Are we witnessing the death of trust?
Over the last five years, PHQ has coached upwards of 15 senior leadership teams in a variety of team coaching/development programs. Alongside this we continue to coach many executives in individual coaching engagements.
In looking at the key challenges these clients routinely face and which emerge during our work with them, Trust is always a key factor: where trust is tepid, absent or worse, where it’s been broken.
For a team at any level, working across the organisation and outside it with various partners for example, lack of trust is particularly problematic, due to its negative effect on efficiency, getting results and creating value for customers, staff and other stakeholders.
When trust isn’t high in a team this is what we notice shows up:
[Some] team members won’t feel it’s safe to speak up – so they don’t. Those people feel unheard, as well as unsafe, which manifests in different ways. The meeting is then absorbed by those that do feel safe, and that is often the same people;
Calculated risks, innovation and decisions aren’t encouraged, nor made;
Team performance and the creation of stakeholder value is impacted;
Efficiency is absent or minimal – time-wasting is the order of the day, evidenced by a myriad meetings, with people going round and round on the same issues for weeks and sometimes [in our experience] months or even years!
This then reduces diverse thinking which is needed to answer the ‘wicked problems’ teams and organisations are charged with solving. This in turn, impacts the team’s overall effectiveness.
It makes for sobering reading, doesn’t it? Perhaps you will have experienced something like this yourself.
The big issue with lack of Trust:
The problem with lack of trust in team and group settings is that it can have far-reaching consequences. And from our experience, what we know for sure is that in the end, stakeholders down the line are impacted – trust in the brand of the team/organisation and what it stands for loses all credibility – people move away, either physically or emotionally.
On a macro scale, what does that look like? Consider Trust through the lens of current global leadership, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Who can you/who do you trust - who can you count on?
At an institutional level – who do we trust? The government, banks, schools, universities, hospitals?
At a organisational level, we see the evidence very early on when we conduct a Discovery at the beginning of a team engagement – these are interviews or online surveys conducted with a team’s nominated stakeholders and the questions asked are co-created with the team.
Often it’s the first time these people – [so nominated due to their importance to the team /organisation’s success] have been asked for their feedback on what the team needs to do more of/less of to better serve them.
Our job as Team Coaches is then to create the space for the team to discuss the data together, thereby, sharing their individual concerns regarding trust, relationships and whatever else they feel needs to happen to lift their brand, performance and the perceived value from stakeholders [Note: the team leader is in these discussions as part of the team].
That in itself, can be the first step to developing trust.
In the past we’ve shared models of Trust [Stephen Covey’s The Speed of Trust] to help the team anchor its understanding; we’ve run vulnerability-based exercises in session from [Patrick] Lencioni and in-session peer reviews activities. These experiences help team members start to express themselves to each other, as to what’s working / not working for them as a team.
However, these activities won’t / can’t embed trust ongoing. Neither are they intended to. Building and re-building trust requires a great deal from people and organisations– just as in families, trust can be fleeting - there one minute, gone the next. You only need to look at major institutions and the reduced consumer confidence in the press, for evidence of that. Further, interventions to build trust within teams and moreover, organisations, are neither quick nor easy to implement.
Of course, not all teams experience this inertia – and if they do, there may well be other contributing factors – but if you’re still interested in how trust can be built to positively impact team performance and value creation, read on.
Last week, a member of the PHQ team came across a podcast on the ABC – This Working Life. The content being discussed on Trust has been drawn from recent and past research and case studies looking at how organisations build, maintain and repair trust - including case studies of organisations recovering from significant trust failures.
Some of the research has been done in Australia as well as globally.
All of it was pulled together late 2019 by QLD University, headed by Professor Nicole Gillespie, and backed by KPMG. The result is a practical guide called Trustworthy by design for those organisations who are serious about building deeper trust within their organisations to better serve stakeholders.
It’s fantastic – quality data, and practical steps. But they stress, it is only for those who are serious about building trust in their organisations, and it starts with the Board.
The report defines Trust as:
the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party, based on positive expectations of the intentions
or behaviour of that party
They cite three characteristics of a trustworthy organisation:
ABILITY “I CAN RELY ON YOU TO BE COMPETENT”
The collective knowledge, skills and competencies that enable an organisation to function reliably and effectively to deliver its products/services and meet its goals and responsibilities. Ability is specific to the domain of Trust.
HUMANITY “I BELIEVE YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR [OUR] STAKEHOLDERS’’
Exercising benevolence and a duty of care to those affected by the organisations operations, products and services – having a positive orientation towards stakeholders that goes beyond profit motive.
INTEGRITY: “I TRUST YOU WILL DO THE RIGHT THING”
Consistent adherence to commonly accepted ethical principles and moral values such as honesty, fairness, promise fulfilment, responsibility for one’s actions.
Their research indicates that if any one of the above is missing, it undermines perceptions of trustworthiness.
They purport that businesses cannot innovate or grow without trust. That trust is crucial to organisational agility, transformation and resilience.
They argue that that if an organisation is truly serious about embedding trust throughout, it’ll take a long term, overarching view and review and embed processes for identifying, understanding and prioritising issues that affect stakeholder trust.
They cite Recruitment/Selection, Onboarding, Remuneration [a key one], Performance Development and ongoing Feedback as some of these.
There is much for CEO’s, Boards and Executive teams to gain from this research. It aligns with our view that executive teams and boards must be involved and take a long-term view: Future – Back and Outside – In.
We are sharing it with you our clients past, present and future, who also see the importance of trust to the continued success of your businesses.
We will also be using it in our work with teams. See you there!
As always we want to hear your thoughts and opinions.
Do you believe we are witnessing the death of trust at a global, national, institutional, and or business level? What else do you think we can/should do about it?
