Trust Rules

Norway Edition

Bob Lee, Jannik Krohn Falck

• Publisher: The Trust Lab Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780995737860
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Verwaltung

“We all know that creating a great place to work is critical to a company’s long-term success, but how do managers actually accomplish this? Bob Lee’s book provides sixteen clear, concise principles and guidance for how to apply them to build employee trust in any... organization.”

—Alex Edmans, professor of finance, London Business School

“ Trust Rules is simple and sharp, an easy, thoughtful read for every level of manager. Most important, it provides context—and that’s where it’s different from other books.”

—Garry McCabe, human resources director, Kuehne + Nagel

Writer and management expert Bob Lee lays out a comprehensive, easy-to-use road map for building a remarkable work environment, with committed and high-performing employees who are passionate about what they do. Incorporating the insight of more than two million employees across eighty countries, with additional material by Great Place to Work Norway CEO, Jannik Krohn Falck, this is a ground-breaking guide for managers on how to harness the power of trust and lead teams to achieve truly extraordinary business results.

RULE 1

TRUST FIRST

IMAGINE WHAT YOUR TEAM COULD achieve if your employees were to bring all of themselves—their skills, their talents, their imagination, their energy, their life experience, and their overall brilliance—to work every day. Think of the limitless potential that you would unleash if every member of your team was free to do their best work and share their best ideas, knowing that you value and respect them as unique individuals determined to leave their stamp on the world. That’s the prize that’s on offer when you trust your team. But only when you fully trust your team.

And that’s the problem.

Trusting others is dangerous and risky because it leaves you exposed. Your trust can be taken for granted, abused, misused, unappreciated, and exploited. It can leave you looking foolish and naive. It can lead to poor-quality work, missed deadlines, and lost customers—for which you are ultimately responsible—reflecting badly on you as a manager and leaving you exposed to criticism from your peers and higher-ups. Or worse.

It’s not difficult to understand, then, why so many managers traditionally have tried to achieve results by not trusting their employees, telling them everything that they should do rather than allowing them to decide some things for themselves. It’s a familiar but thankfully fading soundtrack: the inspirational “your job is to do what I say:” the confidence-building “you better not mess this up;” and the reassuringly supportive “if you don’t hear from me that means you’re doing fine.”

This command-and-control approach leaves nothing to chance, no disappointment, no failures, and no surprises. But there’s a major downside to that approach. It leaves nothing to chance, no disappointment, no failures, and no surprises! In other words, you get exactly what you ask for: predictably average results but zero discretionary effort. Exactly what any other average manager can achieve.

There’s another reason so many managers are hesitant to fully trust their employees: trusting others makes us vulnerable. And vulnerability can be extremely uncomfortable, particularly for those in a leadership role. We know that our teams need us to be strong, and we often assume that to be strong we must never show weakness or vulnerability.

As a manager, it would be wonderful if you could wait until each member of your team has shown themselves to be reliable, truthful, and able—and then trust them. But it doesn’t work that way. For trust to take root, somebody must make the first move, so it’s either them or you. Employees have little reason to take a chance on your trustworthiness and they are not all equally inclined to trust in general. Some of them are willing to trust quickly while others take longer to come around. Although an employee’s opinion of you is obviously important in their decision to trust you, some of that decision has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the employee concerned.

Robert Hurley, a professor of management at New York’s Fordham University, has identified ten factors that can predict if an individual will choose to trust or distrust another. ⁷ Five of Hurley’s factors are worth a closer look here.

To start, an employee’s attitude toward risk has a big impact on their willingness to trust you, or anyone. Risk seekers trust quickly. They don’t spend much time figuring out what might go wrong if they trust you, because they believe that things will probably work out. But employees who are risk averse will be reluctant to place their trust in you unless they feel in control. “Not only do they not trust others,” notes Hurley, “they don’t even trust themselves.”

An employee’s level of adjustment also affects how long it takes them to build trust. Well-adjusted people tend to trust quickly—they are comfortable with themselves and with the world around them, and tend to believe that nothing bad will happen to them. A poorly adjusted employee, on the other hand, tends to see many threats in the world, approaches every situation with an underlying level of anxiety, and will take longer to trust you regardless of any good that you do.

Relative power is the third internal factor in an employee’s decision to trust. You have the power in the relationship with each of your employees. That’s just how it is. It’s relatively easy for you to place your trust in employees because you hold all the cards. You can sanction them if they violate your trust. But what options do employees have if you betray them? They have no authority to do anything but withdraw their trust and resolve to be wiser in the future. Your employees instinctively understand this vulnerability and so will be less comfortable trusting you.

Another factor relevant to an employee’s decision to trust is security. In other words, the key question for the employee is, What’s at stake? “The higher the stakes, the less likely people are to trust,” explains Hurley. “If the answer to the question, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ isn’t that scary, it’s easier to be trustful.” So, for example, employees are more likely to trust you when you are deciding on promotions than they are if you are considering layoffs.

