People-Trust’ Rules For Organizations

What’s Trust?

Trust. You know when you have it; you know when you don’t. Yet, what is trust and how is trust usefully defined for the workplace? Can you build trust when it doesn’t exist? How do you maintain and build upon the trust you may currently have in your work place? These are important questions for today’s rapidly changing world. Trust forms the foundation for effective communication, employee retention, and employee motivation and contribution of discretionary energy, the extra effort that people voluntarily invest in work. When trust exists in an organization or in a relationship, almost everything else is easier and more comfortable to achieve. Experts define trust as, “the state of readiness for unguarded interaction with someone or something.” They have developed a model of trust that includes three components and call trust a construct because it is “constructed” of three components: “the capacity for trusting, the perception of competence, and the perception of intentions.”

Thinking about trust as made up of the interaction and existence of these three components makes “trust” easier to understand. The capacity for trusting means that your total life experiences have developed your current capacity and willingness to risk trusting others.

The perception of competence is made up of your perception of your ability and the ability of others with whom you work to perform competently at whatever is needed in your current situation.

The perception of intentions is your perception that the actions, words, direction, mission, or decisions are motivated by mutually-serving rather than self-serving motives.

Why is Trust Critical
There is a direct correlation between how employees view their company and how customers and stockholders view it. Once leadership has lost the confidence of their employees, that negative energy has a measurable impact on the messages employees -- and especially front-line employees -- deliver to customers, the community at large, and stockholders. Executives must take an active role in leading the discussion about trust in their organizations. This is not something to be left to Human Resources or Public Relations. And it has to be more than platitudes on a wall. Also trust is the basis for much of the environment people want to create in their work place. Trust is the necessary precursor for:

•feeling able to rely upon a person,
•cooperating with and experiencing teamwork with a group,
•taking thoughtful risks, and
•experiencing believable communication.

- Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net