Are you part of a low-trust organization? There are a surprising number of symptoms and tip-offs; perhaps the least obvious are in the organization’s products and services. This is fourth in a series of five. The other posts address warning signs from:

• 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 @ [email protected].

Filed Under: Improving Client Relationships

Low-trust organizations can be spotted in many ways.  This is third in a series of five. In this one, we explore warning signs from leadership. Previous and future posts address warning signs from:

• 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.

Filed Under: Improving Employee Relationships | maximizing organization