Most people do not pay attention to trust in their organization until it is broken. But by then the damage is done: people withhold facts and information, managers set convoluted goals, management is not available, people talk behind each others’ backs, etc. The list goes on and on.
Part of the reason may be that people see trust as a “nice to have” cultural issue to work on once you have everything else in place. This is a fundamental mistake because the level of trust in your organization is a hard-edged economic driver that will impact just about every aspect of your organizations performance.
I’ve just been re-reading Stephen M. R. Covey’s book The Speed of Trust where he describes this impact as either a high trust dividend that can add 40% to your organization’s performance or a low trust tax that can subtract up to 80% by adding to your costs.
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This dividend or tax impact occurs because trust is the ultimate determining factor whether individuals will be good team players, will make the commitment to change, and will work beyond minimum requirements to achieve desired outcomes.
All relationships, personal and professional, are based upon trust. And there is a big difference between the way people work together when they trust each other versus how they work when trust is low or nonexistent.
How’s trust impacting performance in your organization?
What if a manager (or management of a company) assumes that human beings are untrustworthy? I’ve been writing on this…as to what it tells about their attitude toward their customers. I suspect that such managers would still try to create a culture of trust, if only as a sort of window-dressing (i.e., marketing and human resource management tool). Nice blog!