Trust: Hard To Earn But Easy To Lose

 

If there’s one thing that ensures team success, it’s trust.
By Kate Jones

 

Trust is the key that unlocks the door to more innovative, agile and productive organisations.

Yet it barely rates a mention in boardrooms across Australia, reflecting an even more worrying trend – society’s growing mistrust of institutions.

Declining trust is a problem for governments, banks, the media and even non-government organisations. Research shows flagging trust means the majority of people think societal and economic systems are working against them.

The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, which samples more than 33,000 respondents from 28 countries, found people’s concerns centre around corruption, globalisation, immigration, an erosion of social values and the pace of innovation.

Across the four institutions of government, business, media and NGOs, business was viewed as the only one that can make a difference. Three out of four respondents agree a company can take actions to both increase profits and improve economic and social conditions.

Business leaders play an important part in rebuilding trust and it all starts in-house.

Today’s fast-paced advances mean there is a greater emphasis on explaining the impact of innovation to employees and what it means for their jobs. There is the ongoing need for businesses to pay employees fairly, constantly improve benefits and provide job training.

Being a trustworthy leader is all about establishing credibility, says business psychologist Sebastian Salicru, author of Leadership Results: How to Create Adaptive Leaders and High-performing Organisations for an Uncertain World.

 

“Leaders need to be fair by displaying consistency in decision-making . . . and sharing their influence and power appropriately”

 

“This means acting with integrity and being role models of the principles, values and behaviours they uphold,” he says.

“More specifically, building credibility entails enhancing or repairing their psychological contracts with their people by fulfilling the expectations employees have of them, building trust by communicating openly, keeping their promises, demonstrating competence and good judgment.

“They also need to be fair by displaying consistency in decision-making, providing opportunities for others to share their views, share their influence and power appropriately, and provide ongoing feedback to their teams.”

Winning a team’s trust is a marathon and relies on being respectful, welcoming feedback and admitting mistakes, Salicru advises. Losing it can be a sprint.

“Don’t assume people know what you expect from them, don’t pretend that you know everything, don’t blame others when things go wrong, don’t display favouritisms, don’t bully, abuse your power or discriminate against others, don’t avoid conflict and don’t try to be liked or seek approval from others,” he says.

Restoring strong team trust will translate to consumers, giving them confidence to do business with an organisation and recommending that organisation to others. Flowing from this are healthy customer relationships, which fast-track business growth and build sustainable brand equity.

“It manifests in increased sales, repeat business, customer loyalty and brand ambassadorship,” Salicru says.

“In turn, this affords you and the organisation brand differentiation, good reputation, and greater competitive advantage. In the longer-term, this means increased market share, sustainability and business growth.”

Maintaining trust has and always will be crucial for business leaders. Leaders can do this by working towards putting people, their employees and customers, at the centre of everything they do.

 

‘You Must Have Passion and You Must Care’

 

Stephanie McConachy MIML has very strong ideas on what makes a great leader and she plans to practice what she preaches. By Carolyn Boyd

 

Pounding the pavement training for half-marathons, Stephanie McConachy has a ritual. She arranges a three-stage music playlist in advance. “It’s all about the race strategy; you can’t go too fast too soon,” she explains.

McConachy chooses her music based on beats per minute, focusing on getting her running rhythm just right for different stages of the race. The methodical approach is not so different to how she has charted her career – recognising that during the early years she had to lay the foundations, take the time to get involved and gain broad experience.

The Adelaide marketer has recently been appointed to the Institute of Managers and Leaders’ board after spending seven years on the organisation’s committees, including South Australia’s Young Professional Group and the Young Manager Advisory Board.

Growing up as the daughter of two self-employed business people — her mum is a dentist with her own practice and her dad is a geologist — McConachy saw first-hand that a strong work ethic can take you places. They taught her, she says, that you need to work hard to get things done.

Throughout her early career, the 29-year-old has had a string of role models. One quality has stood out to her about each of them. And it’s this single, impossible-to-measure quality that McConachy says makes a great leader.

“They were really passionate about what they were doing, they were enthusiastic, they had really strong belief and purpose,” she says.

McConachy has always been fascinated about what makes people tick. As the third of four children, she played the role of the “agitator and disruptor — that annoying third child, but also the mediator”. At university she started studying psychology but switched to marketing as it seemed a more interesting career that was still about getting inside people’s heads.

In her role as a marketing manager for global consultancy PwC, McConachy leads a team across Australia. She tries to live by the mantra of “just do it” — even if everything she does isn’t perfect. And she tries to be the type of leader she admires.

“It’s incredibly important that they care about the team that they’re leading,” she says.

It’s about taking the time with people. “It’s not just a ‘Hey, how is it going?’, but actually connecting with everyone on a one-on-one and asking them, ‘How are you today? What’s going on?’ And actually wanting to know the answer.

 

“If you don’t understand the people you’re leading, you can’t effectively lead them. That care and that curiosity is really important.”

 

For McConachy, communication is key to being a great leader: “Having that big-picture vision is incredibly important, but more important is how do you actually communicate it? Without communication, you can’t lead effectively, because no-one actually knows what we’re trying to do. Half of us are trying to go to the North Pole, the other half to the South, which just doesn’t work.”

McConachy says the leaders she admires are excellent communicators. “They often have that charismatic edge, but they can communicate really effectively and get their vision across so they take you on the journey with them,” she says. “They’re not just pointing and saying, ‘Go there’. They’re saying, ‘OK, we’re going to go there and this is how we’re going to do it and here’s a paddle for you’, so they bring you on that journey with them. And you want to follow them. You want to get on board.”

