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When Trust Betrayal Keeps Coming Back

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Cobalt57 has a half-life of 257 days. The half-life of a bad divorce ranges from a few years to a lifetime.

And the half-life of betrayed trust is somewhere beyond that.

In fact, trust betrayed has a way of regenerating. Call it Zombie trust: when trust is trashed, it has a way of never really dying—it just keeps on coming back to get you.

Trust Betrayal and the Black Community

Two cases in point. From the early 1930s until 1972, a government sponsored study of syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama systematically and intentionally lied to poor black sharecroppers about the “research” being done to help them. In fact, their infection was left untreated, so as to study the ravaging effects of the disease.

The study is pretty well-known in the black community, and is a powerful story about the depth, depravity and reality of racism in the USA.

Powerful enough that it has made black people afraid of taking part in medical clinical trials. It’s not hard to understand why. And yet, we have this news story:

In a report to be published in the journal Medicine online Jan. 14, experts in the design and conduct of medical research found that black men and women were only 60 percent as likely as whites to participate in a mock study to test a pill for heart disease. Results came from a random survey of 717 outpatients at 13 clinics in Maryland, 36 percent of whom were black and the rest white.

"The survey is believed to be the first analysis showing that an overestimation of risk of harm explains why blacks’ participation in clinical trials has for decades lagged that of whites. The results come at a time of increased recognition of racial differences in disease rates and treatments. Researchers point out that some kidney diseases, stroke, lung cancer and diabetes all progress more quickly in blacks and kill more blacks than people of other racial backgrounds.

"There is enormous irony that without African-American subject participation in clinical trials, we are not going to have tested the best therapies we need to treat African Americans," says study senior researcher, Hopkins internist and epidemiologist Neil R. Powe, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A. "So long as the legacy of Tuskegee persists, African Americans will be left out of important findings about the latest treatments for diseases, especially those that take a greater toll on African Americans and consequently may not have ready or equal access to the latest medicines."

The Zombie of Trust Betrayed is at work here. The past abuse of trust was so horrific that it continues to wreak havoc, even when—ironically—researchers could be of help.

Robert Zogby and the Polling Debacle

Here’s another case. After the New Hampshire Democratic primary polling debacle, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show invited famed controversial pollster Robert Zogby as a spokesman for the polling industry.

Zogby held his own in the unwinnable format—but the Zombie of Trust Betrayed got him—bad—a week later.

In a post on January 16, Rick Rottman recounts a first-hand story from 1992, when he took a European history course from Zogby at Utica College. Long story short, as Rottman tells it, Zogby offered to raise everyone’s grade a point if they came in and volunteered for an 8-hour shift at his polling business.

At first, everyone agreed to it. Later, everyone reneged. Pressed as to why, they all said they felt it was unethical. Zogby, as Rottman recounts it, blew a gasket.

Worse yet, says Rottman, he had gotten an A on his midterm before these events. He never saw the results of his final exam (on which he thought he had done well), but his final grade was a C—implying an improbable F on his final exam. Understandably, Rottman is inclined to wonder why.

That was 1992. Now, 16 years later, Rottman is in the blogosphere saying “John Zogby is the reason I don’t trust polls.” And it’s not hard to understand why.

Note: I want to be very careful about spreading critical comments like this. If Zogby has something to say, he’s got white space here in this column to do so. And if he convinces me Rottman is a nut job, then I’ll strip his story entirely out of this blog. Until then, however, Rottman is writing quite clearly about a first-hand experience which sounds credible to me—or I wouldn’t be citing and linking to him here.

Final examples of the half-life of mistrust: look to the Russian-Chechen conflict; the feelings between the Sunnis and the Shia.

Trust lasts a long time. Trust betrayed appears to last longer.

You Lying, Cheating Dog, You

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Most of us lie, at least a touch.  Maybe cheat a little bit, too.

But it’s interesting to explore just why, and when, we do so. That’s the subject of a charming little piece in the current Harvard Business Review (February 2008, paper only) called “How Honest People Cheat,” by Dan Ariely.

A simple experiment. Give a few thousand people math problems to solve for money. Use a control group to establish average scores. Then rip up the exams in front of the test groups, and ask them to self-report how well they did.