Finally, according to Hurley, how similar you and your employees are also makes a big difference in their decision to trust you. We are all quicker to trust people that we can relate to, and we relate more easily to people “like us,” people who share our values, interests, and perspective. People that are like you, then, are more likely to trust you. But while you might find it easier to earn the trust of a team built in your image, keep in mind that there’s an important upside to diversity. McKinsey, the worldwide management consulting firm, reports that organisations with a diverse and inclusive workforce enjoy return on equity 53 percent higher and profit margins 14 percent greater than those of the least diverse companies.⁸

These five factors show just how challenging it is for employees to trust you and why they are unlikely to make the first move when it comes to building trust between you. They are more likely to wait and make their decision to trust based on how you perform over months or even years. But you don’t have that luxury. You need trust if you are to unleash the full potential of your team. So, make the first move. Doing so doesn’t make you weak. Your true strength lies in having the courage to show humility, openness, and a willingness to trust first.

Yes, being the first to extend trust is risky; it can go horribly wrong. But not if you go about it correctly. Problems typically arise when you extend blind trust, or when you trust and hope for the best, maybe better described as foolish trust. That’s the sort of trust that will get you into trouble every time.

Imagine that your eighteen-year-old son asks for your help learning to drive. You trust him, and with good reason. He’s a responsible teenager: he’s worked a part-time job for years, takes good care of his siblings, and has always worked hard in school. You toss him the keys, saying, “Take my car, son. I trust you to figure out how it all works. You’ve never let me down before. Enjoy!” That’s blind, foolish trust. Although your son has proven to be trustworthy in various situations, he has neither the training nor the competence to suggest that he can be trusted with your car. Your trust is unfair to him, as it’s setting him up to fail. And it’s unfair to you for the same reason.

Trust Rules is about extending intelligent trust: the right amount of trust given to the right person at the right time. For example, assigning a big project to an enthusiastic and capable but relatively new employee. Sharing confidential information about the company’s performance with your employees. Allowing an employee to sign off on their colleagues’ expenses when you’re out of the office. Extending intelligent trust is a gradual process in which success breeds success and the inevitable setbacks are minor and controlled. You celebrate success, deal with setbacks, and carry on unfazed.

I opened this chapter by inviting you to imagine what your team could achieve if it could work at its full potential. It may sound fanciful, but it is both realistic and achievable when you fully trust yourself to fully trust your team. The rules in the rest of this book offer specific guidance on how to build trust with your employees. Rule 1, however, is the most important: trust first. You’re the manager, so that’s on you.

KEY POINTS

Being the first to trust leaves you exposed and makes you vulnerable—and it also shows your strength.

People tend to trust people who are like them. It’s tempting to hire employees who are similar to you because they will likely be quicker to trust you. But be careful; you don’t want to sacrifice the many benefits that a diverse team brings.

Don’t trust your employees blindly. Instead, extend intelligent trust—the right amount of trust given to the right person at the right time.

RULE 2

LIVE WITH INTEGRITY

LIVING WITH INTEGRITY MEANS BEING true to your word in everything you do. It means that people can trust you because you do what you say. It’s doing the right thing, even when no one is watching, and even if nobody would ever find out if you were to do the wrong thing. It means that you stand for something, even if you stand to lose everything in the process. In short, living with integrity reveals your true character. As the legendary basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

In the workplace, integrity matters because how you conduct yourself with your employees, customers, vendors, and suppliers shows the standard of behaviour you expect from them.

Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong and instinctively know the right thing to do when it’s a simple black-or-white issue, but sometimes struggle when they encounter grey areas and borderline cases. Faced with uncertainty and moral dilemmas, your team will follow your lead. Act with the utmost integrity and you’ll inspire your employees to do likewise. But when you compromise your integrity for commercial or personal advantage, you create space for others to do the same. The “right thing to do” is often also the “hard thing to do” and that’s why, without strong leadership, some employees may yield to the temptation to take the path of least resistance.

Of course, you shouldn’t do the right thing just to set a good example, or because your employees are watching you. You should do the right thing to show who you are, what you believe in, and the values that matter to you. When you live your values, what you do and what you say are one and the same. Even if you assume that most of your employees would do the right thing regardless of how you conduct yourself, they simply won’t trust you if they don’t see you holding yourself to the highest possible ethical standards. They will judge your behavio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Rule 1: Trust First
• Rule 2: Live with Integrity
• Rule 3: Keep Your Promises
• Rule 4: Be Approachable and Easy to Talk To
• Rule 5: Give Straight Answers
• Rule 6: Seek and Respond to Suggestions and Ideas
• Rule 7: Involve People in Decisions That Affect Them
• Rule 8: Make Your Expectations Clear
• Rule 9: Show a Warm Welcome
• Rule 10: Nobody’s Job Is “Just” Anything
• Rule 11: Show Your Appreciation
• Rule 12: Get to Know the Whole Person
• Rule 13: Help Your Employees Achieve Work-Life Balance
• Rule 14: Treat Everyone Fairly
• Rule 15: Do What You Are Paid to Do
• Rule 16: Have Fun Together
• Where Do You Go from Here?
• Recommended Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• About the Authors
• About Great Place to Work in Norway