 

Trust is also an important factor and it goes both ways.

 

“I need to be able to trust my leaders,” she says. “I want them to trust me and to give me that space, because without that trust, I can’t do it all on my own; you can’t do it all on your own, we need to work together. You need to have that trust that if you fail, you fail and we can work it out. And I trust you enough that we don’t need to be in each other’s line of sight every single second to make it happen.”

While she agrees some people take to leadership more naturally, McConachy argues leadership skills can be learnt. “Some leaders just have this X-factor and you go: ‘How can I bottle that? What actually even is that?’ But soft skills can be developed. EQ [emotional intelligence] can be developed as well. Self-awareness is very important for leaders and sometimes it takes people a little bit more digging and listening and wanting to take on that feedback to get there, but it can be learnt.”

Having recently joined the The Institute of Managers and Leaders’ board, McConachy hopes to bring a unique perspective to the role, but stops short of saying she can inject a ‘youth voice’. The 29-year-old can certainly provide insight about the issues facing younger managers and leaders.

“I’m just really excited,” she says. “Looking around the table and talking to everyone it’s such an amazing group of people.”

McConachy has her sights set on further board roles in the future. “I see that as a real aspiration to be a non-executive director with a portfolio of board appointments,” she says. “I’m currently on a few other committees and would love to get involved with more boards in the future.”

Outside of work, McConachy can be found helping her furniture-designer husband in his business. Or out and about enjoying the top-class food and wine that the lush regions around Adelaide produce. And she is also focused on her next half-marathon. But that’s OK, she has a game plan.

“A strong beat can get you through,” she says.

 

 

FIVE PEOPLE STEPHANIE WOULD INVITE TO LUNCH

“First, I need someone who could bring the lunch, so a chef. Heston Blumenthal (pictured) has really challenged people’s perception of what food is and can be. So Heston to bring lunch and also to challenge us. Then Seth Godin. He’s a marketing genius and he’s just such an inspirational person and all throughout my marketing career, Seth’s been my go-to. I’d also choose Louis Theroux, the British documentary maker who’s forever curious. He’s disarming, he tackles any type of topic. He would ask really interesting questions, so probably get the best out of that group dynamic. Then I need a fictional character – Yoda. I love his quote: ‘Do. Or do not. There is no try’. He could bring a bit of wisdom to the group. And then Madonna, the queen of rebranding and reinvention. She would add a bit of a wow factor and bring some fun stories.”

 

 

Game of Moans

How to get your team to air their grievances and equip them with tools to independently problem-solve

 

By Candice Chung

 

One of the simplest ways to gauge the health of a relationship is by measuring the lag time between identifying a problem and bringing it into the open. In fact, social scientist Joseph Grenny argues the same litmus test can be used to reveal the effectiveness of any team or organisation.

“You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail — months or years in advance,” writes Grenny in his book Crucial Conversations. In most cases, the predictor of success or failure is a team’s ability to hold difficult conversations. “For example, could they speak up if they thought the scope and schedule [of a project] was unrealistic? Or do they go silent when [a team member] begins slacking off?”

Good leaders recognise the importance of getting their team to speak up. The reality, however, is that most workers tend to do the opposite — bottling up mid-range, mid-temperature niggles since it often feels like an easier way out.

“The two main reasons employees are wary of airing grievances are ‘I don’t want to get in trouble’ or ‘I don’t want to make trouble,’” says James Carlopio, organisation psychologist and Adjunct Professor of Business at Bond University. This is because opening up about certain grievances tend to involve elements of social or political risk.

Marcus Crow, co-founder of uncertainty management firm 10,000 Hours, calls these everyday gripes ‘the undiscussables’ — they are typically related to personality clashes or battles over resource allocation. In other words, things that involve potential losses for one or more of the parties involved.

“These are things we don’t talk about, but we should. And it’s hard to do because you’re going to risk saying something that could exclude you from the mainstream way of thinking in the organisation,” says Crow.

While there is no overnight solution to get staff to open up— since it takes time to cultivate genuine rapport and trust — the good news, says Crow, is that a team’s communication fitness can be built up over time.

To start, try asking for regular feedback in low-stakes situations. “For instance, at the end of every group meeting, check in and ask, “How did we just do?” and invite some brief commentary from the group — so the group gets a chance to reflect on its work,” says Crow.

Marcus Crow, co-founder of 10,000 Hours

A helpful thing to remember is that when employees have critical feedback, it’s usually a sign that they care, says Zivit Inbar, Director of people and performance consultancy group, Different Thinking. It’s therefore important for managers to reward candour by fostering an open culture and taking negative feedback seriously.

“Culture is all about managers modelling behaviours in a consistent way. To build a culture of honesty and openness means that the managers themselves must be honest, open, accept different opinions…admit their own mistakes and foster learning from errors,” says Inbar.

Once employees feel they can safely air their grievances, the next goal is to set up a framework for the team to independently problem-solve.

“The [short term] focus is to solve the immediate problem so that it does not impact on work productivity. After that, it’s important to show employees exactly how [an issue is] fixed and highlight important information along the way,” says Carlopio.

In the end, Crow believes most teams already possess what’s necessary for successful conflict resolution — what doesn’t happen is the practice.

“There’s no magical call to arms from leaders that will leave the team feeling empowered,” says Crow, “Rather, it’s by experiencing the leader making time, or the practice of sitting together and reflecting on hard-to-tackle issues that you’ll build up your proficiency to work together and problem-solve.”