Do You Trust Your Workplace Relationships?

Building Trust in the Workplace: A Valuable Topic for Leadership Training

by: Richard L. Williams, Ph.D

Trust is the foundation of all successful interpersonal relationships, both personal and business. Trust is the confidence or belief a person feels toward a particular person or group. Trust is, therefore, one of the primary binding forces in any interpersonal relationship. It permits people to overcome doubts and unknowns and enjoy peace of mind. The absence of trust causes confusion, worry, inaction, and fear. When interpersonal trust is present, a person feels a confidence that everything will somehow work out. In the workplace, trust is a prerequisite for effective interpersonal communications. Without trust, employees may feel uncertainty, worry, and a sense of insecurity. No relationship, personal or business, can exist for even a short period of time if some element of trust is not present. Trust is an essential leadership training ingredient that binds any human relationship into an effective, working partnership.

Even though trust is fundamental to human relationships, it is actually misunderstood by many people. People use trust, or the lack of it, to explain good and bad relationships with others. Consider the cliché phrases: “Don’t worry, you can trust me” and “Just trust me.” Trust has become both a buzzword and an excuse in our society. Trust is as much abused as it is used in today’s business world. It is used to define and explain; yet few leadership training programs have seriously considered what it is and what it is not.

Psychologists are just beginning to learn how trust really works. Research suggests that trusting relationships are predictable, caring, and faithful. When a manager’s behavior is consistent over a period of time and another person can reasonably predict that behavior, trust is possible. By contrast, it is difficult to trust a person whose actions are inconsistent or unpredictable.

Caring in a relationship involves actions that express consideration toward the other person. Through effective leadership training, a caring supervisor knows when final exams are scheduled at the local college and asks employees who will be taking the tests how much time off will be needed to study. A caring supervisor finds out about a birth, death, anniversary, graduation, or sickness and sends a card to the employee’s home.

Faith is the belief that an employee’s behavior will be in direct response to the trust placed in that relationship. Faith can be demonstrated by communicating clear expectations and then telling the employee, “I know you and I believe you can accomplish this assignment.” Managers who have difficulty demonstrating faith in others typically have difficulty trusting them as well. Trust as a leadership training component can help change this.

Building trust in the workplace is vital for a long-lasting, satisfying, rewarding, and successful relationship. Leadership training helps effective managers practice behaviors that promote and build trusting relationships. They learn to do this with consistent actions each day. In return they obtain the benefits of high-trust employee relations. These benefits include higher morale, increased initiative, improved honesty, and better productivity. All are important aspects of a profitable and rewarding business experience.

It’s not uncommon for people to use the word “trust” to describe a feeling they have regarding some interpersonal relationships. Trust does not magically appear in a relationship without certain elements preceding it over time. And once trust has been breeched it is difficult and sometimes impossible to establish once again.

Three steps pave the path before enduring trust begins. The first step is effective communications. When we communicate effectively with another person we have an opportunity to move that relationship to the second step, which is real understanding. That is when two people have communicated to the point of honest and deep understanding. This can lead to the third step in the relationship of mutual respect. A respecting relationship demands that each person contribute enough respect that it can be reciprocated back from the other person. Unilateral respect in relationships is temporary and superficial. Mutual respect that can lead to trust is much deeper and must come from communicated understanding. Once a relationship has experienced mutual respect it is possible for the participants to experience enduring relational trust. This is a feeling that binds people together over time and through trials.

The four steps are dependent upon the actions or integrity of the individuals involved. Integrity is not only keeping agreements, but it is also “walking the talk.” If, for example, a person communicates deceitfully, how much understanding will there be? And how much respect will the other person have? Ultimately trust will be lacking.

Enduring trust is a leadership training process that takes time and effort. It is clearly the essence of what fuels meaningful relationships.

Test your Trust.

Answer the following five statements on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is not true and 5 is completely true.

1. My actions each day demonstrate that I trust my employees.

2. My employees can trust me with sensitive or private information.

3. I would never betray a trust with an employee.

4. I keep confidences and would never share confidential information inappropriately.

5. I am able to trust my employees.

Tally your scores from the five items. A total score of 20 to 25 would indicate that you and your employees probably share an atmosphere of trust. A score of 15-19 would indicate that trust is present, but not in abundance. A score of 14 or less probably means that some additional leadership training efforts in building trust would be appropriate.

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What Is Fierce Leadership?