The control group got 4 of 20 right. The test groups, on average, reported getting 6 of 20 right. By one measure, they cheated by 50%. By another, they cheated 12.5% of the available opportunity to cheat.

Then the researchers made it interesting.

1. They varied the risk of getting caught. Result? No change at all.

2. They substituted poker chips (redeemable later for money) for money itself. Result: a doubling of cheating.

3. They preceded the test by having participants reflect on their own standards of honesty, e.g. the Ten Commandments or an honor system. Result: complete cessation of cheating.

Ariely draws three conclusions:

1. Most of us will cheat a little, given the opportunity
2. Our consciences impose limits even when there’s no risk of sanctions
3. Non-monetary exchanges allow people to cheat more, e.g. backdating stock options.

Ariely seems to make the most of the third one, suggesting it explains Enron, for example.

I would emphasize it another way.  This elegant little study suggests that the threat of individual punishment carries far less weight than does the exhortation to do right by a group norm.

Now, it’s quite a leap from a small study to suggesting that prisons should focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment and retribution—but that’s the direction.

It’s a leap to say that white collar crime will be deterred less by Elliot Spitzer-like prosecutions than by airing criminal behavior to the disapproval of a broad public—but that’s the direction.

If you can’t trust someone, do you follow Ronald Reagan and “trust, but verify?”  Or do you have a sit-down with them about their responsibilities to be trustworthy? Let’s just say this study is anti-Reagan. 

At root, this study reminds us that much of individual behavior is not explained by that old economist standby, the “rational, self-aggrandizing homo economicus,” who does all that he does in order to improve his own economic well-being.

It suggests that human beings are also—very much—social creatures. We even build our own personal values systems (aka consciences) based on our sense of what furthers our relationships to other human beings.

Is that so hard to understand? 

Lessons in Sales from John McCain

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As far as I know, John McCain has never sold for a living. Though you could argue that insofar as he’s a politician, he’s never done anything else.

Whether or not you believe all politicians are salespeople, some do it differently than others. McCain “sells” in a particular way.

It’s an approach to selling that most salespeople instinctively avoid, but that many of the best salespeople have learned to seek. It’s an approach Hillary Clinton is belatedly coming to recognize.

It’s simple: be transparent.

As Howard Kurtz writes in Accessibility Opens Doors to McCain in the Washington Post,

Reporters rarely quote his aides because the man himself is available to react to just about everything. And that "infinite" access, says Boston Globe correspondent Sasha Issenberg, helps the Arizona senator.

"He’s pretty good road-trip company," Issenberg says. "The guy stays up on sports, movies and what’s in the news. I’ve had the ability to have extensive conversations with him — often Socratic dialogues — about the issues. He’s a richer candidate in stories written about him than other candidates are in stories written about them."

How candidates treat reporters shouldn’t matter in the coverage, but it does.

William Kristol, writing an ope-ed for the NY Times called Thoroughly Unmodern McCain, makes a similar point:

John McCain is a not-so-modern type. One might call him a neo-Victorian — rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled.
Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs. A fair number of Republican and independent voters seem to think so, if one can infer as much from their support of McCain at the polls. But, amazingly, a neo-Victorian straightforwardness might also turn out to be strategically smart.

McCain has been the only Republican candidate who hasn’t tried to out-think the process. Perhaps out of sheer necessity, after his campaign imploded last summer, he simply picked himself up and made his case to the voters in the various states.

Meanwhile, the other G.O.P. candidates are creatures of our modern age of analysis and meta-analysis, and their campaigns have sometimes been too clever by half.

There’s a reason transparency works: and a lesson for those would would fake it.

The reason transparency works is it reveals motives. Unlike appeals to qualifications, credentials, experience, testimonials, track records and competence—transparency speaks to intent.

If we see someone as being transparent, then nagging questions about motive disappear. We no longer speculate about what’s in it for him, what’s the hidden meaning, why’d he say that, is he lying, and so on. We accept the person at face value for what they say, even if—sometimes, particularly if—what they say reflects imperfection. That works in sales, and in politics.

And here’s the lesson for those would would fake transparency: you had better be really, really good at it, because, if you are caught faking transparency—all bets are off. There’s virtually no recovery from being found out intentionally lying about being truthful.

