Building a platform of Trust, assumptions...

In my previous post I referred to building a platform of trust, and you are probably thinking, well that's obvious.  If we can't trust each other and the people in our organisations, how do achieve our organisational goals? You are absolutely right, yet, very few organisations actually get this right. and actually operate from a default position of trust.

Let's look at a couple of (wrongful) assumptions we tend to make:

As employers:

• During our recruitment process, while we deem trustworthiness as a default and critical characteristic of a candidate, we tend to assess this characteristic based on their experience and level of skill.  Let's be honest, how many times have you recruited a person because they "wowed" you in the interview, their CV was impressive, and you never backed it up with proper reference checks? 
• We deem ourselves to be trustworthy to our staff because we pay them a salary?  We think to ourselves "how can they not trust me, I'm paying them a salary?" I call this trustworthiness by virtue of payment. 
• And then one of my personal favourites, as the CEO of the business, carrying all of the responsibility of the business on my shoulders, "I emanate the very essence of trust by virtue of my role and responsibility.  I wouldn't have had this role if I wasn't trustworthy."  Yet, somewhere in the corner of the office, someone does not trust you at all, because you failed to recognise them when doing shopping at the mall over the weekend.  Trustworthiness by virtue of role and responsibility.

Now let's flip the coin to the other side, as employees:

• We deem ourselves trustworthy as we are meeting our goals and KPI's.  We are skilled in our jobs and have worked hard to get where we are.  Dare I say it, we deserve trust!  Trustworthiness by virtue of achievement.  This is a big one!
• Earning in the top 90 percentile of people in my job profile I can obviously be trusted.  The flip-side of trustworthiness by virtue of payment. 
• As a specialist in my field of expertise I am trustworthy as I have studied and are a recognised though-leader.  Trustworthiness by virtue of knowledge.  Knowledge is power right?

I'm sure I can think of 100's more examples but for the sake of brevity will stop here, I think you get the point.   I also haven't even touched on the examples of trust between teams  and peers.  

You see, all of these examples looks at trust from a workplace perspective, but we tend to miss the human element in it all.   We tend to assume people are trustworthy or even assume we are regarded as trustworthy while we don't take steps to ensure that those assumptions are correct.  Now we all know the definition of assumption...yet it seems like we make a lot of assumptions about having a platform of trust in our organisation as stated in the opening paragraph of this post.

I recently read a remarkable book which touches on the lack of trust as one of the challenges in a team context in business.  I strongly recommend "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni if you want to learn more about it.

Next post on trust and a lack of information...a short story

Trust, facts and information at your fingertips

Having worked in world of information technology all my career, I loved (and probably still do...) to use the phrase, you will have "information at your fingertips" when trying to close a deal;  often referring to data analytics and dashboards, eluding to the value it provides to people who has to make important decisions in their day to day jobs.  Now imagine we could all have little information dashboards floating above our heads displaying different pieces of information as we go about our daily lives.

I enjoy watching futuristic movies and as I'm writing this I have this picture in my mind of people working in an office building.  They all have little dashboards floating above their heads, showing the information they deal with and have to share with others, as they go through their daily tasks.  It also shows their thoughts and feelings as they process information and engage with other colleagues.  Every time someone makes a decision which did not take any factual information into account, but instead was based on personal bias, prejudice or someone else's opinion, the words "JUDGEMENT ERROR" starts flashing in big bold red letters.

Now wouldn't that be wonderful?!  It will make running and managing a business so much easier as we will always have the confidence that whenever this happens, we can immediately address the situation, and not just that, we can also deal with the facts as they will all be available, on the dashboards, allowing us to make informed decisions.

While this is not practical and will probably never happen or be possible (hey, you never know), I do believe that through building a culture of trust throughout a business, this can be made possible.  While information, facts and feelings might not float around in dashboards above our heads, we can create a platform where all employees, staff members, volunteers, managers, even board members, have the freedom and are encouraged to share information, however negative or bad they think it might be perceived, knowing that their input is regarded as valuable, and that their personal interests are protected.

I'll continue on this topic of trust over the next posts, looking at what I believe this "platform" should look like, what it is, and what it is NOT.

Trust & the "bottom line"...some questions to ponder

Let me continue this topic by asking a couple of simple questions to give you some food for thought.  

As a person who who is in a leadership role, be it a board member, senior executive, line manager or even a team leader leading a team of volunteers; have you ever found yourself in a situation where there was a direct report you just did not trust?  Be it due to something that happened or someone new who joined the team and you weren't sure what their motivations were.  

How did you engage with this person?  Did you find that you were open to their suggestions or feedback, or any information for that matter which they provided to you?  

Do you think this had a positive or negative impact on the ability of the organisation or team to achieve its goals?

Hang on, hang on...don't jump to conclusions just yet...I realise that the impatient among us might feel that they need to address this immediately which could result in disastrous consequences.  Please bear with me a while longer....

Some more questions to ponder on....

Have you ever worked in an organisation where you reported to someone or even worked a couple of levels down from the senior leadership but somehow did not trust their motivations; for some reason did not trust their leadership or worse case just simply did not agree with the direction in which they were taking the organisation? In other words, you did not trust their judgement.

How did this make you feel? Were you motivated to do the best at what you were being paid to do?  Maybe your answer to this last question was yes as you would comment that you are a person of integrity and although you don't agree with people you will always deliver you best.  Well, let me ask you this, would you be more or less inclined to share information, other than the minimum required from your role.  To give an example, if you are attending a weekly feedback meeting, would you provide the minimum feedback required, or would you feel motivated to share ideas on how things could be improved as well?

Now, reverse the roles.  Try, you might find this hard, depending on the specific situation.

Would you view things differently?  Would you view people differently?

You see, viewing situations and people from other's perspective sometimes, not always, but sometimes, provides us with new information which allows us to alter our own thoughts and decision making.  

My experience has been that it's really hard for people to see different perspectives.  This ultimately creates a barrier for trust to be built, ultimately resulting in inefficiency and unproductive behaviour within individuals, teams and organisations regardless of experience, seniority or intellect.

Trust...insurance for your bottom line

I realise that by taking on this topic in the start of my blogging career, I'm probably jumping into the deep end, but hey, this is how I learnt to swim when I was 5 years old, so here we go.

Now you might ask what trust has to do with the bottom line. Well,  I believe it has everything to do with the bottom line!  You see, in the world of P&L's, income statements and balance sheets, while the financial performance of businesses are the facts and instruments on which decisions are being made at a board and executive level, these documents don't actually contain the factual information of the operational engine generating those numbers.  Rather, they reflect the results of the performance of that engine and therefore convey very little about the actual challenges and reasons why businesses do well, or poorly for that matter.   Yet, I have been guilty of making operational decisions, and not just financial decisions based on these results, as I'm sure many other's have done.  Don't get me wrong, I believe the time calls when the tough decisions have to be made to downsize, close a business unit, or worse case, liquidate a business (the latter which I have luckily not experienced), but it should not be the only facts which are considered when making decisions as a business leader.


I want to take one step back and look at the word "fact(s)", defined as "information used as evidence or as part of a report or news article". I don't think anyone will argue when I say that income statements and balance sheets are true facts, we even have audit firms which are paid lots of money to confirm and approve these facts. These are factual numbers, empirical and scientific information providing the business leadership with valuable data to make financial decisions on, yet, when it comes to managing and running our businesses we rely on our judgement and many times on people's opinions when making decisions on operational processes, organisational structuring, appointing and firing staff. Sometimes we have to do this due to a lack of data, of factual information that provides clarity and a clear black or white answer. We therefore rely on people closer to the situation to provide "input" (opinion) and help with "perspective" (perception).


Now you would argue that no single business person can know everything and be able to always make decisions based on factual information as it's not always possible to get the facts; but I want to argue that we can get close... and that is by building a culture of trust across all levels of the organisation, starting at the top.


More on trust in the next post...

Welcome to Perspektiv

If you are an executive, business leader or a person responsible for delivering results in a business, this blog should be worthwhile following.

I don't profess myself to be a guru or an academic in any shape or form, but I am someone who loves learning and increasing my own skillset through engaging in challenging activities and gaining hands-on experience, especially when it involves a diverse mix of people, complex tasks and systems and reaching a common set of goals or achieving a specific purpose.    

I have found the corporate business world and volunteer organisations like churches to be an ideal training ground to live out this passion and have realised through my own experience that there are probably many people like myself who have had to live out their own dreams by "learning the hard way".

While I'm a big supporter of this method of learning, I have experienced that we sometimes get "stuck" with challenging problems and situations.  I'm hoping that by sharing some of my own experiences and learnings others can benefit and get and outside perspective.