Trust is Critical to Your Organization's Longevity
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Mark Norman believes trust is both simple and intimate. It is not established by grand schemes or fancy programs. It is built one day and one discussion at a time. It is internally fragile and can be destroyed by a single action that does not resonate. Yet it is also strong and enduring and once established can withstand major external attacks. Listen to Mark explain the secret to building trust in employees.
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Trust is critical to building loyalty, engagement, enthusiasm and creativity. – Mark Norman, SEEC leadership expert.
Truth and honesty are vital to a well functioning company. Yet we continue to have secrecy, sugar coating, broken promises and misleading statements emanating from the top levels of some of our largest corporations on almost a daily basis.
Why is this so?
The question really goes back to why do we follow a leader?
Over and over we see politicians and business leaders promise what they cannot be sure they can deliver.
It has become the norm for companies to hide what their real plans are.
Employee feedback is often sugar coated or constrained by legal considerations and a bell curve intended to prevent overly complimentary evaluations
How many times have you known that someone is about to be fired and they have not been given the opportunity to see it coming? How many times have you heard of companies about to go through massive layoffs and the plans are shrouded in secrecy?
In western civilizations we put so much emphasis on winning that we applaud secrecy. We consider business in terms of the art of war. People in power consciously or subconsciously know that, if they make the right promises, people will continue to listen to them and be drawn to them. As long as you make promises that match people's expectations and desires they will be drawn to you. As long as they believe you are the route to prosperity, inclusion and happiness they will follow.
Soft promises to employees are easily made and very often implied with not enough time really given to whether the promise can be fulfilled or enough disclosure on the conditions that are needed to fulfill the promise.
Management and unions are rarely open and honest in their negotiations. To do so is considered naïve and reckless. Yet they must work together to fulfill the company's vision and mission.
Corporations rarely disclose their real five-year game plan beyond the inner circle.
Teams within the same company hold strategic conversation about what can and can't be shared with another team.
Anna Bernasek, a Princeton scholar and writer for Time Magazine, Fortune, The New York Times and the Sydney Herald, explains in her book The Economics of Integrity that we will never truly establish integrity as a cornerstone of business until we can demonstrate;
- How critical it is to profit and longevity
- How vital it is our society's economic well being
- That the real value of integrity comes from knowing how to create more integrity
- How to design integrity systems that are self-reinforcing wealth creating machines
Only when we can do this can we maximize the return on the world's raw intelligence and its full potential to resolve the challenges we face.
Bernasek believes integrity and trust create value. Through economic examples she delves into how systems based on disclosure, norms, and accountability can work to tremendous advantage in virtually any endeavor.
She does not believe you can separate trust from truth. Truth, disclosure and accountability are the cornerstones of integrity.