The First Practice of FIERCE LEADERSHIP

by: Susan Scott

It’s my opinion that today’s “best” practices of leaders not only fail to resolve the problems they’re meant to resolve or achieve the results they’re meant to achieve, they actually escalate problems. I’d like to recommend alternative practices to take their place. After all, reality has shifted and those who cling to old practices that no longer serve them and perhaps never did, will fail to thrive. Seriously. Fail to thrive.

Here, I will touch on the first “best” practice and hope to provoke your thinking, in subsequent entries, regarding all six.

Consider that you are always practicing something. The question is: what are you practicing. And why? Are you emulating practices of well-known, global companies, many of whom are now struggling and, in some cases, bankrupt? It’s time for some original thinking.

“Worst” Best Practice #1: 360 Anonymous Feedback

Which word in “360 Anonymous Feedback” alerts us that a company professing to value openness, honesty and transparency is out of integrity? Anonymous. I expect to take a lot of heat from those who make a living ensuring anonymity, but I believe that, while there is a time and place for anonymity, we only need it in trace amounts.

Teaching As Leadership (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It starts early in our impressionable lives – this attraction to anonymity. This hiding. So it’s no wonder that, when there are invaluable opportunities for candor, we send in good old underpaid, overworked “anonymous”, slip the feedback over the transom and run like hell. The fact is that 360 anonymous feedback rarely creates real or lasting impetus for change, which is crazy because the whole idea is to encourage professional growth and it most certainly doesn’t connect us with one another; rather, it tends to drive us apart. Here are a few highlights, or lowlights:

• The culture suffers side effects. Commercials for the latest, greatest drugs include the warning that side effects can include loss of vision, muscle spasms, internal bleeding, uncontrolled barking and sudden death. OK, maybe not barking, but you get the drift. The warnings for anonymous feedback should read: “Not to be used within organizations that value honesty, transparency, or openness or by anyone who views “authenticity” as a desirable character trait. Side effects can include a culture of terminal niceness, avoiding or working around problem employees, tolerating mediocrity, beating around the bush, dancing around the subject, skirting the issues. If you experience rapidly deteriorating relationships or have difficulty maintaining eye contact with others, call your doctor immediately as these may indicate a serious problem and could become permanent.”

• Most people hate performance reviews – hardly the response you’d hope for regarding a best practice. Other emotions associated with performance reviews include: dread, anxiety, hopelessness, fear, frustration and a firm conviction that a trip to the bathroom for a surreptitious examination of the boil on your backside would be a far better use of your time.

• Anonymous feedback doesn’t tell us what we really need to know because it is ANONYMOUS, lacking specific examples to support the evaluations and instead, using sanitized phrases and a “score” of some sort, all of which tells the recipient very little about how to improve his or her performance.

• When the feedback comes only once or twice a year, it rarely immediately follows the behavior that generated the evaluations so exactly what we did right or wrong to merit a certain evaluation often remains a mystery. We are embarrassingly clueless about how our behavior affects others anyway, so lacking timely, specific feedback, we are unlikely to change our behavior.

• Most feedback merely affirms what we already know about who we have been since the day we were born. Our reaction is, “Yep, that’s me alright!” Creating real impetus for change requires compelling feedback, delivered in a way that gets our full attention. 360 degree anonymous feedback fails on all counts.

• Even anonymous feedback isn’t honest! This may be the most bizarre, unexpected “tell” of all. When no one will know it was us, you’d think we would tell it like it is, or at least, like we see it. We don’t.

• Triangulation (otherwise known as talking about people behind their backs) is a popular bonding activity. Friendships are formed over person A and person B’s mutual loathing of person C. People don’t talk directly to the persons with whom they have difficulty. Instead, they talk about them behind their backs.

• Employee engagement scores are low. Face it, the formal language of feedback is uninspiring and de-motivating. Does “satisfactory” capture anything specific that we could feel good about? Would it inspire us to work harder, do better? How about “meets expectations”? The colorless language of anonymous feedback, with its numbers, ratings and boxes to check, is soul killing.

• People aren’t told how much they are appreciated. It’s a huge tell if your recognition program occurs every two weeks and is called a paycheck.

• When managers decide to let someone go, they must wait or risk a lawsuit. When we finally reach the end of our rope, we learn that we’ll have to have the conversations we’ve avoided in the past, give the employee another chance, and document the heck out of everything.

• You and others aren’t motivated to do your best work. We get what we tolerate. Without timely, candid feedback, people whose behaviors or attitudes are a problem continue unchanged, blissfully unaware, dragging everyone down, including you. One problem person becomes a rock in everyone’s shoes. Rather than remove the rock, we grow accustomed to limping, while execution is delayed and frustration grows.

