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Earning trust: your most valuable commodity
Trust is critical to organisational success but it takes time and effort to build – especially in bigger businesses. Kate Cooper offers some expert advice for organisations looking to establish and maintain trust across their workforce
F
ew leaders would disagree that trust is an essential ingredient for sustainable organisational
performance, but how many organisations are consciously and
strategically working to measure and build trust in their leadership and management teams? At ILM, we have long recognised the growing significance of trust in driving employee engagement, motivation and performance. We know that high-trust organisations benefit from increased productivity and lowered stress levels. Trust reduces the need for tight controls and regulations, thereby reducing the cost of doing business. We also know that trust is a fragile thing, which takes time to build and is easily lost. And once trust is lost, motivation, engagement and performance all suffer. Our research has identified six key drivers of trust in leaders and managers: ability, integrity, openness, fairness, understanding and consistency. But as many as one in five UK organisations are suffering from low trust. How do you know if your organisation falls into that category and what can you do to raise trust and enjoy the many benefits trust brings?
What to watch out for • Bigger is not better – Our research has consistently highlighted that the larger a company is, the lower the level of trust. Leaders with 10 or less employees enjoy the highest levels of trust from their workforce.
• Visibility is key – This might seem like a no-brainer but our findings showed that the closer the working relationship staff had with their leader, the higher the level of trust the leader enjoyed. The more time
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a manager spends cultivating relationships with their workforce, the more trust they are likely to earn.
• Shaky starts – Our research showed that, broadly speaking, managers start off with low trust and steadily gain more trust from their staff the longer they remain in post. Leaders with less than one year’s service saw relatively low trust, which increased throughout their service. Conversely, new employees started off trusting their manager the most and became steadily more cynical the longer they were with the organisation.
• Public sector struggles – Managers in public sector organisations generally experienced lower trust levels than their counterparts in the private or third sector. Our findings suggested that employees in public sector organisations felt that their leaders were failing to effectively tackle the problems that their organisations faced.
Integrity is increasingly an essential quality for modern leaders, as our research has shown a clear correlation between ethics and trust – those managers who are seen as ethical are also more trusted. Ethics has grown in importance following a spate of high-profile scandals at institutions that depend on employee and consumer trust, across banking, healthcare, the media, the police force and the government. Against this backdrop, employees, customers and shareholders, where relevant, are increasingly gravitating towards ethical organisations. Corporate reputation and a company’s ethical standing are significant factors in driving competitive advantage. Employee attitudes, experiences and behaviours are what underpin and define that reputation. ILM are ideally placed to support those
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Trust reduces the need for tight controls, thereby reducing the cost of doing business
organisations seeking to proactively build levels of trust and integrity across their workforce through targeted management development. Our flexible range of leadership and management qualifications are designed to deliver the fundamental skills, knowledge and awareness to build and gain employee trust. We have also recently developed a unique qualification in conjunction with Cass Business School called ‘Leading with integrity’. This Level 5 certificate equips managers and leaders across all sectors with the insight they need to achieve business objectives in an ethical and sustainable way, enabling management to deal with everyday ethical dilemmas and ensuring that the business operates with equitability. To find out more about how you can benchmark, build and maintain trust in your organisation and raise leadership and management performance more generally, talk to the ILM team on stand G170. n
Kate Cooper is a senior advisor at the Institute of Leadership and Management.
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