It used to make sense. But it doesn’t anymore and the implications are significant.

Why Retention?

It’s been awhile since anyone dusted off the basic retention rationale, so let’s review the bidding. Here are some commonly stated reasons why companies should pursue employee retention:

1. It costs more to hire than to retain people
2. The more experienced the hire, the more it costs to retrain replacements
3. Experienced employees know the ropes, the lingo, how things are done
4. Experienced employees form deeper relationships with customers
5. Retained employees are motivated, which helps customer relationships.

Of course, a few of these tenets were always subject to qualification – number 5, for example. Longevity can just as easily drive complacency and myopia as well as it can drive motivation.

But that’s not the Big Story. The Big Story lies in the assumptions underlying all five of those beliefs. Those assumptions are:

1. the benefits of retention increase in direct proportion to longevity, and
2. the pace at which new employees become productive is relatively fixed.

Both beliefs are looking a lot less true these days.

What’s Changed?

Two things have changed: work and people.

Work. Work has become outsourced, modular, plug-compatible, horizontal, contracted, bite-sized, for-hire, project-based. Employers shun fixed costs and value flexibility.

This is partly because they can: technology has made work-sourcing a global phenomenon, freed from space and time. It’s also partly because they have to: global sourcing means competitiveness is also global. The global economy has undergone a massive make/buy analysis and has come down heavily on the “buy” choice. If you’re not working with the world’s best/lowest cost doer of some key task, then you’re at a disadvantage.

The nature of work has shifted from a “job” focus to a “project” or “task” focus. Employers no longer need “someone who can do…” but rather “someone who has done, and will do…”  The new work model is not semi-permanent vertical employer silos of people; it is the model used by the film industry and by consultants, a constantly shifting nexus of tasks and resources.

Recruitment comes to resemble an ongoing speed-dating event.

People. I think we’re finally past decrying the lack of employee “loyalty;” it’s so last millennium.  People are “loyal” to their professions, their technologies, maybe their customers – but not to the constantly morphing corporate entities that sign their paychecks.

The skills of the new generation have evolved to fit the new workplace. The Facebook generation, adept at mass-scale peer relationships, doesn’t relate well to authority, no matter which side of the relationship they’re on. Geography? Twitter is everywhere and while not every 20-something can afford time in Europe, they all know someone who can and does, and can all Skype it and tweet it 24-7 in the meantime.

The oldsters may not like the verbal promiscuity of “friending,” but it fits perfectly with the new workplace. While society may pay a price in the dearth of deep, vertical relationships, the market place is demanding breadth.

Attraction and Retention Redux

Let’s put these trends together. What the economy needs, and what people are organizing to offer, is the ability to form relationships at the speed of transactions.

To companies, the attractive employees are not those with deep potential; they are those who can hit the ground running in a plug-compatible world, instantly connecting with thousands of like-minded peers within the company and without.

To people, the attractive employers are not those who offer long-term “commitments” (usually just relationship-disguised transactional offers anyway) but those who offer the ability to be instantly productive, while offering personal growth opportunities in the form of autonomy and new activities.

There is an obvious match here. What is no longer obvious is the relevance of “retention.”

Why would an employer want to retain people when the changing market requires ever-changing skills that can be bought quickly with precision rather than trained over time with generality?

Why would an employee want to be retained, when (s)he can find ever-changing opportunities to gain experience in a world thousands of times bigger than one employer alone could ever hope to offer?

Attract! Attract! Three New Strategies for Companies

The above are massive trends. The trend is your friend. The challenge is to ride the trend, not fight it. Here are three strategies for doing so:

1. Aim for zero cost onboarding and training. Zero works well as a stretch goal, but it’s not enough. How can you get people to pay you to join your company? (This is not as crazy as it sounds: how much do people pay to go to Harvard? So, become the “Harvard of YourNiche.”)

2. Reverse-hire search firms. Tell Russell Reynolds you want every employee to get one bonafide offer from an outside firm every year to keep them motivated. If they stay with you, they have re-upped, and become re-attracted. If they leave, you can choose either to recalibrate your attractions program, or wish the employee well and let them tell the market how employee-dedicated you are. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Tony Hsieh already does a version of this at Zappos, paying people not to take a job offer).

