Trust - what's our role?
Reading through the latest issue of SCM, I came across an interesting article from Pam Hurley and Dr Johan Siebers of TOSCA. It talks about a three year study from the Future of Work Consortium, which says trust has gone out of the window in a lot of workplaces, making basic communication and co-operation more difficult and leading to poorer business performance.
To build trust, they suggest following four principles when you communicate:
- Quantity - give people as the right information, but don't go overboard
- Quality - don't say things you don't believe or can't back up
- Relevance - keep your communication relevant to the topic
- Manner - don't fudge it, and get to the point
It sounds pretty obvious stuff, but they reckon a lot of communicators either try to avoid the principles (oh come on - don't tell me you've never done a spot of fudging in your time!),or try and look as if they're following them when they're absolutely not ... which is where the dreaded spin creeps in.
Which leads me to the next article that caught my eye. Ben Page, MD of Ipsos MORI, writing in PR Week. He's talking about the accusation often levelled at the British government to date that they've been too focused on spin over substance. (Yep, guilty in my book. I don't think they've done the reputation of comms people any favours.) Fallen over themselves to make announcements and 'manage the media', and ended up with a general public that trusts them less as a result.
His solution to building trust? Stop communicating. Act. No more promises of jam tomorrow. Sort out the policies and actions first, wait until they're working, things are starting to improve and people are starting to notice, and then tell them what you've done.
It reminded me of Jim Schaffer's say/do matrix. What leaders/the company say and what they do have to match, or the actions will undermine the words.
It also reminded me of the time I was working out the comms plan for a project that had been promised to staff for five years. I was given it at the point it was actually going to materialise. It even appeared on the business plan as 'project we really mean it this time'. I think that's what's called a poison chalice ...!
Sue
Sue - you must have come across the work on the 'psychological contract' sponsored by the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development? David Guest of Birkbeck College published quite a lot about it in the mid 1990's
It talks about 'trust' as the essential lubricant between an employer and an employee. Crudely, the idea is that you rely on your boss to look after you and in return you do more than it says in your contract...and when trust breaks down, the whole place seizes up.
People don't do any more than they need to, the car park is empty at 5.01 pm and customers discover that they don't really come first etc....
Liam
Posted by: Liam | June 27, 2007 at 06:48 AM
As someone who writes about trust for a living, let me underscore the truth of what you're saying and the relevance for communications.
The two most trust-destroying words one can say are, of course, "trust me." And that's just a meta-example of the general dis-utility of promises. We say "the proof is in the pudding" for a reason. We say ironically, "do as I say, not do as I do," recognizing that of course we all observe acts, not words. Promises are not just useless, they're positively harmful, if not done with great care and selectivity.
Unfortunately, communications gets used frequently by management to sway opinion. As you point out, it gets used to great (and cynical) effect in politics.
In politics, it is somehow transparent. Politicians seem not to mind suggesting that everything is all about persuasion and votes. In business, we haven't yet reached that level of cynicism. I think.
However: we see entire industries thinking that they can alter their trust perception through--you guessed it--communications and public relations. The pharmaceutical industry, one of the least trusted industries in the world right now as measured by surveys, seems to have a knee-jerk response to that problem, and the response is--better spin, more PR, fix the communications, get our employees to tell the other side of the story.
They, and other industries--many financial services, for example--need to recognize the simple truth you point out. Trust, respect, intimacy, belief--these come from experiences, from observed actions. Words without deeds are empty. Words that precede deeds, even if the deeds follow, are empty until they are followed. And words which are contradicted by deeds are cause for deep and lasting cynicism. Like you said.
Posted by: Charles H. Green | July 06, 2007 at 04:23 PM
Charles, thank you for the comment and you are absolutely right about companies thinking communication can miraculously erase poor decisions, unfair actions or a corporate disaster.
I think many of us will have experienced the 'we're just about to announce a £1million bonus for the CEO, even though we've frozen everyone else's this year - can you make it look OK' type scenario.
By the way, we refer a lot to your book 'The Trusted Advisor' (co-authored with David Maister and Robert Galford) on the Black Belt programme and it's one of our recommended reads. I think you give sound advice for about building trusted professional relationships that applies very well to internal communicators.
Posted by: Sue | July 06, 2007 at 05:13 PM