Focusing on clarity, consistency, and choice can
help any leader establish trust.
Katharine Manning
In order to achieve a healthy and productive workforce you need
trust. Doug Conant, the former CEO of Campbell’s Soup, called it,
“the foundational element of high-performing organizations.” When
he took the helm at Campbell’s, Conant made “Inspiring Trust” his
first mission in turning around the company’s performance, which
eventually led to shareholder returns in the top tier of the global food
market and among the highest levels of employee engagement in the
Fortune 500.
The Great Place to Work Institute has found that “trust between
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managers and employees is the primary defining characteristic of
the very best workplaces.” In fact, employees who displayed a high
degree of trust in their management, compared with lower-trust
companies, had 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50%
higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement,
29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout.
It’s easy to see that trust is important at work. What’s a little harder
to see, however, is how to build trust. In my work as a manager and
through coaching and training other leaders, I have come to believe
that trust at work comes down to the three Cs: clarity, consistency,
and choice.
Clarity
Clarity means that we are clear in our expectations, needs, goals,
and timelines. So often, supervisors hope that their team members
can intuit their expectations. They don’t want to have to think
through what’s needed, or they hate having to ask people to do
things. Of course, this isn’t fair to anyone. We can only feel confident
in doing a task if first we understand what the task is. Similarly, if the
task needs to be completed in a specific timeframe or in a certain
way that also must be communicated. Unfortunately, according to
Gallup, just half of workers strongly agree that they know what is
expected of them at work. To make matters worse, managers are
even less likely than individual contributors to report that they know
what is expected of them.
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https://content.jwplatform.
com/previews/tioL2eL3
In his book, Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara discusses a
restaurant manager who sees that a server has arrived at work with a
wrinkled shirt. Though bothered by the shirt, the manager doesn’t
say anything to the server because he doesn’t want to come across
as a nag. Then the server comes to work the next day with a wrinkled
shirt, and the next, and the next. Over time, the manager becomes
incensed at what he sees as the server’s laxness—though he had
never communicated his expectations. Rather than bottling up the
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frustration and eventually blowing up at the baffled server, the
manager should have taken the server aside the first time she
showed up with a wrinkled shirt, with an easy, “Great to see you!
That shirt looks a little rough today. Why don’t you head upstairs and
give it a once-over with the iron before your shift?”
Leaders can avoid conflict in the future if they build a sense of
security with their team by communicating expectations with clarity.
Consistency
I once spoke with a woman who had founded a small company.
There were three top leaders in the organization and over the
pandemic, one of them had become increasingly difficult to reach.
For hours a day, the man did not respond to calls, emails, or text
messages. His direct reports, unable to get the answers and
approvals they needed, began to go to another team lead, or to the
founder herself. Some projects languished. When I asked the woman
what she thought was going on, she explained that the man was a
single father and that she empathized with the challenges he faced
in parenting a young child alone during the pandemic. I next asked
how long this had gone on. “Nine months?,” she guessed. “Maybe a
year?”
To be clear, all workers deserve flexibility and compassion. However,
we can’t build trust in a team if we are showing compassion to one
member at the expense of others. The work that the single father
was not doing didn’t vanish; someone else was picking it up instead.
By allowing this to go on for so long, the founder was communicating
to the rest of the team that they mattered less than the single father.
That’s not a great way to build trust in a team.
It’s also of course essential that the work continues to get done at a
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high level. It doesn’t serve anyone if output suffers because of one
team member’s performance. For instance, if a company loses
clients, everyone in the company is in jeopardy.
To create a sense of trust on the team, rules must be clearly and
universally applied. We can (and should) still have flexibility but we
must be clear about what the exceptions are to the rules, and those
exceptions should also apply equally.
Choice
Finally, trust also depends on choice. People need to have some
autonomy over the decisions that affect their lives. A draconian
approach of “my way or the highway” without explanation or
flexibility is ultimately doomed to fail.
Thus, wherever possible, consider whether a rule is needed, or
whether you can allow people to choose for themselves. Is it
essential that you assign the office space or can you let people pick
their offices? Can you allow people to choose their in-office days? Or
at least one of them? How much flexibility can you allow in terms of
working hours? Could the team vote on the best day and time for
your staff meeting? If you’re assigning three tasks to a particular
team member, can you let her decide on the order in which to tackle
them? Can you give team members some choice on the tasks they
work on, or some freedom to explore projects that interest them?
When we allow people to make decisions, we demonstrate that we
trust them, which builds their trust of us, as well.
Perhaps even more important, encouraging choice and autonomy
helps individuals to build trust in themselves. When we manage
every detail and proscribe every process, we communicate that we
know more than our employees and then they begin to doubt
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themselves. Instead of growing and thriving, they are diminished.
In her book, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone
Smarter, Liz Wiseman discusses the leadership style of Robert
Enslin, president of Global Customer Operations at SAP AG. When
meeting a new team and uncovering a problematic structure,
“Instead of playing the authoritarian, judging their failure, and
dictating his solution, Robert restrained himself and started a
learning process,” writes Wiseman. After uncovering the shortfalls of
their current approach, he asked, “How can we take this to the next
level?” As Wiseman notes, “He created space for the team to try new
approaches and fix the problem themselves.” This builds a team
atmosphere where people feel empowered and motivated to strive—
allowing them to trust themselves and trust their leadership.
Prioritizing these three Cs in both our individual relationships as well
as when considering office-wide policies can help leaders avoid
thorny challenges and ensure that decision-making, language, and
action are aligned to build and maintain trust.
Katharine Manning is the author of The Empathetic Workplace: 5
Steps to a Compassionate, Calm, and Confident Response to
Trauma on the Job. She supports corporate, government, and
nonprofit organizations in building human-centered and traumainformed workplace cultures.
Recognize your company’s culture of innovation by applying to this
year’s Best Workplaces for Innovators Awards before the final
deadline, April 5.
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