3. Up your knowledge management game. Tenure is such an expensive way to gain company knowledge. Figure out how to make it available to every employee, from day one.

And don’t assume that means AI and databases. Try the same thing that works in the outside world: massive horizontal networking. Invent intra-LinkedIn and Intra-Tweet. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Clay Hebert is working on SpinDows)

Attract and retain? That sounds like a motto for a roach motel. The new mantra is Attract! Attract!

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ info@trustedadvisor.com.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

We underestimate the power of doing exactly the opposite – letting people see us just as we are.

That’s what this week’s Trust Tip video is about.

For more on the general subject of authenticity and honesty, look at Trust, Honesty and Authenticity, a blogpost from two years ago.

If you like the Trust Tip Video series, and you like our occasional eBooks, why not subscribe to make sure you get both? Every 2-4 weeks we’ll send you selected high-quality content. To subscribe, click here, or go to http://bit.ly/trust-subscribe

———————————————————————————–

Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ info@trustedadvisor.com.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

This is the last in a series of five. The other posts address warning signs of low-trust organizations coming from:

• Employees
• Teams
• Leadership
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers (this blogpost)

How Your Clients and Customers Tell You You’re Low-Trust

It’s almost inconceivable that a high-trust organization will have low-trust relationships with its clients or customers. And that works in reverse: low-trust buyer relationships are a tip-off that something is amiss internally as well. Sometimes it’s easier to read the external signals, so here they are:

1.    Your colleagues speak disparagingly of your customers.

• “They’re trying to pull a fast one on us; we can’t let them get away with it.” Whoa, simmer down. People who ascribe negative motives to customers’ actions without data, will generally do the same within the organization.  With all due respect to Andy Grove, paranoia is rarely a good corporate value to promote.
• “I’ll believe it when I get it in writing.” If your people insist on contractual, legalistic relationships with customers, they’ll do the same internally. And since trust greatly reduces time and costs, that attitude is costing you dearly, internally as well as externally.

2.    You haven’t gotten a new referral client in 6 months.

• This is such a key concept that it has been quantitatively refined (brilliantly) in the Net Promoter Score first developed by Bain’s Reichheld and Markey. At its heart: the single metric that best correlates with success is your clients’ tendency to promote you.
• If you have great referrals, you almost certainly have delighted customers and energized employees. And that rarely happens without great levels of trust within the organization.

3.    You’re losing customers and don’t really know why.

• Look at your customer list: is it basically growing or shrinking? Come on, you know the answer, pick one.
• Now ask yourself: do I really know why that is? Or do I have a list of anecdotal, seemingly unrelated reasons? The CEO left; that guy’s a complete jerk; they decided to go with the low-price provider; they’re rationalizing suppliers.
• That is not an unrelated list, after all. The common denominator is, they don’t trust you. And if your customers don’t trust you, the odds are remote that you live in a high-trust organization.

4.    You’re being asked to submit bids and respond to RFPs for long-time clients.

• We don’t want to be dogmatic about this one: there is a long-term, secular trend toward professional procurement. That trend is not Evil incarnate; the procurement people are your new clients. Treat them as such, respectfully.
• However: if YourCo seems to be singled out for this treatment, if it’s not a slow trend but a landslide for you, then maybe the market is telling you something. It’s telling you you’re not trusted. If you were trusted, you’d be seeing many fewer RFPs, you’d be getting sole-sourced where reasonable, you’d be getting in to define some RFPs, and you’d be getting some very personal coaching from the customer about how to operate in the new procurement world.
• That’s not happening? Then odds are, your customers don’t trust you. They’ve never been shown the difference between genuine concern and manipulation. They’d prefer to deal at arms-length, with professional buyers who are immune to emotional bullying and enticement alike. They prefer to deal on price, because they haven’t been shown any good reason to deal on any other basis.
• And if you’re quoting on price, using self-oriented sales tactics with your customers, then you probably don’t respect your own products, value and organization. Sounds like low-trust.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little series on warning signs of a low-trust organization. Writing it has reminded us of two things:

1.    Trust is infectious. A high-trust organization is highly correlated with high performance on so many dimensions: innovation, people, leadership, products, and markets.

