In order to trust you as an organization, your stakeholders need to believe three things: that you care about them (empathy), that you’re capable of meeting their needs (logic), and that you can be expected to do what you say you’ll do (authenticity).
Takeaways of Note:
10 Pitfalls That Destroy Organizational Trust
1. Aversion to making choices… from managing for consensus to trying to be great at everything… increasing likelihood of exhausted mediocrity.
2. Reliance on heroic employees… if depend on people continuously going above & beyond, be prepared to work much harder to find them and reward them with outsize compensation — most people have imperfections and lives outside of work.
3. Shiny object syndrome… lack of intention (discipline) in the pursuit of new opportunities puts business models at risk — often justified by hazy ROI equations that inflate the upside and downplay the risk.
4. Disengaged middle management… managers often know the true distance between a company’s reality and its ambition — and yet, are often overlooked by a leadership team that’s focused on inspiring the front lines and gaining buy-in at the top.
5. Casual relationship with other people’s time… too comfortable wasting employees’ time on everything from clunky HR software to forcing everyone to come into the office for a view of what work used to feel like. The opportunity cost is immeasurable.
6. Comfort with collateral damage… desensitization to unintentional harms and justified by “we tried our best” (would not tolerate this attitude in other parts of business, i.e. “we tried our best to protect our financial data!”).
7. High incidence of the “Sunday scaries”… if a significant percentage of team feel an impending sense of dread at the thought of coming to work, then there’s an org-level problem that needs to be fixed.
8. People-pleasing in the boardroom… this pattern is rooted in our human impulse to tell people what we think they want to hear — a habit of gently withholding, massaging, and constructing reality.
9. Tolerance for misalignment… lack of alignment anywhere in the business is a problem but pay closest attention to org-level disconnects — a common one is a gap between strategy and culture.
10. Delusions of meritocracy… if those at the top of your organization bear little resemblance to the rest of your employees, the customers you serve, or the demographic distribution of the communities in which you operate, then you’re not a meritocracy