Trust - Stopping Erosion

I love visiting gorges. The carvings made by water, etched into the landscape over millions of years, are breathtaking. Water doesn’t seem significant enough to work its way through hundreds of metres of solid rock, but over time it has its way. Observing a given moment, the erosion is imperceptible. Once you understand the mechanism, it’s obvious.

There’s a similar pattern with trust in workplaces. Like water, there are forces that erode trust. Viewed in a moment, they seem insignificant. Over time they wear trust down. They multiply and the erosion gets deeper and harder to fix.

Here are three and what to do about them:

1. Open loops. When people make suggestions, ask about progress or for a decision, they often don’t hear anything back. Even if they ask many times, there's still no reply. It doesn’t mean nothing is happening. I talk to many busy leaders who are working hard, with good intent to make stuff happen. But in the busyness, it’s easy to forget to update people. It erodes trust, because it seems like there's neither care nor action. Close those loops.

2. Talking behind people’s backs. Even if we don’t consciously notice it, someone bad-mouths someone else, we wonder what they are saying about us when we are not around. We become more guarded. Address issues early and often.

3. Agreement without agreement. In a meeting everyone agrees, but then agreement is undermined in practice. Have robust conversations to reach agreement, and then back the agreement. Sometimes this means living with something that is different from the choice I personally would have made. That's OK.

In places where there are already deep gorges worn into the landscape of trust, it takes time and intentional effort to rebuild. It is possible, and can be surprisingly rapid if there’s willingness to do the work.

What does the trust landscape look like where you work? Is it effective or ineffective?

Don’t let legislation lead

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ll know that WHS legislation has recently changed in Australia to include psychosocial hazards. Organisations now have a legislated responsibility to ensure that people are safe from undue psychological impacts of work. As of this week, there's been additions to enshrine people’s right to disconnect from work, meaning they cant be compelled to respond to out of hours communication unless it is unreasonable (e.g. when you are on call, or under a specific set of conditions for a limited time)

You could take the approach of finding out what the new rules are and then follow the legislative lead. That will take you down a rabbit hole of minimum standards and a compliance mindset. A better approach is to build the culture you and your team want/need for optimal performance and then create it together. The standard you set will be much greater than the minimum required, and will have the added bonus of boosting engagement and performance.