What To Do If You Are One Of The Leaders That 2/3 Of Employees Don't Trust

Chief Learning Officer magazine recently highlighted a key finding from a CIPD Employee Outlook survey of more than 2,000 employees in the UK. In an article entitled Amid Corporate Scandals, Trust and Engagement Decline, they led with, what on the face of it, seems like an extraordinary statistic - that only 36% of workers trust their senior leaders.

What makes this more extraordinary is when you consider the true impact of this. For example, we recently asked a senior group of over 300 participants to consider a high trust and a low trust working relationship they are involved with and to compare how these feel, the kind of communication that characterises both and the results they achieve from either one. We then asked them to quantify whether the high trust relationship provides no difference in the results, a small difference, a big difference or a huge difference, and the average response was >40% saying 'big difference' and >45% saying 'huge difference'. If you then multiply this performance gap across the 64% of employees in low trust relationships with their leaders, you get a sense of what could be gained by increasing these levels of trust.

Having created this awareness, and desire to build trust levels, the next stage challenges we typically observe are that

• people and organisations often talk about trust as if everyone knows what it means, but rarely provide a good definition so that everyone can work from the same point of reference and so that leaders can be effective in their communication and execution on the topic. 
• a leaders instinct is often to look first to the systems and processes they can adjust in order to impact trust levels, rather than to their own behaviours and the behaviours of those around them, which are often at the real heart of the issue

In response to these challenges FranklinCovey approach starts by providing a simple, yet complete definition of what trust is and then builds on this by providing insights and strategies for how individuals can build levels of trust from the inside out, firstly by focusing on their own trustworthiness and then by how they extend trust to the relationships around them.