Trust in the workplace

It’s the job of each of us to be
in charge of our lives, our careers
JO HAWKINS DONOVAN
For SBT
Some words are so big and fluffy they mean nothing to me. Like “happiness”, or “communication”, or “trust”.
I trust one friend to be 15 minutes late for everything. I trust another to exaggerate to the point you need to water down her conversations. Her common cold becomes the Laotian flu. I trust my husband with my life … but not with my computer for five seconds.
And when someone starts a conversation with “Trust me”, up goes the little red flag, the same flag that pops up when I hear “If I can be perfectly honest with you” or “To be frank…”.
Yet the trust word is bandied about so much that it’s helpful to chunk it down and figure out what meaning you want to assign to it. The dictionary provides: “a firm belief or confidence in the honesty, integrity, reliability, justice, etc., of another person or thing”. The Bible provides, in Proverbs: “Before you trust a man, eat a peck of salt with him.”
I like that one.
We hear a lot lately about the sweeping lack of trust in the workplace. “How can I work here when I don’t trust my boss?” “I don’t trust half the people who report to me.” “We can’t trust anything we hear from the CEO, he only cares about the shareholders.” I’m sure you’ve heard comments such as those that came from some of my clients.
The employment contract has changed. The relationship we have with employers is not the relationship we remember from our childhood, when our dads or neighbors worked for 30 years for the same company, with good faith that they would be “taken care of” after retirement.
Every day brings news of another business reacting to a slowdown with layoffs, sometimes the cutting of thousands of jobs. The New York outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas counted a total of 675,000 job cuts in the US in 1999, almost matching the record cuts for the decade in 1998. Job security is a myth — and maybe it always was.
Dennis and Michelle Reina wrote a book called Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace. The Reinas have a consulting firm in Vermont, and their book is getting a lot of press in the industry. They say that “betrayal” refers to an intentional or unintentional breach of trust or the perception of such a breach. They talk of the many issues that are pulling at the fabric of trust in the workplace. Dennis Reina states, “Over the last two decades of downsizing and mergers, people feel vulnerable and people feel betrayed.” They admit that some employees carry a lack of trust with them into a new job, maybe generated from experiences with former employers. I think some employees are armed with that lack of trust because they grew up hearing, at the dinner table night after night, “You just can’t trust management.” There is much evidence that people vary in their willingness to place trust in others or in institutions, despite the level of trustworthiness or good intentions of management.
There is just as much evidence that trust in relationships — between workers and companies as well as between companies and customers — is a big factor in sustainable success. So all of us in business have to grapple with this complicated issue called trust.
Some business gurus are proposing a return to family values in the workplace, based on their conclusions that successful companies function like extended families. They recommend periodic “all-hands meetings” where members come together to keep abreast of the organization’s plans, celebrate, and just have fun together. Familiarity is recommended, following the example of Midwest Express CEO Tim Hoeksema, who is simply Tim to everyone. Those are sound suggestions, along with attention to fairness, consistency and authenticity. Clearly, the best way to build trust is to be trustworthy, all the time. A CEO who refers executives to me for coaching said over lunch one day, “Why do my people trust you?” I answered, “Because they can.”
Nevertheless, I take issue with some of this advice, especially the recipe for building trust by duplicating an extended family atmosphere. In my experience, distrust is rampant in many families.
Trust has to be chunked down into “trusting to do what?” Betrayal, instead of flattening us to the cement, can be reframed into data. “Now I know my boss is capable of stealing my ideas,” just like Melanie Griffith’s boss in “Working Girl.” That’s data. You adjust your behavior accordingly, and that adjustment will entail calmly looking at your choices, including leaving.
In personal or work relationships, the only trust we can truly depend on is trust in ourselves. The best of bosses might have a stroke and lose the ability to even recognize me, much less remember he promised to take care of my financial future.
I coach my clients away from depending on the organization, or any one in it, to be in charge of their lives, their careers, their futures. That’s a job for each of us. We can strengthen a belief in ourselves, in the reality that we have the resources to deal with whatever comes down from the organization. We can figure out how to be OK in the face of many scenarios, rather than lying in bed wondering “What if …”.
Trust in ourselves is the only secure trust, and we’ll no doubt violate that occasionally. We can rebuild trust after betrayal, trust in self or others. We can allow ourselves and others a measure of human frailty. I like the words of Herbert George Wells from his Outline of History: “Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness …. Not one is altogether more noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile …. Not a single one but has at some time wept.”
Jo Hawkins Donovan has a coaching and psychotherapy firm in Milwaukee, and can be reached at 414-271-5848 or jo@hawkinsdonovan.com. The firm’s Web site is www.hawkinsdonovan.com. Hawkins Donovan will respond to your questions in this column. Her column appears in every other issue of SBT.
Aug. 3, 2001 Small Business Times, Milwaukee