2.    Trust begins at home. Correlation is not causality, but causality is clearly at work in trust. Furthermore, it flows more in certain ways than in others. In very broad terms, the five factors we’ve discussed move in the following manner to create a high-trust organization.

It generally starts with leadership; but that’s a different series for another time.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

I suggest it might simply be this: Return Calls Unbelievably Fast.

It’s not hard. It costs nothing. You can do it starting right now.

And It has several benefits, not just one. That’s what this week’s Trust Tip video is about.

For more on the general topic of speed and trust creation, you might like Does Trust Really Take Time, from our articles archive.

If you like the Trust Tip Video series, and you like our occasional eBooks, why not subscribe to make sure you get both? Every 2-4 weeks we send you selected high-quality content.  To subscribe, click here, or go to http://bit.ly/trust-subscribe.

It’s all about Tools that Work – For Your Work.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

• Employees
• Teams
• Leadership
• Products and Services (this blogpost)
• Clients and Customers

Product/Service Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Take a hard look at YourCo’s products and services. Not only do they provide tipoffs about high or low trust – they are themselves the beneficiaries (or victims) of high or low trust. YourCo’s market offering is very much tied up with trust.

Here are some product/service indicators of low trust at YourCo:

1. Innovation is low in YourCo.

• Pick five big-picture indicators of innovation and rank your organization vs. your competitors. If you rank high, you probably have a high-trust organization. Low? Then probably not so much.
• If you don’t rank well, you’ve got well-rehearsed excuses. “We’re like Apple, we’re not first in but we get it right.” “We focus more on service quality than on innovation per se.”  But you know what? Apple innovates. Ritz-Carlton innovates. Just in different areas. What’s your area?
• The simple truth is, high-trust organizations foster high levels of innovation; low-trust organizations don’t. The lack of innovation is a canary in the coal mine; innovation itself is one of the great benefits of high trust.

2. Complaints are considered routine at YourCo.

• Nobody’s perfect? OK. But if a complaint about your product or service no longer produces pain or angst within YourCo, then you’ve lost trust. Customers will sense that you’re unreliable, and – worse – that you don’t care.
• Maybe this is just us, but we think those “please take a moment and rate your service” approaches hurt trust. They are automated; they leave no room for creativity; worse, they are all about YourCo and YourCo’s internal evaluation scheme. And worst of all, they pretend to be about the customer.

3. You don’t offer guarantees.

• If you’re a retailer offering $1.99 items, “satisfaction or your money back” is no big deal. But if you’re a professional services provider, the value you provide may be way beyond the cost you charge.
• What would it cost you to guarantee the cost of your service? If you’d lose money doing that – then maybe you have a service quality problem. The perception of not standing behind your service is that you yourself don’t trust it.
• If you do offer a guarantee but it’s in small print, and you quibble over it, you just lost the value of the guarantee. That means you view guarantees as a cost of doing business, and not as a sign of confidence and customer respect. That will cost you trust.

4. Information is not forthcoming.

• In this day and age, all customers – B2B, B2C – want easy access to every question they might have. The organization that gives you easy access to answers is the one that gets your trust.  The organization that manages your access to information so that you only see what they want you to see when they want you to see it – that’s the organization that loses your trust.
• Put everything you can imagine on your website. That doesn’t mean it has to be all above the fold on page one; it just means you have to make it very available, and reasonably accessible. If I can’t find it, I infer you must be hiding it.  And I don’t trust you.
• There are some questions I want help with; that’s when you make 800 numbers available, click here for live chat…  If instead of those options I get, “this is a recorded message; please call back during the hours of…” that’s when trust declines.

