This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
Effective communications comes from building trust, and trust comes from taking the time to build connections with employees and from, yes, communicating. The problem is that many people don’t typically drop by to chat with the boss. If you only talk to the ones who do drop by, you end up with limited information and communications structure that’s more like a game of telephone. There is also a very good chance that you’ll split your team into an in group and an out group. If you really want to get people talking to you, you need to seek them out. IBM’s founder, Tom Watson, was legendary for showing up unannounced at different IBM locations and just dropping in to chat with different people. He was trusted as few CEOs have ever been: employees believed that he cared about them personally. The stories about him reflect that to this day.
Trust is not just about keeping your word. It’s also about living up to the image of leadership in your organization and honoring the implicit promises in the organizational story and culture. If the story your organization tells is one of people being recognized for their work, you need to make sure that happens.
If something happens to cause a breech of trust, you need to acknowledge it, apologize, and explain what happened. Economic conditions or other surprises sometimes mean that promises can’t be honored, be that a raise or sending someone to a conference they were looking forward to attending. When that happens, you need to be honest about the situation. Trying to deny it or fool people only compounds the problem whereas repairing trust makes it stronger.
In a very real sense, trust and safety go hand in hand: when we don’t trust someone, we don’t feel safe around them and, conversely, when we don’t feel safe around someone we also don’t trust them. We tend to be more on our guard and less willing to engage. Commitment, innovation, feedback, and intelligent risk taking are sharply reduced. Careless risk taking, on the other hand, tends to increase.
Trust, it must be remembered, is a two way street. As your employees learn to trust you, you also learn to trust them. That means developing an accurate picture of their strengths and weaknesses. If you force people to operate in their areas of weakness, they will be more likely to fail. This reduces your trust in them and causes them to view you as setting them up for failure. That, in turn, reduces trust in you.
Part of building trust is recognizing process. Every person in an organization tries to work in the ways they work best. Each person seeks to develop their own process. That process is, in a very real sense, a manifestation of who that person is in the organizational community. If you cannot trust someone’s process, you will not be able to trust them; conversely, if you do not trust someone’s process, they will not trust you: you are essentially telling them they cannot be who they are. When you trust someone’s process, however, you build trust in them and enable them to trust you. This increases productivity, motivation, and loyalty. Fundamentally, as psychologist Tony Putman observed, a person becomes what he is treated as being. How you treat the process is how you treat the person.
Recognize that trusting the process is not just about trusting that the results will be what you expect. That is important, but it’s a surprisingly small piece of the puzzle. There is no such thing as a perfect process and no process will always execute without something going wrong. True trust comes when you know that people can be trusted to handle mistakes and unpredictable events. Trust in our own skills comes from learning that we can make a mistake and recover; without that, trust is brittle. Trust in a process comes from recognizing that the process may sometimes give us the wrong answer, but it also gives us the ability to recognize that fact and recover.
Finally, how you act in a crisis can make or break people’s trust in you. A leader who panics in a crisis can undo months or years of team building and trust. On the flip side, being able to remain calm and focused in a crisis can increase trust as you become seen as someone who can be counted on when the chips are down. However, some trust must already exist for your behavior in a crisis to matter: in the Mann Gulch disaster, Wagner Dodge never built enough trust with his team for them to trust him when he figured out an innovative way to save their lives; as a result, most of them died. Conversely, after hurricane Sandy hit the east coast in October of 2012, President Obama won praise from some of his harshest critics for his calm, disciplined, organized response to the disaster.
Your response in a crisis is the model for how others will respond. If you remain calm and build safety, people will respond to that and trust you more than ever. If you panic, you will reduce perceptions of safety and trust will decline.
Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
Imagine that first day on a new job working with a group of strangers: there you are, staring at your partners, wondering what to do. You don’t want to admit that you don’t know; after all, perhaps you’re in this group by accident. Sure, they said that the selection process was careful, but they must have made a mistake in your case. If anyone realizes just how little you know, they’ll surely ask you to leave!
The good news is that everyone else feels the same way!