• Relationships flat-line and fail. The conversation is the relationship. When the conversation stops because we don’t want to risk a negative reaction or if you and I add our candid assessments of each other’s performance to the list of things we’re unable to talk about, all of the possibilities for our relationships grow smaller.

• There is no joy in Mudville. Employees walk around unhappy, unhealthy, on edge, bored, unengaged. Your company is not happy workplace. Just a workplace.

• The organization’s long-term survival is at risk. Profits are down, customers are fleeing, good employees are leaving. This occurs in part because an organization professing to value honesty and openness while promoting anonymous feedback is out of integrity. Companies in which stated values actually drive behavior and decisions will weather tough times far more successfully than companies whose practices are at odds with their so-called values statement.

• Respect for leaders is waning. Everyone is thinking: How could you, our leader, allow this to continue? Would somebody please bell the cat?!

• You become invisible. If you remain silent in the presence of poor performance or a lousy attitude, you will become increasingly invisible to yourself and to others. Yes, you will safe. You will also be anonymous, undifferentiated, your identity blurred. With mounting unease, you may realize that you are what’s missing.

• People fail to grow professionally and personally. It’s hard to imagine anyone of substance saying, “I’m so glad I’ve remained blissfully unaware of how others feel about me, enjoyed few insights into my character and have experienced zero growth as a human being.”

Anonymity is addictive and contagious. We grow accustomed to it, become anesthetized, barely registering the consistent message our gut has been sending us for years. “Tell the truth.” And we infect others. Ask yourself, where else does anonymity live in the organization and what damage is it doing? At what level in the organization? In what other situations are people withholding what they really think and feel? What are the implications?

Source

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Be Flexible with Others

Why Being Flexible with Others Brings Success

by: Andy Sullivan

Other people live in the same world as you. Perhaps another way of looking at this is to say, there are people who share the same world as you. This may seem an obvious point to make, but many people believe the world revolves around them. The people who share the world with us have just as much right to follow their dreams as you or me. A lot of people fail to grasp that people in this world provide the opportunities for success. The adage, it’s not what you know but who you know, and it’s is true in every way. Whether you like it or not, other people will continue to exist in your world .Accepting that these people have the right to cohabit this Earth with you makes plain sense. You should also accept that other people may choose to live according to a set of values that are not your own .

You have probably noticed that humans come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colours. No doubt, you have seen that not all people share the same religion culture or political opinion. Accepting diversity is one of the best ways to increase your tolerance of others. Acknowledging that other people have a right to their own ideas about how to live their lives even when you totally disagree with what they are saying can save you a lot of emotional distress. People are going to continue to exercise their beliefs no matter what you think.

Accepting others is the key to being free of anger stressors and unhealthy rage. Wanting others to treat you well and with respect is fair enough. Similarly, you probably want other people to do a good job for you. Social contracts are like gentlemens agreements where we presume a certain person will treat us in a particular way. You need to ask yourself, am I doing everything I can to fill my end of the bargain?

The Earth seen from Apollo 17. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Keeping your attitudes flexible and based on preferences, rather than demands or expectations, can keep you in harmony with yourself. The more rigid and demanding you are of others, the more likely it is that you will become angry and bitter for no good reason. Being flexible towards others means you have to be prepared to tolerate disrespect from others too. Having a flexible outlook means accepting that there are some people in this world who do not share the same values or respect culture as you. Of course, this is slightly different when it comes to reacting to people we know personally, we are talking here about people in everyday life. Remember that people behave according to how they want to behave not how you want them to behave.

The point I am making here is that putting people down makes respecting people in general difficult. You need to sustain a level of respect for others in order to be able to consider their behaviour correctly. The alternative is accepting them as people who make mistakes just like yourself. Accepting other people will make you a more tolerant and more pleasant person. There are rewards to reap from this mindset: your mind set will become more positive and energetic in the right way.

As we have been discussing, one of the best ways to determine your frame of mind is to think about how you are with other people. A great way to do this is to picture how you behave towards people you do not know. Are you outgoing and open to meeting and talking with others? Or are you insular and afraid. Believe it or not one of the best ways to overcome a negative frame of mind is to change your attitude to the world around you and that means the people in it as well

By believing that other people are complex, ever-changing and mistake ridden individuals, you will see the beauty of your new tolerant state of mind. Frustration will occur if you believe that the people around you are interfering with you goal. If you carry on in this way, you will experience the unhealthy sort of rage that makes your life plain miserable.

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