Everyone talks about it, but I haven’t really met many managers that would actually be committed to doing the work and building trust within an organisation.
Trust isn’t something that magically pops up when you talk about it. Trust is predicated on actions, interactions and leadership activities.
That’s one of the reasons why leaders are in so high demand – because they are capable of doing emotional work and building teams by creating honest relationships.
Basing on my experience there are very few leaders capable of creating healthy corporate culture and trust, which is a pity because it has a huge ROI. Let me tell you why.
Trust, a great booster for care
If you have someone who cares, he’ll do the work you haven’t ever asked him to. Employee who cares will work on things outside of his job description to improve your organisations because he feels like success of the organisation is his own success and the job is something more than just 9-5 duty.
While care is a astonishingly important quality, it can’t be fully utilized without trust.
One can find a lot of areas to be improved, can have head full of ideas, but if he doesn’t trust management enough to share those concepts it’s all for nothing. What’s the benefit of care in such situation?
Surely someone who cares will do low-risk items better than a person who doesn’t care, but why stop there? Often times, big ideas are risky and tangible improvement doesn’t come without costs, but these big breakthroughs are the things pushing our industry forward.
Make your employee feel secure, allow him to trust you and take the risks with all consequences.
If you decide to give someone a chance, you’re obligated to support him along the way, because both care and trust are resources that can be exhausted and it’s hard to earn them back.
If you don’t want to fully commit to support the people you lead in their efforts, don’t make empty promises because this will make everything worse.
“Team is a group of people who trust each other”~Simon Sinek
The right culture to me is the one that makes everyone comfortable and gives a feeling that one can rely on his peers. There are organisations with toxic culture in which employees forget they should be competing against other organisations instead of other co-workers. Even tho they share the same goal, their behavior doesn’t reflect that in day to day relations.
In healthy organisation toxic employees would be kicked out, but what if that’s management creating toxic atmosphere while they should be responsible for maintaining the culture? Here is where CEO as a head of HR kicks in, but unfortunately many CEOs think it doesn’t scale for them to do that which most of the time is faulty assumption.
Sane competition inside an organisation can be healthy as a self-improvement motivation, but it should be clear that at the high level it’s all about cooperation and same goal, and it mustn’t turn into aggressive attitude toward colleagues.
If you do the work to make your peers feel safe, they’ll feel obligated to do the same. Take care of your mates and they won’t leave you behind.
Insecurities are dangerous
Even the greatest and most talented individual won’t step out if he’s feeling insecure. I’ve seen plenty of great specialists holding back because they were feeling insecure in their teams and organisations.
People with extraordinary abilities can’t breathe if they aren’t allowed to fully utilize their potential so they’ll bash around for a moment and then leave the toxic organisation to live a good life somewhere else.
Lack of trust generates stress, and stress can paralyze the greatest minds.
The last thing you want is your A players to be stressed. Actually you don’t want anyone to be stressed, because stress kills productivity on all levels. It makes focus shattered and doesn’t leave free space to think about how to make the greatest work possible, because stressed individual thinks about ways to avoid being punished for anything he does and it takes priority over everything else.
This is how our brains are wired as a human beings – we prefer to avoid punishment and harm far more than we want to risk doing something that may end up positive, even if the second can result in much bigger ROI.
Stress makes people unproductive. As Mark Cuban says – If someone in organisation makes others stressed, he should be kicked out immediately because it spreads like a toxin and can kill the greatest corporate culture.
Let them breathe
Managers need to work hard to make care and trust core values in the organisation, because this is the best way to achieve long-term growth of the business and personal growth of employees. Employees who feel the growth want to stick around longer, because along with sane compensation this is almost all they need to be happy.
Yet, there are many organisations that don’t bother much about care and trust but still remain on the market. So it seems like it’s possible to achieve somewhat successful short-term goals, but if go and talk to unhappy employees you’ll realize that they’re working on the lowest productivity possible or already looking for a different job.
So the question is – do you want to be an average organisation that just holds up on the market, or the one that dominates it thanks to great teams full of A players?
Leadership is hard as much as being a good human being is hard. But at the end of the day it pays off.
Dawid Bałut 