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Staff Trust

Recently I was in a client’s office when we got to talking about cross-selling – that old chestnut that every firm strives to conquer and yet few manage to do well. They were telling me that they saw an opportunity to grow a key client account, but they were nervous about introducing the lead from the other department to their beloved client. He simply hadn’t ‘earned their trust’.

Now, all of you know that I think building trust with your clients is the ‘secret sauce’ for building and sustaining business. But what some of you may not know is that I think the trust you build internally – with individual colleagues and between different departments – is just as critical. Because if you don’t trust the people you work with, you’ll never refer them or get them to help you with a client. Protective and divisive behavior rules the day, and we all know that does not a successful business make.

And yet, internal protective and divisive behavior by people who do not trust each other in an organisation is commonplace – particularly when times are a bit turbulent like they are right now in many consulting firms in Australia and around the world.

If not dealt with in a swift, appropriate and efficient manner, it can have a very detrimental effect on not just the organisation, but on a more personal level, those who work inside it.

The two types of people who work in organisations – and how to work out which ones you’ve got. 

Over the years, I have discovered that there are two distinct types of people working within organisations. The first are those who believe that trust has to be earned, not given outright. The second type are just as abundant as the first, but instead of requiring trust to be earned, they tend to trust people from the outset. But if this trust is broken, it is usually lost forever.

If you want to test this, get a group of staff who do not know each other very well around a table and do the following:

  • Ask each person to write the names of the two people either side of them on a piece of paper.
  • Ask them to score how much they trust each of those two people from 1-10.
  • Review the results.

You’ll not only find extremely varied responses, but you’ll also notice that how well each person knows each other is not always a key element in the scoring. Within organisations, the trust given from one person to another is largely due to their job credibility, ie ‘That person knows what they’re doing because it’s their job to know.’ But is credibility alone enough for long-term personal and organisational success, or is something more required?

To me, the answer is quite simple – something more is definitely required. We all know that there is more to trust than credibility, and then times get turbulent, relationships based purely on how credible one person perceives another as being bin their job will not be enough to survive the storm and come out the other side intact. If organisational relationships are not built on deeper held trust, involving all elements of the trust equation (high credibility, reliability and intimacy, and low self-orientation) a case of ‘organisational malaria’ can break out, causing widespread mayhem.

How do you assess if you’ve got a problem?

To assess whether your organisation is at risk of infection, consider the following warning symptoms. You should seriously reassess your organisation’s culture and options if you believe that:

  • There is not a deeper held trust between people.
  • There is a mutual feeling that people within your organisation only have their own interests at heart and are not focused on the greater good of the organisation.
  • Some people within your organisation have started to demonstrate behaviour that they have not previously shown or been prone to.

The bad news? This can spread and spread quickly. But the good news is that it can be easily cured if the right measures are quickly put in place. If urgent measures are not taken, then the spread may become pandemic and mistrust will become the culture not the exception.

5 things to focus on to create a culture of internal trust

So what do I recommend you do? Ideally, you should strive to build total trust across your organisation when times are good. This will not only protect the organisation when times get tough, but it will reap massive rewards in the good times too. Unfortunately, in reality, only few organisations I know take these preventative measures.

If you already have a trust problem, the only cure is to focus on building trust in your organisation beyond credibility – focus on reliability, intimacy and low self-orientation. Specifically, think about how you can do these five things:

  1. Get everyone to genuinely buy into your firm’s ethos and strategy.
  2. Get everyone to see the direct link between their role and that strategy.
  3. Get everyone to see and believe in everyone else’s role in that strategy.
  4. Have a policy of no blame and no ‘water cooler conversations’.
  5. Have no sacred cows’ when it comes to adherence to the ethos and strategy.

Then take a step back and think about what your organisation stands for and what’s important. From this you may potentially have to make some hard, but critical decisions regarding some of your team.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn by Keith Dugdale.