Trust

Maybe it's too late for your organisation?

Trust defined

Trust might be considered the glue that binds people together. As such it enables humans to operate collaboratively, whether that be in respect of a community, a business or as a 3-legged pub crawl team. Our ability to collaborate at scale sets us apart from our bipedal cousins. We have demonstrated our ability to act collaboratively at a national, international and global scale.

Incentives are another means of engendering collaboration. You might not trust your local grocer, but you hope that their desire to remain viable will ensure that they set a minimum standard in respect of produce quality.

Incentives lack the foundations of trust. When trust is in place, each party will be more forgiving when expectations are not met. Conversely with incentives any deviation from expectations generates a red flag and escalation to Defcon One.

Is he asleep?

The industrial era factory model was built on incentives. The peasant would endure hours of drudgery and hardship to acquire the money to live in the city, feed the family and architect a rudimentary lifestyle. There was no need for organisational trust. In much the same way that there is no need for the components of a sausage machine to have a trusting relationship.

But as workers moved from cogs in the machine to knowledge workers, the ability to manage their activities became more difficult. “Is Fred asleep or mentally working through a business-critical problem?” Management would feel more comfortable with Fred’s inactivity if it knew that he was ‘all in’ re the organisation’s vision and thus could be trusted to always act in a manner that progressed the mission.

Sponsored micro-aggressions

The reality is that in many organisation’s Fred doesn’t trust his employer. Even the slightest disagreements cause both Fred and HR to lunge for the employment contract. Whilst not every employee is a freelancer, more often than not the organisation is staffed with mercenaries.

So the relationship has a brittle quality. Management wants Fred to spend more time in the office, with his eyes open. But they are not sure how he will react, and so they kick the can down the road. The distrust rachets tighter.

Similarly teams and departments, more specifically their managers, distrust the other groups. They pursue their own political agenda, which is often at odds with what is best for the organisation.

We can add to that the mist of micro-aggressions that has permanently settled on the organisation. The lack of trust, perhaps more specifically the lack of civility, leads to people communicating in inconsiderate ways. This can take the form of lazy assumptions in relation to race, gender, age or background. The offenders are oblivious and consequently leave comet trails of frustration and anger as they move through the day.

Leaders who create an environment where juniors cannot share their perspectives and so feel obliged to stay silent clearly do not see trust as a corporate asset. Therefore psychological safety might be seen as leadership-sponsored micro-aggression.

Imagine each cell in your body feeling too exhausted to do their job because they are ruminating over a recent disrespectful encounter, They decide to ‘quietly quit’, thus performing their duties to the absolute minimum standard. It would not be long before your body showed signs of irreversible damage.

You started it

As the forces bearing down on organisations compound and conflate, organisations that are internally at war are unlikely to sense and make sense of what is happening in their market. Decision quality is thus hampered, and the resultant execution is a combination of tardy and ineffective.

Imagine a Delta Force unit deep behind enemy lines descending into open conflict mid-mission. Raised voices, arguments and infighting cut through the night, effectively acting like a giant flashing beacon hovering overhead with a downward arrow and the words: “Enemy infiltrators here.”

Internal friction does not stay internal for long. It leaks outward as noise, hesitation and vulnerability. Eventually the market feels it.

Running low on trust, puts your organisation at existential risk. Your organisation is probably only one more black swan away from extinction / acquisition.

Reverse engineering trust

The absence of trust presents as a systemic problem. However you cannot ‘buy trust in’ or ‘sheep dip’ the workforce, and the management, in a pan organisation, workplace civility programme. Fundamentally it is a structural problem. Given the complex nature of modern organisations, particularly those that adhere to industrial principles, it is very likely that the horse has bolted in terms of rectification.

Any attempt by the leadership team to behave in a more enlightened manner will be seen as weakness by the workforce and they will capitalise on it. Big time.

Tighter governance to the rescue

You have very little choice but to ramp up the governance to the point where people have very little latitude other than to do what they are supposed to, including engaging with other parties up and down the value stream.

This is the equivalent of making a deep commitment to centralised leadership, which in itself is the wrong move in terms of organisational adaptiveness - a critical characteristic in disruptive times. However it may well keep your organisation in the game for a little longer.

Another more radical approach is to grow parallel sources of income by developing new business models. Cultivating a culture of trust is critical from the outset, given how complex systems are shaped by their initial conditions. You know this only too well if you preside over a culturally dysfunctional organisation.

In conclusion

You can make good progress in the absence of trust if you get the incentives right. But I feel that this is not enough given how macroenvironmental forces are creating a very uncertain and volatile world.

It is already well established that organisations predicated on industrial era principles are highly mechanical and thus unsuited for a rapidly changing world. Those organisations that are similarly predicated but recognise the value people can deliver will eventually recognise to their dismay that a lack of trust is even more corrosive than sclerotic mechanical processes.

CEOs should not be surprised when their leadership offsites, employee wellness programmes and heavy investment in AI only serve to accelerate the organisational tailspin.