The best way to be transparent about your motives? To be sure your motives are clean in the first place. We don’t like someone who’s being transparent in order to gain something (like the Presidency). We want transparency as an end in itself—a principle, a value, not a means to end.

Here’s how it’s done, from Kristol again:

There was a serious moment when BBC correspondent Justin Webb asked why McCain kept bringing up global warming — not a popular cause with many Republicans, particularly in Michigan, where resistance to fuel-efficiency standards is strong.

"You’ve got to do what you know is right," McCain replied.

"You could lose as a result," Webb said.

"There’s a lot worse things than losing in life," the former POW said.

Transparency sells. The “trick” to using it is to live your life in a way you don’t mind being exposed.

Then just be who you are.

Property Theft or Generation Gap?

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David Pogue  is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times. His Wall Street Journal counterpart, Walt Mossberg, plays the practical, straight-shooter  to Pogue’s edgier and more expansive ruminations.

Case in point: Pogue’s article “The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality.”

 Pogue sometimes speaks to audiences who are outraged at copyright thievery, $2.00 DVDs of first run movies or $10 copies of Windows hawked in Hong Kong, knock-off designer bags in New York, scams, con men and property theft in general.

He asks them; “if you own a CD and it gets scratched, and you borrow one from the library to burn a copy—is that wrong? If you make CD copies of old vinyl LPs you own? What if you burn a copy of a movie you rented from Blockbuster?”

He leads listeners down a garden path of increasingly discomfiting examples, with more people at each point willing to call it “wrong.” His point: “wrong” is a nuanced view, not black and white. And it’s a powerful example.

Until—he spoke to a college audience of 500.

 

Pogue went all the way down his usual garden path, and got only two people—in an audience of 500—who characterized his endpoint as “wrong.”

…to see this vivid demonstration of the generational divide, in person, blew me away.
I don’t pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I’m increasingly convinced that copy protection isn’t it.)
I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies’ problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?

Pogue is on to something—but it’s not generation gaps. Generations are the second-order indicator of something much bigger.

It’s the disconnect between old belief systems—forged in a different business and technology world—and the new reality.  We are inhabiting an inter-regnum, a period where old beliefs don’t fit the new reality—and the new belief systems as yet unformed.

Emile Durkheim wrote about the shift from one mode of civilization to another; the result, if I recall correctly, was what he called “normlessness.” And it created anomie—a sense of disconnectedness, a lack of cohesive social principles, manifested in individuals as a sense of not belonging.

This disconnect between old beliefs and new reality shows up in several places: the purchasing function is one (old belief—compete with suppliers to squeeze costs out of them; new reality—collaborate with suppliers to create cross-corporate supply chains).

But Pogue’s example is the most vivid. It’s about property rights—the intellectual rights of music, movies, books, software—but also “hard” property like art or design as they become “copied” or digitized.

Technology relentlessly drives toward communalization of property. “Information wants to be free,” was the anarchic claim of the early digerati, and I think they were right. And the more free it becomes, the more Pogue will get blank stares from new generations.

Property owners can partly blame themselves. When videocassettes were introduced, movie companies’ first impulse was to sell, not rent, thereby implicitly degrading their rights to the content.

Remember Microsoft howling about counterfeit Windows in China? But Bill Gates knew full well that every counterfeit Windows user meant one less Unix user; tolerating counterfeiting wasn’t a Faustian deal, it was a plain old one.

We live in a normless time regarding digitizable property. We continue to infinitessimally slice “rights” of music artists, writers and producers to allocate tiny revenue streams from other artists’ 2-second samples sold through DVDs, online streaming media and media yet to be dreamed up. Counting angels on the head of a pin? The Lawyers’ Full Employment Act.

Lawyers will howl.  Software producers, artists, record companies will howl. Moralists will howl. And data will continue to become freer.

The howling will stop when we develop a new set of norms, appropriate to the new conditions on the ground. Pogue’s generational comment is accurate, as far as it goes. And normlessness does rhyme a bit with adolescence and punk rock, for that matter.

But ultimately it’s not about age. It’s about the changing of the social contract.

