Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

It’s Week #25 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

Holly Latty-Mann offers this week’s advice. Holly is both a Top Thought Leader in Trust and an active member of our Trust Alliance.

Go public when expressing gratitude;

go private when expressing disappointment.

While cultural differences do exist regarding response to positive public recognition, no company on record has ever lost an employee due to discomfort with public praise. David Sturt (HBR, November, 2015) shared findings that employees in the USA, India, and Mexico tend to revel in it, while those from Australia and the UK enjoy it with less fanfare. When publicly acknowledging the Japanese, Germans, and French, small-scale publicity is more appropriate.   

What about shame-based management via public chastisement? Not all employer humiliation or harassment is illegal as long as the verbal abuse is unrelated to demographics (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity). Perhaps that explains the high prevalence of managers belittling coworkers publicly on job performance, yet across all cultures, such behaviors are shown to compromise trust in management, for which statistical evidence clearly points to a compromised bottom line (bit.ly/1WBOBp6).

A final note:  Company morale goes respectively up or down when a single person is publicly honored or dishonored, and the literature is prolific with studies showing strong positive correlations among morale, productivity, and revenue.

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.

Welcome to TRUSTGiving 2014, our first annual weeklong trust awareness campaign.  Join the Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts as our members help our readers navigate the complexities of trust. We will be blogging (several times a day) and posting on Twitter #TrustGiving2014.

Holly Latty- Mann has some further advice for building trust during meetings.

You may have caught an earlier post regarding opportunities to build trust at the onset of your weekly management or departmental meeting. Because people tend to remember the first and final activities of meetings, let’s now take a look at tangible ways you can end your team meetings that can promote a more meaningful trust level between and among your team members. Again the activities take on the nature of willful sharing, and as such can serve as a crude measure of your company culture within the context of interpersonal comfort and social trust. 

The end-of-meeting activity is purposefully shorter and lighter than the onset checking-in activity so that even the most reserved team members feel they have a viable place to engage.  With time these more reticent respondents may ultimately share at a deeper level such as the challenges of having a special needs child at home. This is when team members begin experiencing one another as real live human beings with a heartbeat. Team members invariably begin reaching out to one another in a show of support, even sharing similar experiences within their own life.

Consider the following brief activities to end your meeting. The content can either convey familial caring or offer a welcomed sense of levity. Either way, you can begin forging meaningful human connections with one another through these small, caring gestures:

►End with a quote, as most quotes impart a wisdom regarding how to enhance life and living,

►Offer meaningful information or tips such as the 4-7-8 breathing exercise to help manage stress,

► Share a brief human interest story (maybe your own), news item, or even a joke or recipe, and

►Invite other team members to share their favorite quote, tips, restaurants, and such. 

The degree of team sharing carries its commensurate level of team trust.  When we break momentarily from “work as usual,” we’re acknowledging the human side of one another where humor, sensitivity, and a certain sacred spirituality reside.  We are acknowledging the poet, the parent, the philosopher, and adventurer in one another among many other possibilities when we share from a diversity of resources. When we engage one another on a human level that forgets titles and job roles, we are providing the kind of psychological milieu that allows the spillover of good will and trust to permeate all interpersonal relationship dynamics throughout the organization and beyond.

Holly Latty-Mann, PhD, president and owner of The Leadership Trust®, uses her two doctorates in psychology to heighten and crystallize self-awareness and emotional intelligence at root-cause level. Her holistic, integrative model extends to the team and organizational levels to embolden trust-based collaborative efforts, thereby expediting both the creation and delivery of her clients’ innovative products and services. Contact Holly and learn more through leadershiptrust.org/info@leadershiptrust.org.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Welcome to TRUSTGiving 2014, our first annual weeklong trust awareness campaign.  Join the Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts this week as our members help our readers navigate the complexities of trust. Over the next seven days we will be blogging (several times a day) and posting on Twitter #TrustGiving2014.

Holly Latty-Mann shares some thoughts below. Check back at the end of the week for the second segment of Holly’s Trust and Company Meetings Part 2.

Part I: Trust-Building Activities to Incorporate in Company Meetings

(an excerpt from our upcoming book, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities & Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust)

Weekly meetings, whether management or departmental, offer prime opportunities to create and build both trust and cohesion between and among all team members. By applying what cognitive psychologists refer to as the primary and recency effects, people tend to remember the first and final activities of meetings. As such, it is important to begin and end team meetings in a way that promotes a trust with far-reaching ripple effects.

Although not necessary, ideally the one who sets the agenda for weekly meetings is the one with the greatest opportunity to introduce activities designed to create a team culture of trust. The following represents a tried-and-true approach by the author of this blog.    

Create a Brief Checking-In Activity to Start the Meeting: 

►Announce you’d like to start your meeting with a quick, casual “checking-in round,” in which everyone has a chance to share anything of interest going on in his or her life – or pass.

►Rather than offer examples, consider going first in order to provide a model of appropriate self-disclosing. Examples can include family vacation or the angst one feels with one’s teenage child getting a permit to drive, or discovering rock climbing as a favorite pastime.

►Occasionally bring in a prop or picture as an adult version of show-and-tell, something designed to promote some levity or a relaxed demeanor.

►Although it is important to keep it brief, it’s also important not to be rigid regarding timing. 

►Allow body language cues to help with moderating, pacing, and timing.  

Experiencing one another in other life roles helps everyone become as much people-focused as task-focused when later working together on a team project. It is a genuine manifestation of trust when one’s focus shifts from who is right or wrong to what’s working or not working, the latter of which is more likely to happen when people regard one another as “Pat the person” and not just “Pat the professional”.

My next blog will feature an even shorter activity to end the meeting, one that likewise is designed to build trust and team cohesion.

Holly Latty-Mann, PhD, president and owner of The Leadership Trust®, uses her two doctorates in psychology to heighten and crystallize self-awareness and emotional intelligence at root-cause level. Her holistic, integrative models extend to team and organizational development processes to engender trust-based collaborative efforts, thereby expediting both the creation and delivery of her clients’ innovative products and services. To contact Holly and learn more, visit www.leadershiptrust.org or write info@leadershiptrust.org.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Copyright 2014 Next Decade, Inc.