What Trust is – And What It Is Not

Chief Learning Officer recently published an article entitled How To Regain Employee Trust, highlighting survey results from Maritz Research that indicates as few as 10% of employees trust managers to make the right decision in times of uncertainty.

For organisations where this level of mis-trust is present it can hugely debilitating and a real barrier to maintaining, never mind improving performance, in a challenging environment. Its unfortunate then, that in addressing this important topic, the first sentence of the CLO article conflates 2 different ideas when it asserts that "Cultivating an environment if trust and caring may sound fluffy, but it can actually lead to greater engagement and performance".

3 things are striking about this

1. The first is the idea of defining a trusting environment as a caring environment. This reflects an issue we observe in many clients we work with, namely that they don't have an effective definition for what trust is, and what it is not. The definition FranklinCovey provides is that trust is a confidence people have in you or your organisation based on their perception of your character and your competence, and our experience is that when people think of trust in this way it can create the foundation for effective communication, and execution of, a trust based strategy 
2. The second is positioning that trust is a potentially 'fluffy' topic, when in our experience it is exactly the opposite. In addition to providing a definition which is based on a combination of character and competence we also work on the mindset of people so that they don't just think of 'trust' but they think of the 'Speed of Trust'. By drawing on their own experiences of high and low trust relationships, this idea resonates with people at all levels in a business (from Executive to Front Line) and creates a real motivation to establish a culture of trust as the foundation of higher organisational performance
3. The third is the comment that trust 'can actually lead to greater engagement and performance', as if this should be a surprise. In fact, when we engage groups on this topic, the idea that higher levels of trust can be an accelerator on results achieved seems completely natural.

Ultimately, having established its importance in people's minds, the most important thing is not leaving the development of higher levels of trust to chance. In this sense, FranklinCovey's approach is highly practical in that it provides a route map across '5 waves of trust', which helps businesses build (and measure) trust at a personal, team, organisational, market and societal level.