If you’re lucky, a manager or team leader has already been assigned. They’ll clear up your confusion and get things going. If there is no formally appointed manager or leader, however, that can be a problem. It is truly amazing how long it can take to get nothing done. Often enough, though, the mounting pressure of an impending deadline will force someone to take charge or perhaps simply do the project themselves. The latter case, in particular, tends to trigger more than a little resentment!
The dominant characteristics of stage one groups are dependency and inclusion. Members are primarily concerned with their place in the group; the greatest fear is banishment. Consider that exile from the community was, for much of history, seen as a fate worse than death. Indeed, even today with all our technology, survival completely apart from the group which is civilization is extremely difficult!
Thus, members of stage one groups have a very strong focus on appearing competent. Making a mistake is perceived to be tantamount to risking membership in the group. Unfortunately, with many of the companies I work with, that is also the reality (that’s why I’m working with them! It’s not easy to change.). As a result, members are afraid to take risks or admit to mistakes, preventing effective error correction from taking place. The unwillingness to make mistakes or appear less than competent also means that members will often fail to ask questions, leading to confusion about objectives, and are unwilling to accept help lest that be seen as a sign of weakness.
Another characteristic of stage one groups is that the group does not know how its skills match up with the task at hand. Indeed, in a very real sense, the group does not know what its skills are as a group. It takes time and exploration for the group to discover their strengths and weaknesses and how they can support one another to maximize their strengths. There’s a reason the Red Sox have Spring Training, and even then they sometimes never get it together.
Communications in the group will tend to be polite, distant, sometimes appearing formal, or at least extremely careful, in nature. Because group members do not really know how they stand with one another, no one wants to offend anyone else. Conflict is seen as disruptive to the harmony of the group, proof that members are not committed or loyal. There is a great deal of “go along to get along” taking place.
It’s been argued, granted somewhat sarcastically, that to know oneself is the ultimate form of Freudian aggression. By contrast, in a group, the person most people wish they could work with is themselves. Since that’s not actually possible, similarity is the next best thing.
Groups seek common ground. This commonality may be physical, stemming from gender, skin color, size, etc. It may be based on background, nationality, education, or culture. The more diverse the group, the more likely the group will demand conformity as a way of building similarity. The conformity may be based around dress, time spent at the office, where and when to eat lunch, or buying in to some particular ideology. IBM’s blue suit and tie dress code was part of the effort to create similarity in the company and became a cultural icon; a political party’s efforts to require all members to buy into a particular orthodoxy is another way of building similarity. Conformity can also be based around dislike of an outside group or a member of the group who does not buy into the group’s values. Stage one groups are quick to punish such deviants, initially with the goal of bringing them back into the fold. Should that fail, they are usually shunned or exiled. Conformity works best when it focuses on issues that actually help the group get the job done. When conformity focuses on trivial or irritating topics such as requiring everyone to eat lunch together or always show up at the same time, it tends to stifle creativity and individual expression. This causes resentment and reduces group performance.
A strong leader can often be enough to provide the focal point, or at least a focal point, of similarity for the group. Members are usually extremely loyal to the leader, and will rarely question his judgment. When there are questions, they are usually relatively polite and restrained, at least as defined by the cultural norms of the organization. Think of the image of the 1950s manager who takes care of his employees and to whom the employees will go with work or personal problems.
Lacking a strong leader, the group may not coalesce at all. If the group does coalesce, it is often around something trivial or inappropriate: a particular style of dress, eating lunch at a certain restaurant, or in opposition to the schedule, mannerisms, or style of a particular team member. These early attempts at similarity actually produce conformity. Some conformity is necessary for the group to function; too much is stifling. Lacking leadership, the group will not be productive until a leader emerges. As distressing as this fact is for many people, leaderless groups simply don’t function.
The more diverse the group, the greater the need for conformity: the less the members appear to have in common, the more they need to create common ground. On the flip side, the higher the intelligence and self-esteem of the members, the more they resist conformity. As you might imagine, a diverse group of highly intelligent, competent, confident individuals is going to be struggling with two opposing psychological imperatives. Skillful leadership is particularly important here!
