Is There Trust in Your Company?

By Charles Vander Kooi

I have been on consulting visits with contractors where you could feel the distrust that had built up in that company. Employees didn't trust management as far as they could throw them and vice versa. A huge wall of distrust had been built between people who dearly needed to trust each other in order to be successful.

Without trust, you can spend an extraordinary amount of time micromanaging and double-checking everything mistrusted employees do. If employees don't trust you, they gain attitudes that result in all sorts of negative behaviors.

Sound like your company a little bit, or maybe it sounds like your company a lot? Do you want to keep this from ever happening in your company? Do you want to know how to re-build and maintain trust in your company? Then read on.

The Trust Process

Before you meet someone or learn anything about them, you're typically neutral - unless you're an overly cynical or overly trusting person. With no evidence, you have no reason to either trust someone or distrust them. People either earn each other's trust or they earn each other's distrust.

When my girls turned 16, I neither trusted nor distrusted them with the car. I was simply neutral. When they asked for the keys to the car I told them, "Be home by midnight, drive carefully, and fill the gas tank." If they were home by midnight, not a scratch on the car, and the gas tank was full, I trusted them. If they arrived home at 1 a.m. with a dented fender and an empty gas tank, I distrusted them with the car.

To put this in context, ask yourself these questions:

• Did your employees promise to take care of something but later you found it wasn't done?
• Did employees say they would work on a Saturday but then they never showed up?
• Did they promise they would never do something again, but then they did it again?

Trust is a 2-way street. It's just as important that you earn employee trust as they earn yours:

• Did you promise your people a bonus but never gave it to them?
• Did you promise them a raise but you conveniently forgot about it?
• Maybe you promised them a new computer or other equipment but either never got it, or gave it to someone else?
• Did you promise a Saturday off work, but it never happened?

Mrs. Vander Kooi Doesn't Want Excuses

Even though you or your employees may have arguable reasons for not keeping promises, distrust still builds up and you need to take action to restore trust.

Too often we take what I call the Marlboro Man approach. Let's say I tell my wife I will pick her up from her work at 10:30 a.m. to run an errand. I tell her to come down from her office and be waiting there by the front door. So 10:30 comes and goes and I don't show up. It's 10:45 and I'm still not there. At 10:55 I swing into the parking lot at 60 mph, and pull up and she finally gets in the car.

She asks, "Where have you been?" only not very nicely. Now, at that point I have a choice. I can tell her, "I was on the phone with someone and couldn't get away. Then, someone stopped me as I was heading for the door with a question I had to answer. And to make things worse, the traffic was bad on the way here. It was not my fault. I got here as quickly as possible so get off my back."

At that point she will say, "Okay, Okay," and I will feel like it is taken care of. Is it really taken care of? Actually no, it is not taken care of. I have just built up a wall of distrust.

This is what happens the next time I tell her I will pick her up at noon to go to lunch: I pull into the parking lot at noon and she won't be by the front door. I will drive around the parking lot for 10 minutes before I park and go up to the office. She will be there working and be surprised that I was actually on time and tell me she was going to go down at 12:20 p.m. since I was so late last time.

How Things Should Happen

What should I have done? What should she have done? The second incident wouldn't have happened if we'd handled it right the first time when I was the one who was late. In that first incident, 3 things needed to happen:

1. The first thing I needed to do was confess. I needed to say, "I could give you all the excuses in the world, but I was still wrong. I said I would be here at 10:30 a.m. and I wasn't." Confession is hard on our pride, but is absolutely necessary in order to maintain trust.
2. The next step is repentance. "I'm sorry. I will be on time the next time or give you advance warning that the time is changing." "I'm sorry" are the 2 hardest words for men, especially contractors, to say. But they are absolutely essential in order to maintain trust.
3. The last thing she (or the employee, or you) must do is forgive. Forgiveness at its best means to forget enough to allow trust to be restored. If something happens again a few weeks later, she can't say, "And there was that incident 2 weeks ago when you were late." Forgiveness puts past events away enough for a person to continue to try and deal with each new event properly and thus maintain a level of trust.

Do you remember a bumper sticker that was around for a while that said, "Have you hugged your kid today?" I wanted to print one that said, "Have you confessed, repented, and been forgiven by someone today?" Then I would put it on every contractors' dashboard.

You see, every day you will earn people's trust and their distrusts. The real question is: How do you acknowledge the distrust and turn it into trust?