Trust in Senior Leaders

In their 2008 report on the State of Employee Engagement, consulting group Blessing White state that only about half (53 percent) of respondents trust executives at the top compared to 75 percent who trust their immediate manager or supervisor.

It is more difficult to demonstrate trustworthiness without a one-on-one relationship. The same is also a challenge with people you don’t see very often, if at all. But I think there is more to it than that.

Senior executives’ expectations of what being trustworthy means for them is quite different to what employees expect from them. It is quite easy to understand when we look at the four Elements of Trust described in a previous post: Congruence, Openness, Acceptance, and Reliability.

Senior executives see themselves as trustworthy by being Congruent (honest and ethical), and Reliable (producing results). And in reality, these are the elements that the board and shareholders are primarily focused on as well.

But employees see things differently. Yes of course they expect their senior leaders to be honest and ethical and run a profitable business, but for them personally, acceptance and openness are more important. They want to know that their senior executives value and respect them and the contribution they make, and they want a higher degree of openness between senior executives and themselves.
This involves not just communicating more openly with employees, but also listening to them. How would employees in your organization answer the questions:

•    Does our senior executive team know what is on employees’ minds?
•    Does our senior executive team care about what is on employees’ minds?

If half of the employees in your organization don’t trust your senior team, that is likely to be the same half who are not engaged or passionate about what they do.

Building trust requires all four elements of trust. It is worth the effort for senior executives to get out of their offices and meet with employees. They have things on their mind that could grow your business.

What are you doing in your organization to increase trust with employees? I’d like to hear about it – just post me a comment in the “comments” section below this post.

Comments

[Keith Ayers]

Thanks for the great comments. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman made the term "management by walking around" famous many years ago in their best selling book "In Search of Excellence", and perhaps it was over-used. Many of the companies mentioned fell from grace, and their research has also been questioned, but do we need to "throw out the baby with the bath water?" The principle still applies today... employees need to know their leaders as people; to see them and be able to communicate with them. Then trust will soar.

[Laura Hauser]

Thanks for this article and the research reference. I want to share it with my MBA students at Pepperdine where I teach a course on organization design and advanced principles of leadership.
Laura

[John]

One of our senior leaders has just started taking groups of front-line employees out to lunch. I haven't heard how it's being received, since this just started in the last couple of weeks. But I think it's a step in the right direction of opening up communication, especially on the listening side.

[Lauren]

Keith, I think some of the best examples of senior leadership I've seen are CEOs spend their time out on the factory floor talking with their employees. If CEOs take the view that people are their most important asset (see recent Financial Times article on the turnaround of Jack Welch former GE CEO) then perhaps they would have more time to do develop openness and acceptance with their people. Great article, thank you. Perhaps a good tie-in to your former post I Don't Have Time!.