Change on the ground precedes and drives business models.  Business models then drive ideologies, belief systems, norms, laws.  Ideologies get enforced by lawyers, and lawyers get hired by those who benefit from the status quo.  Until change on the ground starts the whole cycle all over again.

Pogue is correct that “wrong” is a nuanced word.  So is “rights.”  Property rights are not absolute.  We have made "property" of women and black people, air and water—and un-made them.  In the scheme of things, re-thinking the status of a Wu Tang Clan track or an Adam Sandler flick might be just a tad easier. 

Who Do You Trust? A Snapshot in Time

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That’s the title of a recent blogpost  by Barry Ritholz, in his delightfully eclectic blog The Big Picture: Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets.  (Though, as one of his commentators snarkily reminds us, it should be “whom” do you trust).

Together with forty-odd literate comments, this post provides a perfect snapshot—a social Rorschach test—of the application of trust, the nature of trust, and the state of trust in business today. (Plus, it’s a fun read).

The application of trust.  As Barry points out, we apply concepts of trust to personal and business relationships alike. He implicates trust in the decline of mainstream media readership. “Trust” in the comments gets applied to products (ETFs over mutual funds), broadcasters (Kudlow, Kramer), directors (Spielberg), institutions (the IRS more than the Fed), and even “humanity” or “myself.”

Much of his post—and the comments—focus on the notion of trusting companies—as in, “I trust Amazon and USAA,” or “I don’t trust Microsoft.”

In turn, reasons for trusting (or not trusting) companies include:

• concerns about data security leading to identity theft
• customer service
• attention to customer experience, e.g. spam prevention
• reputation, e.g. linkage to one’s past.

Barry neatly sums up the range of trust applications in a series of questions:

Who do I trust? Who can I rely on, confide in, bank on, have faith in?
Who do you read? Who do you let get inside your head? Who do you believe? Who are you sure about?
What companies do you entrust with your personal files and passwords? Your social security number, bank account data, personal financial info, data?
Who do you trust?

The nature and state of trust. A blogpost is the furthest thing from a statistical study; then again, we’ve just seen the feet of clay of polling statistics.

The post and comments are more like a focus group; they have the ability to state a particular insight "just so." 

Barry says, “I am naturally sceptical. I see too much bullshit everywhere,” and his commenters continue the tone. One says, “People are, by nature, liars, thieves, and fast buck con artists.”

In other words, truth-telling is an indicium of trust—and the general view is bearish on truth-telling these days.

Barry says, “Yahoo (YHOO) still has some residual trust — but its waning fast. I still use Yahoo as a home page, but their inattentiveness to some of their properties is shameful.”

In other words, trust is about taking responsibility.  And how Yahoo isn’t doing it, nor is Dell, nor AIM. 

He also doesn’t trust social networking sites, because they abuse data—in turn, either because of sloppiness, and/or venality.  Trust is about motives, and about focus on something other than oneself.

One commenter says he trusts someone through their blog. Another says it amounts to risk management. One talks about trusting a very small circle of friends and family. Another talks about the essential role of trust in capitalism.

And many have hilarious lists of who and what they trust and don’t trust.

All in all, a rich real-world sample of the meaning of the word trust; not in a dictionary sense, but in an active, anthropological, here-now on-the-street sense.

It’s a great snapshot of trust in America circa January 2008. Thanks to Barry for posting.

Covey on Trust

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I am remiss in reviewing Steven MR Covey’s The Speed of Trust: the One Thing that Changes Everything. 
Remiss because it came out over a year ago, because the book (and associated events) has been quite a success—and because it deserves that success.

The book itself is organized according to “waves”—from self-trust, to relationship trust, then on to organizational, market and societal trust (at this last level, it echoes  Francis Fukuyama’s seminal work, Trust, from a decade earlier, subtitled "the social virtues and the creation of prosperity.")

Covey’s section on self-trust—what I would call the realm of “personal trust”—centers around credibility, which he suggests consists of integrity, intent, capabilities and results.  This covers territory similar to my own (with Maister and Galford) in The Trusted Advisor:  (credibility + reliability + intimacy, all divided by self-orientation), except for his inclusion of integrity.

His linking of integrity and credibility remind me of another interesting piece of work—Integrity: a Positive Model…, by Michael Jensen and Werner Erhard.  Both take an end-run around “ethics” toward a more practical approach which still yields similar results without the whiff of theology.

