7 ways leaders cripple their organization by destroying trust
Or how to avoid this from happening
Trust is an essential element of your organizational culture. Trust allows people to think outside the box, welcome different opinions and take risks. It is the cornerstone of the learning culture of effective organizations.
You’d think everyone understands the importance of trust. But if that is the case, why is it, that so many leaders show behavior that destroys trust? Here are 7 ways leaders destroy trust, crippling their organization. Which of these impact you? Let me know in the comments!
1. The HIPPO effect
The HIPPO effect is an organizational culture element where the highest-paid person’s opinion is more valuable than other peoples’ opinions. They may even be considered more valuable than facts that show the contrary.
It is effectively saying that your opinion doesn’t matter unless you are the top dog in the room. People below a certain rank are deemed to have no interesting opinions or input. As a result, people will not challenge their leaders and carry out their wishes without question. Critical thinking is frowned upon. The organization doesn’t trust their people.
2. Shoot the messenger
The bringer of bad news is being punished for doing so. This is revealing in multiple ways. Firstly, the leaders assume that it is possible to take every scenario into account. They ignore the complexity of the real world. Secondly, it is a sure way to discourage feedback and create a culture of fear, blame and distrust.
It erodes the trust within teams and the organization. People will fear to speak up and may cover things up. Others may feel the need to blame others to deflect the repercussions.
3. Don’t allow mistakes
An organization that embraces a learning culture accepts that things do not always work out as expected. Their assumption may be proven wrong. This is good because they wish to know soonest what to invest in and what to abandon. In complex environments, you should expect to be proven wrong.
But when leadership doesn’t allow mistakes, they show they don’t trust the teams to experiment. This will have devastating effects. The teams will:
define unambitious goals
avoid creativity and innovation
miss learning opportunities
fear failure
lose morale and engagement
4. Don’t allow conflicts
When individuals can’t express their issues and worries by having a conflict, mistrust will grow. Communication will deteriorate, issues stay unresolved and resentment will rise. The quality of decision-making will decrease because it happens with incomplete information. Conflicts can’t be swept under the carpet indefinitely. This can lead to escalations.
Healthy conflicts are an essential part of a well-functioning team. It shows people trust each other to be vulnerable as they can voice their concerns even if this is unpleasant. Having a conflict may be the only viable option to resolve certain issues.
5. Don’t allow out-of-the-box thinking/acting
When leaders restrict their people to only working within their job function, they signal they don’t trust them to take responsibility to find ways to have a meaningful impact. People may become disengaged from the team, only focusing on achieving their personal objectives.
A learning organization embraces their individuals. They are more than their job function. The organization takes their people seriously as multi-skilled professionals. Leaders show they trust their people to help the organization advance. This leads to increased collaboration, flexibility, engagement and agility.
6. Say one thing, do another
Leadership can consciously or subconsciously say one thing while doing another thing altogether. They may promote self-managing teams, but disallow them to plan their work. They may say they promote an Agile way of working but emphasize speedy delivery over focusing on value creation.
The people are not crazy. They notice when leadership is dishonest or uninformed. They see when leadership speaks with a forked tongue. The result is that they don’t trust leadership. It sets a harmful example and also can lead to disengagement.
7. Sell a cost-cutting as an improvement program
Related to the previous point are leaders who believe they can sell or reshape a cost-cutting exercise into an improvement program. They may or may not believe it themselves. But they sell it like this. It “only” requires teams to be more efficient.
The messages this sends to the people are all eroding trust:
the people who need to let go didn’t add value to the company
the cost-cutting is the fault of the teams as they were not efficient enough
leadership has to step in to make the teams more efficient as they don't trust the teams to do this
leadership lies to them to sell cost-cutting as an opportunity as a way to increase productivity
leadership puts extra pressure on the people who stay as they have to do more with fewer people
If you want to take your people seriously, stop telling fantasy stories. They will not believe you anyway and it only destroys trust.
Pathological Culture
The above 7 ways to cripple trust are a sure way to create a pathological culture. “These organisations are characterised by low cooperation across groups and a culture of blame. Information is often withheld for personal gain.” - Westrums Cultural Typologies. This is a power-oriented culture. It is a toxic environment where cooperation is low, novelty is crushed and value discovery is severely undermined.
Westrum also recognizes a bureaucratic culture and a generative culture. A bureaucratic culture is a step up from the pathological culture but is still restrictive and rule-oriented. A generative culture is performance-oriented. This generative culture is what you wish to strive for to have an organization that welcomes creating value when many things are unknown.
End Note
How many of the 7 ways to cripple trust do you recognize? These are the things to start working on to resolve immediately. Without trust, the foundation of a well-functional organization is weak, risking the collapse of the building of an effective learning organization.
Beating around the bush shows not trusting your people to be able to handle bad news. That is a very effective way of destroying trust.