Trust
Harvard Business Review Online | The Enemies of Trust
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The Enemies of Trust
You’re honest, straightforward, and competent. So why don’t your people trust you?
by Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau
Robert Galford is a managing partner of the Center for Executive Development in Boston and has taught in executive education programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Northwestern. Anne Seibold Drapeau is the chief people officer at Digitas in Boston. This article is adapted from their book, The Trusted Leader (Free Press, 2003).
Try an experiment sometime. Ask a group of managers in your company whether they and their closest managerial colleagues are trustworthy and, if so, how they know.
Most will claim that they themselves are trustworthy and that most of their colleagues are as well. Their answers to the second half of the question will likely reflect their beliefs about personal integrity; you’ll hear things like “I’m straight with my people” or
“She keeps her promises.” A little later, ask them whether they think they and their colleagues are capable of building trust within the organization. Because we’ve asked this question many times, we’re pretty sure we know what you’ll hear: A sizable percentage will say they have little or no confidence in the group’s capacity to build and maintain trust.
What accounts for the gap between the two sets of answers? With their differing responses, the managers are simply acknowledging a fact of organizational life: It takes more than personal integrity to build a trusting, trustworthy organization. It takes skills, smart supporting processes, and unwavering attention on the part of top managers. Trust within an organization is far more complicated and fragile than trust between, say, a consultant and a client. With a client, you can largely control the flow of communication. In an organization, people are bombarded with multiple, often
Page 1 of 9
Purchase products from:
>| http://www.hbsp.org
The Enemies of Trust
You’re honest, straightforward, and competent. So why don’t your people trust you?
by Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau
Robert Galford is a managing partner of the Center for Executive Development in Boston and has taught in executive education programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Northwestern. Anne Seibold Drapeau is the chief people officer at Digitas in Boston. This article is adapted from their book, The Trusted Leader (Free Press, 2003).
Try an experiment sometime. Ask a group of managers in your company whether they and their closest managerial colleagues are trustworthy and, if so, how they know.
Most will claim that they themselves are trustworthy and that most of their colleagues are as well. Their answers to the second half of the question will likely reflect their beliefs about personal integrity; you’ll hear things like “I’m straight with my people” or
“She keeps her promises.” A little later, ask them whether they think they and their colleagues are capable of building trust within the organization. Because we’ve asked this question many times, we’re pretty sure we know what you’ll hear: A sizable percentage will say they have little or no confidence in the group’s capacity to build and maintain trust.
What accounts for the gap between the two sets of answers? With their differing responses, the managers are simply acknowledging a fact of organizational life: It takes more than personal integrity to build a trusting, trustworthy organization. It takes skills, smart supporting processes, and unwavering attention on the part of top managers. Trust within an organization is far more complicated and fragile than trust between, say, a consultant and a client. With a client, you can largely control the flow of communication. In an organization, people are bombarded with multiple, often