But while Covey is theoretically sound, his real focus is on the practical, as befits someone who ran his father’s highly successful business (as in  Seven Habits of Highly Successful People).

Most of the book, and I suspect most of his lectures and seminars, are aimed at corporate audiences—in particular, what people can do to become more trusted. He lists 13 behaviors, all of which make perfect commonsense (which is not to say they are common): listen first, talk straight, meet commitments, etc.

It goes without saying—though I’ll say it—I couldn’t agree more with him.

I think Covey’s greatest contribution, however, may lie in his forcefully advancing the simple proposition that Trust Matters.  In one of his emails promoting a webinar, he rhetorically asks, “Is Trust more important than Vision? Strategy? Systems? Structure? Skills?” and proceeds to answer in the affirmative.

Linked with some effective framing (don’t pay a trust tax, earn a trust dividend), he makes a case that business hasn’t heard often enough: trust pays off, not just in some mufty-flufty New Age calculus (though that’s true too), but as well in the conventional, traditional business language of ROI, efficiency and effectiveness.

I have some minor quibbles—his emphasis on measurement, for example—but they are not critical to his contribution.  It’s a fine piece of work that moves forward our understanding and appreciation of the critical role of trust, particularly in business.

What New Hampshire Voters Really Said

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What a kerfuffle!

The press anoints Obama in Iowa, then gets caught smirking by the re-ascendance of Queen Hillary in New Hampshire. Is the press getting its come-upance?

That’s the story if you watch John Stewart lampooning Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs and any network besides Comedy Central.

That’s also how Daniel Henninger’s Wall Street Journal article “Thomas E. Obama" sees it, invoking the flawed announcement of Dewey’s supposed defeat of Truman:

Here’s a simple explanation for what happened in New Hampshire. In the 96 hours between Thursday’s victory by Barack Obama in Iowa and Tuesday morning, enough election output poured over voters to fill the entire Truman-Dewey campaign of 1948. This thunder said: Barack Obama is the party nominee, a new era has dawned on American politics and the election is now about "change." Like Dewey, he can’t lose. New Hampshirites did what normal people do. They pushed back.

Lesson learned: In elections yet to come in the Internet Age, it will be the habit of the media to overdo it. As is their wont, the voters will undo it.

But the “voters revolt” theme has one big flaw: the polls blew only the Democratic primary—they nailed the GOP results. Did only Democrats revolt?

What about New Hampshire residents’ preferred view—their streak of stubborn independence (“we’re not gonna let a bunch of corn farmers tell us how to think”)? But that requires us to believe that all voters lied to the pollsters. Like most conspiracy theories, this one overstates humans’ ability to organize.

Let’s throw three other factors into the hopper.

One is race.

And if your nose just crinkled in a scowl at the above line, then you must go read a most thoughtful article by Shelby Steele (in Time magazine, of all places) called The Identity Card.

It deftly explains why white and black America alike are ensnared by wishes and denials about race—and how Obama is a lightning rod for all who hope we have transcended it. A good example could be seen on George Stephanopoulos’ ABC News roundtable Sunday: George introduced the race hypothesis, then instantly led the rush to distance himself from the idea—closely followed by everyone on his roundtable but Claire Shipman.

I don’t know how race may have affected the vote—I’m just suspicious of the rush to deny its relevance. Race is, simply, omnipresent in America. The wishful rush to deny it is understandable, but suspicious of itself.

The second factor is Hillary’s “crying.” Maureen Dowd, Gloria Steinem, the Republicans—everyone piled on immediately, staking out positions on gender, emotion, power, class.

And everyone’s theory probably differed a bit from your own, personal, immediate reaction. Instantly, the pundits were telling you what to think about something very personal—not just a vote, but a feeling—and how it explained you politically.

Now add the third factor—what I’ll call the Personal Heisenberg Principle. In physics, at a subatomic level, the act of measuring something can actually affect the measurement itself. At a human level—the same.

It’s one thing to tell me who everyone else is voting for. Annoying? Maybe. But it’s not particularly personal.

But mix in the personal. Throw in race and gender; tell people how they should feel about each.

