By Ryan Quinn
A few years ago I met the president of one of the major business groups of a Fortune 500 company. Her business and her company faced a number of challenges, such as competition between businesses for the same customers, a lack of communication, and low employee engagement. As I spoke with her, I proposed a number of hypotheses about what might be causing these problems. After considering many options, however, she was convinced that all of them could be traced to one source: a lack of trust throughout the organization.
(This entry focuses on building trust within an organization. I should also mention, however, a project that is happening across the hall from me at the Darden Graduate School of Business, in the Business Roundtable’s Institute for Corporate Ethics. They have launched a “Project on Public Trust in Business” to explore what companies should do about the current crisis in lost trust by business as an institution. Their report on the matter can be found here.)
Challenges in Building Trust
Research on trust in organizations would suggest that there is a good possibility that the claim of the business unit president I spoke to was right. [1] Trust may not be organizational paradise, but it can bring significant benefits to an organization, particularly if it is managed well. In the company where this business president worked, it was unlikely that they could move from competition to cooperation to strategic integration, improve communication, or improve engagement without trust.
Improving trust in an organization is no easy task. For example, not long after our initial discussion, I did some training on trust with many of the managers in the business of the business president that I mentioned above. At the beginning of the session, I asked managers to rate trust in the business, trust in their managers, and other categories of trust as well. Most of these managers rated the trust in their business as being quite high. Then, I had these managers participate in a role play that was designed to test their propensity to trust and be trustworthy. To my delight, the business president and about nine other managers performed the role play in a trusting and trustworthy way. To my dismay, the other managers–about 190 of them–did not. They were either unaware of their own lack of trust, or unwilling to admit it.
A Point of Contrast
Contrast this with another experience I had recently. I met with the top management team of an organization to discuss whether their organization might need a cultural intervention. I asked them to describe for me what they think their ideal culture would be like. One answer was that their organization’s culture would be high on trust.
I asked these leaders what a high-trust organization might look like. One member of the team then told me a story. He said that the team had recently completed a major organizational re-design. Early in the process, he visited one of their sites. The employees there were anxious about the re-design and worried about their jobs. They peppered him with questions. He answered their questions carefully and thoroughly. Then he told them about how two other members of the top management team had carefully considered these issues and had included them in the re-design plan. As soon as he mentioned the names of these two members of the top management teams, the anxiety level in the room decreased. The employees accepted the decisions and moved forward with the change. As Roger Mayer and Mark Gavin found in some of their research [2] on trust, when employees trust their leaders, they can focus better on their work, and both their job performance and their extra-role behaviors improve.
When I heard this story, I told the management team how impressed I was. The two other members of the team were humble about the story, though, and said that although they had earned the trust of a good subset of their employees, there were others whose trust they still needed to earn, and that what they really wanted was not just to earn trust, but to develop a culture of trust and trustworthiness.
Why Trust is Hard to Develop
Trust can be difficult to cultivate in a single relationship, let alone throughout an organizational culture for at least two reasons. First, trust is difficult to establish because it involves risk. Trust, after all, is “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” [3] Whenever we trust others, we make ourselves vulnerable to them. We need to be wise and cautious in assuming such vulnerability. But if we avoid assuming this vulnerability because it is risky, then we will never create trusting relationships and trusting cultures.
A second reason why trusting relationships and trusting cultures are hard to create is because these relationships and cultures require us, as leaders, to be trustworthy. Trustworthiness is more than just keeping one’s word. For others to see us as trustworthy they have to see us as competent and benevolent as well as honest. [4] In modern organizations, with all of their complexity and change, creating and maintaining competence, benevolence, integrity, and others’ perceptions of these attributes is no easy task.
Cultivating Trust
How, then, can leaders build trusting relationships and trusting cultures? I would suggest three sets of activities, which leaders need to engage in again and again and again:
- See trust as an end in and of itself. It is easy to see trust as a means to an end, because trust helps us to achieve other things we want, like performance, speed, integration, communication, and engagement. What is harder to see is that we will only achieve the ends that trust leads us to if we treat trust as an end in and of itself. We must remind ourselves again and again that trust is just as important as the other results that we want, setting goals and taking action to achieve trust.
- Learn where you are not trusting or trustworthy. There are so many ways in which we can become untrusting and untrustworthy without even realizing it in the complex, changing organizations we participate in. And even though we–like the managers in the Fortune 500 company I was training–may not notice, others do (especially anyone who may be below us in a hierarchy). So if you make trust a goal–a priority–in your leadership, then you would do well to ask others to point out to you the ways in which you may be falling short. If you make it safe for them to tell you, and you act constructively on their feedback when they give it to you, you may be shocked to discover the impact this has on relationships and cultures.
- Take wise risks. If you do not, there will be no trust, and none of its benefits.
A Closing Example
A colleague of mine once shared a powerful example of risk-taking, trust, and their benefits. His company had been acquired by another company, and his unit was redundant with one of the units in the other company. This meant that there would probably be downsizing, and because his unit was the acquired one, his people would be likely to go. While he understood the business case for this, he also knew that his unit had a unique and potent strategy, and it would be a shame to lose the opportunities their strategy could provide. As a result, he made an appointment to go talk to the leader of the redundant unit in the acquiring company.
When my colleague met with the leader of the other unit, he took a cautious risk: he told the other leader a little bit of his unit’s strategy. This was a risk because any information he shared could be stolen by the other leader and used against him. The other leader, though, saw what my colleague was trying to do, and respected him for it. He also took a risk, and shared some information about his unit with my colleague.
With each risk that each of these men took, they trusted each other more, and became more willing to take more risks. As they took more risks, they shared more information. And as they learned more information, they came up with ideas about how to work together. Pretty soon, they had developed a joint strategy for growing their respective units in a way that was complementary rather than competitive. Soon, the two units were growing in mutually beneficial ways. As a result, when the company executives re-structured the organization, they performed downsizing and cost cutting in almost every unit of the organization except in my colleague’s and his counterpart’s units.
Conclusion
Not all stories will unfold as well as my colleague’s did. Sometimes people will take advantage of our vulnerability. Sometimes trust and trustworthiness take a long time to cultivate–especially when there is a history of distrust. For those who put the effort in and make trust a priority, though, they often wonder why they put it off for so long, even if there are bumps in the road along the way.
[1] See, for example, studies such as Donnellon, A. 1996. Team Talk. Boston: Harvard Business School Press; Gulati, R., & Westphal, J. D. 1999. Cooperative or Controlling? The Effects of CEO-board Relations and the Content of Interlocks on the Formation of Joint Ventures. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(3): 473-506; Jones, G. R., & George, J. M. 1998. The experience and evolution of trust: Implications for cooperation and teamwork. Academy of Management Review, 23(3): 531-546.
[2] Mayer, R. C. and Gavin, M. B. (2005). Trust in Management and Performance: Who Minds the Shop While the Employees Watch the Boss? Academy of Management Journal, 48(5): 874-888.
[3] Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., & Camerer, C. 1998. Not So Different After All: A Cross-Disciplinary View of Trust. Academy of Management Review, 23(3): 393-404.
[4] Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. 1995. An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20: 709-734.