerning trust. I remember a colleague of mine, many years ago, being told by a new senior manager that ‘I do not trust you and you will have to earn my respect’. This was the opening conversation between the two of them. They both knew each other and had been in the same organisation for a number of years yet had never worked together. As you can imagine the working relationship hardly flourished following that initial dialogue. It was only after some coaching that my colleague decided to approach his new manager to talk about their earlier conversation. ‘Trust’ after all must have an object attached to it. For example, what specifically did the manager not trust my colleague to do? His performance targets were regularly met and sometimes exceeded. Feedback on his performance from colleagues and customers was positive. ‘Trust’ was being used as a label by the manager. The same with ‘Respect’, how on earth do you earn it? Here’s a challenge – earn a colleague’s respect. It can’t be done. It is almost as though you have to determine whether you are in credit or debit each day? Quite simply ‘Respect’ is given, it is not earned. In effective relationships ‘Respect’ is automatically given. The conversation between the manager and my colleague was never really about ‘Trust’ and ‘Respect’ it was about power and control. The manager was saying ‘I’m the boss and you’ll do as I tell you’. Hardly an effective start point for building a good working relationship. All too often people misuse ‘Trust’ and ‘Respect’ and do not make effective distinctions about what they actually are. Hopefully your article will help people make more effective distinctions.
Duncan Miles
Director
Inspire Training and Consultancy
http://www.inspiretraining.net
Trust is multi-dimensional and it emerges (or doesn’t) from loca
Hi Sally,
You make the very important point that trust cannot be created in a step-by step way. It can’t be mandated, designed and built by managers as part of a formal change plan. Where it exists, it does so within the relationships that people have with each other. It grows, or is undermined, as a result of people’s everyday experiences and the sense-making conversations that they have with others about these.
At the same time, though, trust has many facets – some of which I don’t think are fully reflected in your values-focused piece. We all feel that we know whether or not we trust someone. But to say that we trust or don’t trust them doesn’t get us very far. What is it about them, or about what they do, that causes us to take this view?
Is it because we believe that they are innately trustworthy? Or is it because we see them as ‘one of us’ – with shared perspectives, common interests and sense of identity? Do we trust them because we believe that they are open and honest in what they say and how they say it – and, at the same time, that they maintain confidences? Is it because we believe that the ‘story’ they are telling us makes sense and is credible in its own right? Or maybe it’s a combination of all of these things. Trust is multi-dimensional. When we say we trust (or don’t trust) someone, we are likely to be basing that judgement on any or all of a number of different aspects of their observed behaviour and perceived personal qualities.
Perhaps our trust is grounded in a belief that they are competent to do what is needed in the specific situation. Or that we believe we can depend on them to do what they say they will do – or explain why not! Then again, it might stem from a feeling that the underlying cultural patterns and work climate are channelling behaviour in ways that foster high-energy, trusting relationships.
Ultimately, the cultural dimension of trust flows from the accumulated impact of people’s everyday behaviours, as these are perceived, interpreted, evaluated and shared through everyday conversations and interactions. A major impact on this sense-making process is people’s observations of those in formal leadership positions throughout the organisation. The ways in which leaders are seen to deal with issues of trust in others, therefore, impacts powerfully upon the level of trust that emerges.
Chris Rodgers – Author of Informal Coalitions