5. You think you’ve got the hamburgers.

• In the early days of McDonald’s in Moscow, I’m told, customer service attitudes were hard to change. As one employee told a hapless American from corporate, “You people don’t seem to understand.  You see, we have the hamburgers; the customers don’t. They should be nice to us.”
• Working from trust in business means you don’t trap people into doing what you want. Instead, you give them what they want; then let them live up to their humanity and give you what you want. The best way to create trustworthy customers is to trust them with your products and services.

The next blogpost in this series will be the last: client and customer tip-offs about whether you’re a low-trust organization.

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ info@trustedadvisor.com.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

• Employees
• Teams
• Leadership (today’s post)
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers

Leadership Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look at the leadership in your organization. Does it have some of the following characteristics? If you’re a leader yourself, think hard, you might be contributing to a low-trust organization. These issues all arise from leadership choices, after all.

1. The Cult of the Corner Office thrives.

• Do you have corner offices that are not conference rooms? Do they come with extra appointments, more square footage, better desks? Are there criteria for who gets them? You may have an issue.
• If you have sanctified real estate, the odds are you have other visible symbols of class status and rank. With one exception, class systems detract from trusted relationships in an organization.
• The exception: you’re intentionally running a business that connects meritocracy and materialism. Some trading operations fit that description. But you’re not likely to confuse them with high trust environments anyway.

2. The highest performer is a values-offender.

• Name the 2-3 smartest, highest-bonus, most successful persons in your organization.  Does at least one of them get there by thumbing his or her nose at your avowed corporate values? Then you have a problem.
• Values mean nothing if they are not enforced. Very few values statements have exceptions clauses (“…unless you can make a really profitable sale..”). What part of “team player,” “integrity,” or “client-focused” do you think rhymes with not showing up at team events, obfuscation, or self-aggrandizing?
• Nothing shoots holes in values statements like blatant hypocrisy.

3. Blame is an art form.

• Blame is the opposite of responsibility. If leadership means anything, it means taking responsibility. If the first words out of leaders’ mouths in the face of difficulty are to blame the situation or another person, what you have is the absence of leadership.
• Don’t confuse an explanation with an excuse. Explanations are important; they help us know what to do differently next time. They do not, however, let anyone off the hook. Leaders can’t be let off the hook; that’s part of the definition of leadership.
• Blame and its twin “inability to confront” corrode trust. They both try to disconnect responsibility from the truth. Leaders don’t do that.

4. “Need to know” is your catchphrase – and you’re not in the military.

• The military, and military contractors, legitimately operate on a “need to know” basis. Not too many others do. It’s an easy rationalization that leads to low trust.
• If I say you don’t need to know something (outside the military), it means you can’t be trusted with the information. Maybe you’re incompetent, maybe you’re a blabbermouth, maybe you’ll misinterpret it; there can be many reasons for low trust. But they’re all low trust.
• If I don’t understand or accept why I have no need to know, then I will resent you telling me. Resentment leads to all kinds of avenues, none of them good, and all of them low-trust at heart. Need-to-know erodes trust.
• None of them above is any different because it’s a policy: a policy to withhold the truth systemically just means you have a systemic approach to withholding the truth. Now you have a whole organization that is untrusting.

5. The need to “have a positive outlook” trumps the need to tell the truth.

• Many a leader has said, “We need to keep people’s morale up, make sure they hear this the right way, don’t let them get depressed.” That way lies trouble. Because the truth has a way of getting out.
  • Most people in most situations would prefer to hear the truth, to make up their own minds. They don’t trust people who assume they know better.  Remember Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men, yelling, “The truth! You can’t handle the truth!” Don’t be that guy.

In the next post, we’ll explore 5 ways in which products and services can indicate a low-trust organization.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

We need to get off of our habitual Self-Orientation. As my colleague, Andrea Howe, says we need to Get Off Our S.

What does that mean, and how do you do it? That’s the subject of this one-minute Trust Tip.

For more information about Self-Orientation, try this article on The Trust Equation.

