How Much is Low Trust Costing Your Organization?

Have you ever stopped to consider the economic value of trust when it comes to building your team or organization? If not, you probably have blind spots within your organization and pockets of hidden potential that are costing you a lot of time and money. How much time and money? Well, that’ the tricky thing about the cost of low trust verses the value of high trust…it’s not something you can print on your earnings report or your expense accounts. It’s not immediately quantifiable, and it's not something which you spend a lot of time and energy thinking about.

Nevertheless, the importance of trust is something which you cannot afford to overlook when it comes to building a thriving organization.

The High Cost of Low Trust

As a demonstration of how costly low trust can be, just think about how much more management and supervision is needed when you cannot trust your employees to produce results without immediate supervision. Just think about how much money is spent on “snoopervising” technologies such as e-mail archiving, surveillance cameras and other tools which require money to purchase and man power oversee. And how about the incredible impact which these things have on your employees who clearly see that you don’t believe you can trust them?

Your employees are the most valuable asset in your company, they are the very thing which is required in order to make all of your systems and procedures work properly. They are the first people who your customer speaks with and therefore they are the voice and the face of your company. But when an employee feels mistrusted, it comes as a blow to their sense of personal validation, which has a dramatic impact on their attitude and ability to make a valuable contribution. This is but a taste of what low trust might be costing your organization.

The Benefits of High Trust

If all of the above things come as a result of having low trust, this ought to give you an idea of just how valuable high trust can be. When an employee feels trusted to do the right thing or to do a job well, they feel both empowered and accountable because of that trust. This is because when a person knows that they are trusted they feel validated and that validation builds confidence and a sense of self-reliance. This cuts back on the need for micromanagement or for duplicated work to be done due to checking up and hovering over.

This level of organizational trust empowers your readers to focus on what they do best without having to worry about babysitting the people who work for them. This level of trust also builds an emotionally healthy atmosphere which makes it easier for your employees to deal graciously and comfortably with your customers. As you can imagine, this level of high trust can have a dramatic impact on both customer and employee loyalty and therefore increase the potential of your organization.

So what can you do to begin building and cultivating high trust?

Building High Organizational Trust

Organizational leadership expert Steven MR Covey states that there are two crucial dimensions of trust: character and competence. Character is the moral side of trust and has to do with a person's motives and personal sense of integrity. Competence on the other hand is also required for trust to work properly. After all, it is possible for someone to be of strong moral character and still lack the competence to get the job done. In order to build a genuine trust within your organization, you have to address both of these dimensions properly.

Building the character dimension of trust can be accomplished through accurate and well organized hiring procedures, but also through extending trust to your employees. People have the tendency to be mistrusting of people who are mistrusting them, but the opposite is also true. So if you have solid hiring procedures and also cultivate the art of extending trust to your employees, it will inspire them to trust you and your leaders as well. If you’re afraid that the people working for you are not trustworthy enough for you to extend trust to, then the next place you need to look is in your hiring procedures.

However, most of the time, the character dimension of trust isn’t the biggest problem with an organization. That’s where the dimension of competence comes in.

Building the competence dimensions of trust begins with being clear about the expectations of each of your employees and team leaders. Clear expectations provide the standards by which you can establish and verify trust. Without clear expectations, it's easy for people to overstep their boundaries and to over extend themselves, which can have a dramatic impact on their ability to fulfill their job description. But clear expectations also draw the line between leaders and subordinates in regards to responsibility.

If one of your team members is unclear as to what is expected of them, there’s a very good chance that they won't live up to your “unspoken” expectations. But since they are unaware of the expectations, it will be easy for them to blame the supervisor when they are confronted about failure to fulfill the duties of their role. And frankly, the supervisor would be to blame. But because expectations were not made clear beginning, the misunderstanding would probably be interpreted as a violation of trust on both sides.

The final key to building the competence dimensions of trust is having all of your employees in the right “seats on the bus.” This means that everyone is placed in a specific job description according to what they are both capable and willing to do. The willingness part of this is crucial, and the one which is the most commonly overlooked. Just because someone is capable of doing something doesn't mean that they are willing to do it with the spirit of teamwork and enthusiasm.

But if you place people in positions according to their capabilities and their motivations, you can be certain that they will deliver results which will inspire trust. This will make it easier for you to extend trust wisely and to harness the incredible power of high organizational trust.