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Story Time: It’s Trust, Therefore It’s Personal

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Our Story Time series brings you real, personal examples from business life that shed light on ways to lead with trust. Our last story illustrated how one conversation changed everything. Today’s selection highlights  the value of making a personal connection.

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 selling to the C-suite. It vividly demonstrates the value of paying attention to more than just the task-at-hand, and taking the risk to put personal before business.

From the Front Lines: Taking a Chance on Connection

Gary Celli tells a story of the business value of building trust quickly with a C-level client.

“I was working in California for a multi-national high-tech company. I was a project manager at the time, and the project I was leading was rife with difficulties—nothing atypical, just the usual stuff. We were also trying to position additional work with the customer.

“One day, the CIO asked specifically to meet with me. Until that point I had been dealing with his directors, so he and I hadn’t spent any time together beyond a brief interaction at the big project kickoff meeting. You can imagine I was a little on edge about the meeting.

“The first thing I noticed when I arrived at his office was what a mess it was. There were papers all over the place. One chair was so stacked with stuff it wasn’t usable. I glanced around and noticed a copy of the Scranton Journal on the floor—the magazine for my alma mater, the University of Scranton, a small Jesuit university in Pennsylvania. I looked around for a diploma on the wall, but didn’t see anything. So I asked about the magazine.

“It turns out that we were both graduates, now living nearly 3,000 miles away in California. Talking about that really helped break the ice and took the edge off. We spent 30 minutes reminiscing about the school, the campus, the local hang-out bar that all the kids went to. Then we spent about 15 minutes talking about project issues.

“It was a very successful meeting. The bond we had established made it possible for me to glean more information from him and he seemed very open to hearing my perspectives on the project. We got to the heart of the matter in no time. My company also got the follow-on work, and the CIO was a loyal client for years to come.”

—Gary Celli

What’s your next opportunity to make it personal?

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Read more stories about trust:

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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].

Manufacturing in China: Back to the Future?

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I talked to Joe in San Francisco recently. Joe is 96, living with his daughter and son-in-law Jean and Fred. He talked about what happened when he was 18 years old, and wondered why it couldn’t happen now.

Good question, as you’ll see.

The Civilian Conservation Corps

Roosevelt was elected in November of 1932. In those days, inauguration didn’t happen until March – March 4, 1933. In his speech that day, he outlined his New Deal.

17 days later, he proposed the massive Emergency Conservation Work act, which would put a quarter of a million Americans to work. He sent the bill to Congress the same day.

10 days later, on March 31st, Congress approved the bill – by voice vote. Roosevelt signed it the same day, and issued an executive order setting up the Civilian Conservation Corps.

By the end of June – just over three months since inauguration – 1500 camps had been created, employing over 300,000 people building and rebuilding infrastructure like parks, roads and conservation programs. The program lasted for 8 years, shutting down in 1942.

“The pay was $30 a month,” Joe said, “and you had to send $25 of that back home to your family.”

“So, what was $30 worth back then?” I asked.

“Oh quite a bit,” said Joe. “I wooed my wife on that money. Saturdays we’d go to the movies – a dime for the two of us. And I’d buy us both coffee, and her a piece of pie. That was a nickel. And she’d share the pie with me. We got married, and stayed married for 64 years.”

“I don’t really understand,” says Joe, “why Obama can’t do the same thing now?”

Back to the Future

Fast-forward to January 22, 2012. The New York Times started an explosive series with an article called “The iEconomy: How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work.” It’s an inside look at FoxConn City and the Chinese manufacturing nexus in Shenzhen – and why American manufacturing is completely incapable of competing against it.

“Basically slave labor camps,” shouted one US headline. FoxConn employs over 200,000 workers, a quarter of whom live in dorms, often working up to six days per week, and “many workers earning less than $17 per day.”

But notice:

  • FoxConn’s $17 per day is about $350 per month.
  • In today’s dollars, Joe’s $30/month would be worth $501.94/month.  Triple that for room, board and other expenses (paid by the CCC), and you’d be somewhere around today’s US poverty line.
  • Assuming room and board are far less in China, these numbers are not orders of magnitude apart.

I’m not an economist. I don’t even play one on TV. But this much I can say: the distance between China today and the US just a few years ago is not nearly as great as we make it out to be.

Indeed, David Pogue, the NYTimes’ technology editor, writing about an ABC Nightline program, said, “It didn’t look like a sweatshop, frankly.” And ABC itself said, “…when I asked, ‘What would you change?,’ we heard the kind of complaints you might hear in any factory anywhere.”

Joe believes he was always a free American, never a slave. Indeed, to the American ear, his voice is an authentic one, drenched in traditional American hard-working virtues.

What a difference a few decades make in our perceptions. How easy it is to believe that the Chinese and we inhabit such different worlds.