Tell them publicly, statistically, with rhetorical flourish, from the anchorman’s desk, hours before going to the polls, that their innermost psyches are predictable, categorizable, and easy to segment int politically predefined categories. All the while claiming it’s about “change” and “experience.”

It’s one thing to tell me I’m going to vote like people in another state. It’s another to claim to objectively predict my innermost feelings, unclear even to myself, about some of the more complex issues in society today—like race and gender.

Which, of course, were only on display in the Democratic primary.

I know it’d irk me. I’d go and vote for—for—well, the opposite of whatever they told me I was going to vote for. Just to piss ‘em off.

When you pretend to know me, and you don’t—I don’t trust you.

Take that—all y’all. That’s what the voters were saying.

At least, I think so.

Selling in Three-Part Harmony

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I am fascinated by sales.

The sale is the point at which the personal meets the commercial. How we view the personal / commercial relationship informs how we look at business in general.

So it’s instructive to read those who write on sales. The reigning sales author of our time has to be Jeffrey Gitomer. As of this writing, on Amazon’s best-seller list of Sales and Selling, he has books at the numbers 5, 9, 13, and 17 slots.

Popularity doesn’t necessarily mean quality, nor does quality guarantee best-seller status.  But both hold true in Gitomer’s case.

Some sales people write about sales process, management and strategy. Gitomer is an unabashed throwback to the “old” sales gurus—he speaks to the individual who sells. He speaks about the intersection between the commercial and the personal.

Here’s an excerpt from his new Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching!

I’m certain you have seen or heard the information about “typing” people. Driver, amiable, creative, whatever. And then you’re told ways of manipulating what you do or say to be able to communicate with them.

Go back to the Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People, and you’ll see the two words that explain harmony: “Be yourself.”

Selling is about understanding the other person. Each person has different motives to buy based on personality and needs. Salespeople cannot give the same presentation all the time. You’ve got to adapt the presentation to meet the needs and the personality of the potential customer without compromising your standards or altering your personality to a point where you have to remember the way you acted or spoke.

I’m against systems of selling. They teach you a way, usually a manipulative way. And you gotta use that way. The problem is the probable purchaser may not want to buy that way. Which way do you sell?

Why people buy is ONE BILLION times more powerful than how to sell…

Harmony is understanding, sensing the tone and comfort level of the customer, and using your character skills and interpersonal skills to harmonize. Your job is to take the characteristics of the probable purchaser and blend them with the reason they are buying so that it motivates them to act and gives them enough confidence to buy.

THINK! about harmony in music. Your notes blend with other notes to create harmony.

Think of it the same way in sales. Think of it the same way in business.

If Gitomer is in your town (and he will be), treat yourself to a ticket to one of his seminars.  He’s a showman.  His schtick is a working-class, red Staples-type sweatshirt gruff cigar-chomping straight talking regular guy. The last guy to get all philosophical on you. But he does get philosophical on you; he just does it in the vernacular.  (He is a regular guy—and regular like a fox).

Gitomer’s view is clear. Business is personal. It is not just about systems and forces and corporate battles.  It necessarily involves people relating to people—as full people, not just as cogitating neurons.

And his metaphor is powerful. Business as music. In particular, the harmonic element of music; the element that speaks to collaboration. Business in his view is inherently about collaboration, interaction—not a series of parallel solos.

Think of business as commerce—a relationship that is either competitive or collaborative.

It’s up to the seller, more than anyone else, to choose which it shall be.

January Carnival of Trust is Up

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carnival of trust image

The January Carnival of Trust is up.

This month, I’m proud to announce it is hosted by Ford Harding, of Harding and Company.

The Carnival of Trust is a monthly blog carnival which focuses on the role of trust in business and other relationships. Each month, the host reviews submissions and selects the Top 10 submissions, as well as offering some commentary.

Ford is a great host for this carnival; a world expert on selling professional services, he has written several books, as well as having published in Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal. Ford has a distinctive, powerful and very practical approach to managing professional services firms, and particularly to the business development role. He brings a clear perspective to the Carnival.

The Carnival looks at the last month’s blog postings on the subject of trust in four broad arenas: trust in Sales and Marketing, in Leadership and Management, in Strategy, Economics and Politics, and finally in Advising and Influencing.

