It’s Week #20 of 2016. This latest article is part of a series drawn from our 3rd annual 2016 Trust Poster….now hanging in hundreds of offices around the world. Get yours today!
52 Ideas That You Can Implement to Build Trust
Bob Whipple is a Trust Alliance member and a Trust Across America Lifetime Achievement Award Winner. He offers this week’s idea:
The absence of fear is the incubator of trust. The leadership behavior that reduces fear the most is reinforcing candor.
Fear at work is often a very rational emotion based on experience and the observed behaviors of the managers. That kind of toxic environment eliminates the possibility of growing real trust. Faced with enduring hypocrisy many will flee to greener pastures. But those employees who continually seek a better environment may find themselves moving to a different job only to find the conditions there are even worse than what they left.
I believe trust can kindle spontaneously in an environment where fear is low.
If your organization runs on a steady diet of fear because people are afraid of the consequences of speaking their truth, you are likely to have a toxic, low trust culture. That is a signal that there is an amazing level of productivity increase available if the leaders can change their behaviors to reduce the fear. Using candor may just be the fastest means to that end. I recall # 8 of Deming’s famous 14 points was “drive out fear.” I believe the famous quality guru was right.
Thank you Bob. We hope our readers heed this week’s advice.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. Now in its seventh year, the program’s proprietary FACTS® Framework ranks and measures the trustworthiness of over 2000 US public companies on five quantitative indicators of trustworthy business behavior. Barbara is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine.
Copyright 2016, Next Decade, Inc.
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