Joe’s Question

“Why can’t we do the same thing now?” asks Joe.

Three reasons I can think of:

1. A politically significant group of Americans have come to believe that a road built as a government job is “worth” less than a road built as a private sector job. So in the name of “cutting government” we are cutting jobs in the face of a recession, adding a half-million government workers to the unemployment rolls. This is already not ending well.

2. Today’s Americans look at Joe’s CCC experience and see it as a treasured part of our history – but not relevant to today. In today’s terms, they look at a program like that and see FoxConn, not the life-forming experience that Joe had. And they don’t want any part of it.

Fair enough: but in a global market, global pay disparities will exist, and jobs, like water, will seek out the lowest level.

3. Roosevelt created 300,000 jobs in less than three months. The nation has lost its ability to move at anything remotely near that speed. There are many reasons for this, but a failure of trust is one of them.

Of all the critiques posed by the less-government crowd, the one that rings most economically relevant is the substitution of process and procedures for trust and collaboration.

The absence of trust is itself a massive economic anchor dragging us down; the belief that our system is consistently ‘better’ is an expensive delusion.

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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].

Trust Tip Video: Truth is More Than Not Lying

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We all think lying is bad. Pretty much, mostly, usually. We think of lying as saying something that is not true. But not saying something that is true can get us in even more trouble.

We underestimate the power of truth-telling.

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

For more on the subject of truth-telling, lies and untold truths, you might enjoy reading Truth, Lies and Unicorns.

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

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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].

Trust Tip Video: Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Taken

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We all spend an awful lot of time, money and effort trying to convince others of our attributes. We want them to see us as we imagine that we want to be seen.

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

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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].

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 5 of 5

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If your customers and clients tell you they don’t trust you, things have gotten bad. But you could have seen it coming. There were many early-warning signs of low trust in your organization.

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

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.

 

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 4 of 5

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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:

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].

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 3 of 5

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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.

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 2 of 5

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It’s not impossible to find a high-trust team in a low-trust organization – we’ve seen a few – but not too many. For the most part, low-trust organizations are made up of low-trust teams.

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

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.

 

Story Time: How One Conversation Changed Everything

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Our Story Time series brings you real, personal examples from business life that shed light on specific ways to lead with trust. Our last story told a tale of risky business. Today’s anecdote zeroes in on the importance of being willing to interrupt the status quo.

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

Sarah Agan tells us about the conversation that changed everything with her client, John.

“I had just joined a new consulting firm and was asked to take over as the engagement manager for a project that I soon learned was in dire straits. My client John was happy—he was responsible for a high-priority government-wide initiative with the potential to catapult his career, he had a high-end strategy firm by his side (that was us), and he was getting everything he thought he wanted—a well-documented plan identifying key investments required to guard against terrorist attacks.

“The problem was this: my team was very unhappy. Imagine a group of super-bright, creative, energized young graduates, well-trained in strategy development and execution, assigned to a high-visibility project, sitting in a windowless conference room formatting Excel spreadsheets. It was a troubled project that everyone in my firm had heard about and no one wanted to work on.

“While it was tempting to step in and make a dramatic move, I bided my time. I focused first on developing my relationship with John, understanding his interests and priorities. In several of our initial meetings he made reference to our team as his ‘administrative support.’ At first, I just filed it away. He was happy with the arrangement. He had no idea what he could or should expect from us.

“I also made a point to find out more about how our company had ended up in this predicament. We had fallen into the trap of being seduced by a lucrative long-term contract, doing whatever it took to keep the funding coming.

“One day when John referred to us again as his ‘administrative support,’ I decided it was time to speak up.

“I don’t recall being particularly nervous at the time. I just spoke from the heart: ‘John, this is at least the third time I’ve heard you refer to us as your administrative support. If that’s what you truly feel you need, let us help you find someone who does this as a core competency at a fraction of what you are paying us. If you’re interested in doing things more strategically, I’d love to have that conversation.’

“From that moment, everything shifted. The nature of all our conversations changed. The team began to bring ideas to the table, like helping John host a national workshop—with representatives from across the government, academia, and private industry—so that John could engage all his stakeholders in a way that they would have some ownership for the nationwide plan. It was an extraordinary workshop John’s successor is still talking about years later.

“Now we were positioned to deliver the kind of value we were truly capable of. The project that no one wanted to be on became a project people wanted to be part of.

“The biggest lesson for me in all of this was the importance of being willing to interrupt the status quo and say what had been left unsaid for too long in order to focus on what really mattered to John. Looking back, it was a pretty risky move. It was also the right one. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

—Sarah Agan

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

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Read more stories about trust:

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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].

 

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 1 of 5

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Low-trust organizations are petri dishes for low growth, profitability, and ultimately survival. Yet the signals are easy to ignore.

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.