If you like the Trust Tip Video series, and you like our occasional eBooks, why not subscribe to make sure you get both? Every 2-4 weeks we send you selected high-quality content. We mailed out our latest eBook just yesterday with another scheduled in two weeks.

To subscribe, click here, or got to http://bit.ly/trust-subscribe.

It’s all about Tools that Work–For Your Work.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

This is the second in a series of five, totaling 25 warnings signs in:

• Employees (first post)
• Teams (today’s post)
• Leadership
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers

Team Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look around the teams in your environment. Do they have some of these characteristics? Then you might be a member of a low-trust organization.

1. A low-trust team isn’t productive.

• It misses milestones. It doesn’t deliver on time, or on spec. The team doesn’t do what it says it will do. The team is unreliable.
• It produces mediocre work. It settles for what looks to be low risk, getting the lowest common denominator. It chokes off innovation in the name of risk, often masking jealousy and NIH (not invented here) Syndrome.
• It fails to achieve its goals. Goal failure is more than milestone failure writ large. It speaks to a failure of common purpose and common commitment.

2. Low-trust teams typically form sub-groups and cliques within them.

• There are flurries of private emails and hushed conversations. This is sub-team bonding, not even tribal – it is transient, shallow, and superficial – Mean Girls bonding.
• Team members are guarded in their communications. They are concerned someone else might hear, and that would be in principle a bad thing. It’s the ‘in principle’ part that’s worrisome.
• Information is hoarded as a source of political power, rather than shared to create greater team power and organizational success.

3. Low-trust teams are less than the sum of their parts.

• A great team – even a just pretty good team – can accomplish so much more than simply the sum of its parts. But a low-trust team can’t.
• They choke off innovation and personal growth – things that happen organically even in a neutral, social organization. A low-trust team isn’t benign, it’s toxic.
• People are massively influenced by those around them – a group of low-trust people can bring even a strong team player down to their level of low trust.
• If the team is bureaucratically protected from competition, it will have low turnover among a core group and high turnover from the occasional newcomer. If the team is in a competitive environment, it will show high turnover everywhere. No one likes staying.

4. A low trust team is addicted to faux team-ness, happy talk, not real team walk.

• We can’t prove this, but we sometimes wonder if the presence of those motivational posters isn’t negatively correlated with team behavior (or is that just us being cynical?)
• Lip service is the coin of the realm, because to be honest would be to acknowledge the existence of low trust. Honesty is what distinguishes a merely critical team from a low-trust team; the latter is disengaged.
• The opposite of low-trust teams isn’t competitive, meritocratic teams; it is teams who know enough to wish they were trust-based, and try to pretend to appear so.
• There is frequently a high-performer, one who achieves great results but does not follow the values. This manifest unfairness results in resentment among the rest of the team.

5. A low-trust team has trouble collaborating.

• Low-trust teams are likely to prefer individual compensation schemes; they don’t believe in, or trust, the ability of the team to do well for them, preferring to fend for themselves.
• Collaboration drives innovation; but low-trust teams exalt solo work, thus buying into the “solo inventor” myth of innovation.

If teams in your ecosphere look like this, you may be hanging around a low-trust organization.

For some ideas on how to improve trust, see Three Strategies to Improve Business’s Trust.

In the next post we’ll explore Five Warning Signs in Leadership that suggest a low-trust organization.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

A New Anthology

When it comes to trust-building, stories are a powerful tool for both learning and change. Our new book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust (Wiley, October 2011), contains a multitude of stories. Told by and about people we know, these stories illustrate the fundamental attitudes, truths, and principles of trustworthiness.

Today’s story is excerpted from our chapter on shifting from tactics to strategy. It demonstrates how simple it can be to dramatically alter the nature of a working relationship, and pave the way for delivering far greater value.

From the Front Lines: Upping the Ante

What’s been left unsaid for too long in one of your relationships?

++++++

Read more stories about trust:

• Risky business
• When to walk away
• An unexpected way to recover lost trust
• An unexpected approach to developing new business with trust
• Leading with trust in the C-suite

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ info@trustedadvisor.com.