It’s a top 10 list: edited and commented on by someone with a clear point of view and discerning judgment, so you can get the most insight out of your valuable time. This month, that someone is Ford Harding.

Click on over to the Carnival for a read; and many thanks to Ford for hosting.
——————————————-
You can also read past carnivals at:

Carnival of Trust #7 was hosted by John Crickett at Business Opportunities and Ideas

Carnival of Trust #6 was hosted at Trust Matters;

Steve Cranford at Whisper hosted Carnival of Trust #5;

David Maister at Passion, People and Principles hosted Carnival of Trust #4;

the anonymous but trusted Editor of Blawg Review hosted Carnival of Trust #3;

Carnival of Trust #1 and Carnival of Trust #2 started off here at Trust Matters.

Employee Engagement, Fog Sculpting, and Measuring Love

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Do you believe the following statement?

High levels of employee engagement keenly correlate to individual, group and corporate performance in areas such as retention, turnover, productivity, customer service and loyalty.

It’s from Employee Engagement:What Exactly is It? by Patricia Soldati.

How about this following statement?

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of an engaged workforce on a company’s bottom line.

That one is Julie Gebauer (whom I know) of Towers Perrin at The Workforce Disengagement Problem.  

I believe both statements. I believe them a lot, in fact. (And not just because Julie Gebauer says so—though that helps!).

Trouble is—what do you do with it?

“Employee engagement” is one of those concepts that straddle a thin line: how to be complex enough to be true—and yet simple enough to be practical?

• Over-stress explanation, and you risk fog-sculpting—creating beautiful conceptual landscapes that are unactionable;
• Over-stress actionability, and you risk measuring love—mechanizing the things that make humanity human.

Similar issues arise with concepts like loyalty, employee satisfaction, organizational commitment, or identifying customer needs.

There are four risks here.

The first two risks are definitions, and identifying drivers. Soldati says:

In 2006, The Conference Board published "Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications"…twelve major studies on employee engagement had been published over the prior four years by top research firms such as Gallup, Towers Perrin, Blessing White, the Corporate Leadership Council and others.  Each of the studies used different definitions and, collectively, came up with 26 key drivers of engagement.

Four of the studies agreed on eight of the 26 drivers.  All studies agreed that the strongest driver is the relationship with one’s manager.

Believe it?  I do.  No problem believing that one at all.  But it’s dangerously close to the fog-sculpting end of things, up there with good parenting, moral values and integrity.

The third risk is causality. For example: it is statistically proven that shorter people have lower IQ scores.

Don’t believe it? Compare 7-year olds’ test scores with 20-somethings’ performance on the same test.  See? Height is clearly correlated with IQ.

Correlation is not causality. David Hume (who outranks even Julie Gebauer), famously showed it’s impossible to prove causality.

The search for causality, in service to managerial actions and simplicity, forces us down the path of measuring love—which, like an emotional Heisenberg Principle, can destroy the thing being measured if overdone.

Which leads to the fourth risk—in today’s business environment, the biggest of all: measurement-driven behavioralism.

“Employee engagement” is the latest star in the umpteenth remake of a movie we’ve seen too often: define drivers, measure them, benchmark the measures, attach rewards, and link pay to performance against the metrics.

This leads managers to ask HR to causally link “engagement” to shareholder value, define indicators for the links, and provide incentive plans to drive the whole Rube Goldberg scheme.  By Tuesday, please.

I suspect the HR community is even more at fault for encouraging this kind of thinking.

Of the two sins, I’d rather be subjected to fog-sculpting. At least it fires the imagination.

By contrast, measuring love is inherently dehumanizing.

Turning “engagement” into an engineering exercise is—I believe—a great recipe for disengagement.

Scott Flander takes a good look at all this in “Terms of Engagement” in Human Resource Executive Online.  He quotes Ian Ziskin, chief HR officer at Northrup Grumman:

I’ve found over time that the single biggest thing to focus on is not the actual scores or the response rates — that’s a means to an end. The end is, do you really understand what the issues are in your business, and what are the actions you’re taking to improve them?

I don’t know Ziskin, but he sounds a thoughtful exec; he knows how to sculpt fog, and how to measure love.  And he artfully chooses a Middle Way.