Creating a Culture of Trust As A Leader
We’ve all been there. Told one thing, while observing another. Sometimes this is unintentional, the natural result of imperfect people in an imperfect institution, doing the best they know how to do right by their people and help their organizations to succeed. However, other times, leaders and the organizations they serve seem to inexplicably and purposefully put in place policies, practices and procedures that reinforce an unhealthy culture of distrust across the organization. What can and should leaders do to better foster and sustain both their institution and institutional trust within their teams and across their organizations?
What exactly is trust and why is it so important to organizations and their leaders? Put simply, “Trust is the belief or confidence that one party has in the reliability, integrity and honesty of another party. It is the expectation that the faith one places in someone else will be honored.” We all know that trust is essential to effective and successful leadership, and while developing trust is not rocket science, developing a reputation of honesty, integrity and reliability can be quite difficult.
The Formation Of Institutional Trust
Another recent article explained trust this way: “Trust, to my mind, is the foundation of all successful interpersonal relationships, both personal and in the workplace. Trust is the confidence or belief a person feels toward a particular person or group and so trust is, therefore, one of the primary forces that enables people to gel and truly work effectively together.” If we hope to build and sustain successful teams and a competitive organization, we need these strong interpersonal trust-based relationships, which will lead to stronger collaborations and a more effective workforce.
Additionally, “Trusted leaders get many rewards such as the ability to retain talented people, more engaged employees, a more positive ‘performance development’ driven work culture rather than the more traditional command control culture and most importantly improved business results.” If we want to attract and retain the best people in our organization and develop and sustain a healthy organizational culture to drive results, then leaders need to proactively engage their employees and exhibit their trust-based capabilities to deliver on an authentic people focus.
In one of the seminal scholarly works on trust, “Not So Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” Denise Rousseau and colleagues offer the following definition for trust: “Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behaviors of another.” Further, they state that, “Risk taking buttresses a sense of trust when the expected behavior materializes,” while “the nature of trust changes as interdependence increases.”
Why Individuals Trust Institutions And Their Leaders
Just like individuals need to develop trust in order to sustain productive and meaningful relationships, so too must institutions and organizations. I’ve previously written on the topic of trust formation: “In a nut-shell, institutional trust is just like it sounds — trust within an institution — and means that institutions (in this case a particular organization) either promote or constrain micro-level interpersonal and personal trust relations through macro-level organizational processes. Often one can look specifically at a given organization’s characteristics and processes (programs, policies, procedures, hierarchy, etc.) and denote some of the impact that these characteristics and processes will have on the trust formation and maintenance of individuals within that organization.”
In other words, institutional trust either works to enhance and build or undermine and diminish the development and maintenance of sustainable interpersonal trust within organizations. Without the healthy trust-promoting mechanisms of institutional trust, interpersonal relational trust will be inhibited, and even perhaps undermined, leaving a leader with little in their arsenal to be effective in their role.
Trust has been thoroughly examined across academic disciplines (e.g., psychology, organizational behavior, political science, sociology, sociology, etc.) and researchers have found that the foundational mechanisms of institutional trust formation and maintenance include:
* Knowledge of the history of the institution (including background/emergence of the institution, past interactions with society and institutional uniformity)
* Personal history and overall knowledge of the institution (including personal upbringing, the establishment of personal values, beliefs and social norms and social interactions with individuals/small groups within the institution)
* Institution-based trust facilitating mechanisms/procedures (including goodwill gestures to the surrounding community/society, consistent communication/openness/transparency and private enforcement/regulation systems)
Understanding the how and why behind institutional trust formation and maintenance can help leaders to leverage the strong histories of their organization and its people while also enhancing and increasing their own leader-based trust as they openly acknowledge and work to address the more difficult and unhealthy aspects of the organization, better aligning organizational policies, practices and procedures with its stated values and mission.
We develop our leadership trust capabilities by showing our vulnerability and communicating and displaying our trust to those on our team and across our organization. Furthermore, we develop trust by practicing personal openness and transparency while encouraging greater institutional openness and transparency. We destroy trust and our own credibility and reputation when we fail to do what we say we will do and when we fail to take ownership of our mistakes. Nobody expects perfection from leaders or the institution as a whole, but they do expect an honest and consistent effort. When this occurs, we develop goodwill in our team and throughout the organization, which will allow us to better weather the storms and sustain the institutional and interpersonal trust necessary for the organization to thrive.
Originally published at https://www.forbes.com.