This post was written by Andrea Howe
Andrea Howe is an Associate with Trusted Advisor Associates LLC, and founder/CEO of BossaNova Consulting Group. Read more about Andrea at http://trustedadvisor.com/consultants.andreahowe/ You can follow Andrea on Twitter @AndreaPHowe

The canaries in the low-trust coal mine fall into five groups: we’ll devote one blog post to each of:

• Employees (today’s post)
• Teams
• Leadership
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers

Employee Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look around your offices. Do you see the following five signs? Then you might be a member of a low-trust organization.

1. The copy room bulletin board has those round smiley cartoon figures laughing and rolling on the floor saying, “You want it WHEN?!”

• Humor is revealing. This particular cartoon pokes fun at the internal customer. Allegedly. When is it a good idea to make jokes about the customer?
• What it really indicates is insecurity on the part of the copy room staff. What it really says is, “Please don’t blame me, I feel un-validated around here. And besides, all I want is to follow simple rules that I don’t have to think about, why are you making my life so miserable with all your requests?”
• And when you see those cartoons, it isn’t just about the copy room. They’re a canary in the company mine. It means you’ve got insecure employees reporting to people who can’t give clear feedback, and a culture of entitlement. Good luck trying to get things done around that place.

2. People email others on the same floor way more than they talk to each other.

• Sure, email provides an invaluable record of communication. And yes, it’s efficient. And no, I’m not going to say you have to be more empathetic and caring in all your relationships – that’s your call.
• But email is for transactions. An organization that kids itself that it can reduce all decisions to transactions is an organization that can’t tell forests from trees.
• Interactions that are overweighted into transactions become poor at executing  strategies (despite their attention to detail), because strategies require frequent strategic-level thinking.
• A culture that over-celebrates impersonal transactions is likely to be non-innovative, because innovation thrives on the trust that allows people to challenge each others’ ideas.

3. Blame stalks the halls.

• One of the worst sayings is, “No one ever got fired for hiring [IBM, McKinsey, etc].” It may not be bad for IBM or McKinsey, but it means that business decisions are being made by employees based on personal risk-aversion, rather than on the organizational good. That makes for some very bad decisions.
• Behind blame lies fear. Employees driven by fear will never properly value risk. They will avoid people and decisions based on their personal fears; this avoidance increases inefficiencies and lowers innovation. Ironically, it ultimately also raises risk.
• Blame is captivity, as Phil McGee says. When blame reigns, you can’t tell who’s responsible. When you’ve got no responsibility, accountability is meaningless. Blame leads to ineffectiveness; and that means you can’t make decisions, respond to markets, or do positive things.

4. People talk about each other.

• People talking frequently about each other suggests gossip, which usually means talking behind people’s backs. This signals an inability to confront real issues. This means politics replaces truth telling.
• Ask someone where they work in an organization. At a great company, it might be “in bubble memory technology.” Or, “in the semiconductor division, in R&D.” In a low-trust organization, the answer will be, “In Robinson’s group.”
• The cult of leadership is just another cult. Steve Jobs may have been revered (or not), but he knew the desired obsession was not about personality, but the business. Celebrate, but don’t idolize.

5. People complain.

• Complaining is wrong because it is wishing, not doing. If you didn’t win the lottery, you’ve no business complaining if you didn’t buy a ticket.
• And if you bought a ticket and are complaining about the odds, you don’t understand the lottery.
• If you bought a ticket, understand the odds, and are still complaining, you have no sense of your obligation in this organization, which is to do something about it. Go make a better lottery.
• Complainers suck out the air in the room. They are self-oriented, they drag down productivity, and slow results. If you don’t get rid of them, it’s probably because you’re fearful (see #3, above).

These employee behaviors are warning signals of low trust in an organization. Low trust threatens your economics, innovation, speed to market, cost position, overhead structure, employee turnover, and customer indifference or worse – and a whole lot more.

For some ideas on how to improve trust, see Three Strategies to Improve Business’s Trust.

In the next post we’ll explore Five Warning Signs in Teams that suggest a low-trust organization.

This post was written by Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen