The Enemies Of Trust

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: The Enemies of Trust

Competency: trust

Who benefits: everyone

Consultant Usage: a strong reminder about the conduct of our clients and ourselves

What’s it about? Among the competencies supported by this site is Trust.  It is hard to achieve and easy to lose … and hardly ever thought about until it is betrayed.

I was roaming around the achieves of our computer library recently when I came across a 2003 article on trust.  I struggled through the first two paragraphs and was glad I did.  What came next left me thinking … and that is a good thing … I think.

The third paragraph was the real introduction of article for me.  The authors introduce the notion of three kinds of trust in the work world.  “The first is strategic trust—the trust employees have in the people running the show to make the right strategic decisions.” “The second is personal trust—the trust employees have in their own managers.”  “The third is organizational trust—the trust people have not in any individual but in the company itself.”

My favorite paragraph is entitled “The Enemies List”: “What do the enemies of trust look like? Sometimes the enemy is a person: a first-line supervisor who habitually expresses contempt for top management. Sometimes it’s knit into the fabric of the organization: a culture that punishes dissent or buries conflict. Some enemies are overt: You promise that this will be the last layoff, and then it isn’t. And some are covert: A conversation you thought was private is repeated and then grossly distorted by the rumor mill. Because any act of bad management erodes trust, the list of enemies could be endless.”

The article goes on to list a number of practical ways, like inconsistent messages, that people dilute their trust account. 

So trust me on this: I urge you to read the whole article.  And if you have sufficient interest, you might also consider the authors’ book on the subject, The Trusted Leader.

Catch you later.
[tags]trust, trustworthy, truth, truthiness, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.