Properly managed, trust is one of the most important routes to competitive advantage for any country, company and individual, says Laurance Kuper, MD of Johannesburg-based business strategy consultancy Competitive Strategy and the author of Ethics – the leadership edge – How to sharpen strategy with values and trust.

Trust in business is at an all time low. Many organisations have incorporated trust into their mission statement or have adopted it as a core competency. Yet, few business leaders know how to rebuild and maintain trust.

It isn’t just major financial scandals or unethical behaviour during corporate restructuring, downsizing and mergers and acquisitions that inflict a gut-wrenching sense of betrayal.

“It is the small, day-to-day things that erode trust and ultimately lead to a sense of betrayal among employees,” says co-author of Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace Michelle Reina.

Kuper adds that any act of bad management erodes trust, including:

• Inconsistent messages from top management
• Inconsistent standards
• A willingness to tolerate incompetence or bad behaviour
• Concealing real issues by sugar-coating feedback
• Failure to trust others to do good work
• A tendency to ignore painful or politically charged situations
• Consistent company under-performance
• Rumours that are improvised news in an information vacuum
• All other management activities that reflect a lack of integrity, competence and communication.

Kuper says a dithering duality goes on behind the scenes in many large, well-known companies where people pretend that trust exists where there is none. They are polite in the name of harmony when cynicism and distrust are rife.

Kuper says this so-called “social hypocrisy”’ eats away at the very core of an organisation. Meetings in these organisations are painfully strained and frustrating, because:

• They fail to provide opportunities to build trust and solve problems in the kind of discussion that releases people’s creativity whilst building their sense of solidarity
• People sit on their ideas, withhold criticism and courteously agree with plans they know won’t work.
• Criticism flows freely after these meetings. People run down their colleagues, pursue their own agendas and become the world’s greatest cynics.

“The net effect is an organisation that cannot be counted on to deliver on its mandate enthusiastically and creatively,” says Kuper.

Gossiping, hoarding information, failure to take action, hidden agendas, over-promising and under-delivering are all trust issues business leaders grapple with on a daily basis.

Research conducted over the last decade found that people mostly breach communication trust though gossip and back-biting. Nine out of 10 employees experience it.

Information under-load erodes trust
A common complaint among employees in many organisations is they don't know what's going on. “They lack information,” says Reina.
In the absence of information, they do what anyone would do: They guess. In offices where there is a lack of trust, it's natural for people deprived of information to:

• Assume the worst
• Start distrusting their managers and spreading false rumours
• Become less productive, or less interested in their jobs.
• Resign

Keeping employees in the know is a daily managerial relationship responsibility. Be mindful of how your actions affect your relationships with employees, advises Reina.

Those who are not, could get stuck in a negative feedback loop, in which a manager's action or inaction leaves employees feeling betrayed, so they undermine the manager by not performing well, making the manager feel betrayed. The manager then withholds information from the employees, who then begin to assume the manager is working against them.

Building sustainable trust

Raising people’s awareness of what trust means and the behaviours that build it, is the first step in trust building, says Reina.

“Providing a common language of trust puts employees on the same page and cultivates a shared understanding that supports constructive discussion and action planning.”

Training programs that define trust and provide employees with instruction for preserving and fixing trust should be given on an ongoing basis.

At certain critical junctions in a company's life, such as during mergers and acquisitions when an organisation is going through change and transition, people become unclear of what is expected of them and of their roles and responsibilities," she notes.

"When they're not clear of their expectations, they're also not aware of what agreements they are being expected to honour."

Training that emphasises the importance of communicating concerns directly with managers and co-workers, rather than relying on the gossip mill is therefore essential.

In addition, when people have skills, abilities or insights they are not able to offer, they often feel as though they are not being perceived as trustworthy. As such, they are not trusting in return, says Reina.

Companies that “effectively match employees' skill sets to their work may see an organisation that's not only more efficient, but one that suffers a lot less from interpersonal problems.”
She says you need to trust your managers and employees, but not with tunnel vision.

"It is the responsibility of a leader to be aware there will be some people who at some point in time may become vulnerable and lose their sense of themselves, and may behave in a way that is untrustworthy. We are human beings, and even those of us who are highly trustworthy do trip up. We do lose our way. We do mistakes. We do lie, and we do violate trust."

Kuper adds, “Measures to prevent people from betraying others’ trust are ultimately based on trust.”

Regardless of how clear the understanding, tight the contract or complex the bureaucracy is or how many transparency measures are introduced to ensure trustworthy behaviour, human ingenuity will always find ways to wriggle around the rules, he says.