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Gyan Gurus - Leadership

Leadership – Developing and sustaining Trust  (View Comments)

Vibhuti Jha is the managing director of International Business for the Human Potential Project. He brings a vast amount of experience in the financial sector and rounds out the broad level of competence on the HP2 management team.

Posted On Friday, November 13, 2009 at 12:31:31 PM

Last week, we talked about Commitment Based Management (CBM) with a declaration that today, managements ought to incorporate this culture in all its practices. Let us evaluate this choice with reference to two newspaper reports that I read recently. One said that in terms of “ease of doing business” India ranked well below and was behind Swaziland! The second talked about the high levels of stress that the current Indian CEO’s were experiencing due to tough work culture being imposed on them leading to undue stress and even death! Let us see how CBM can eliminate these threats altogether.

A commitment-based culture requires high levels of trust since it demands extensive collaboration and coordination as well as decentralised decision making in daily practice. This can be achieved by developing mood and practices for TRUST among the teams and the team members that one works with. Contrary to current common sense, trust does not live in the world of feelings but instead is an assessment of another person’s sincerity, competence and reliability. Competence and reliability can be fairly simple to assess if we know a person’s training, expertise and past performance. The important aspect of working with competence and reliability is to put people on projects with management and support systems that will both increase their odds of success and provide developmental opportunities.

Sincerity can be more difficult to assess and is typically the source of the negative assessment that we can call MISTRUST. Sincerity is our assessment of whether one’s public conversation and actions match their private conversation and actions! Are they being straight with me is a primary question and doubt about people in the organisations all over the hierarchy. The way to foster sincerity can be accomplished in two ways. First, we must state explicit and clear standards for open communication- people are more likely to be insincere when open communication is punished rather than rewarded. Second, we must cultivate the capacity for giving and receiving assessments. When the culture of an organisation supports and rewards open communication and takes strong action against gossip, rumors and triangulations, much of the space for insincerity evaporates. As such the need for open communication practices cannot be over emphasised.

To promote knowledge work in our business we need to address the level of mistrust that exists in most organisations. This means producing a new operational rather than a moralistic interpretation of TRUST. As said earlier trust is an assessment and not a feeling. Once the company culture accepts this new interpretation, management support must come by instituting a new set of practices for open communication. Open communication includes information sharing as well as sharing of assessments. The creation of this shift and transformation in culture and the mood of the organisation from one of mistrust to trust will not happen overnight. However, as trust takes hold within an organisation, the levels of coordination and collaboration increase dramatically. The good news is that the competence of building and rebuilding trust can be learned and it is imperative for those who have their eyes set on a stress free, healthy and profitable long-term future. Knowledge and tacit workers cannot flourish in an organisation with an environment that is rife with mistrust.

Finally, both CBM culture and knowledge work are characterised by informal leadership and networking. Strong businesses have strong informal leaders with strong networks. Installing open communication practices and accepting assessments keep the informal leaders as one of your organisation’s best and productive assets. As the mood of the employees shifts to trust so will the mood of their networks and the rest of the organisation. Knowledge work requires trust between employees, management and clients. It is a normal human character to give their best and do everything possible when we trust in what we are asked to do and who we are dealing with and in all our relationships, not a penny or a paisa for what we don’t!     

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