This has made me think about the impact of trust, or lack of, and who is our customers.
For a leadership group within an organisation their customers are their internal staff. We all have customers weather they are internal or external, we focus on building great relationships and harbouring trust with these external customers but sometime forget about the more important customers to a organisation, our internal customers.
Trust is not automatically given when a person becomes a manager, trust from his/her pears and directs must be earned, it must be exhibited everyday with trust worthy behaviours and actions. This means removing bad habits like checking on everything people do, questioning their motives and looking to catch people out. I once hear a manager say “inspect what you expect” this comment in itself is saying “I don’t trust my staff and I need to check everything they do”
One of the greatest organisations I know whose complete business is based on trust is EBay. EBay have over one million transactions everyday go through their system. The model behind EBay allows a consumer to purchase goods from a total stranger from around the world, hand over their money and hope that the seller will post the goods and that they are as described.
If I was to describe this model to someone today that had no idea who EBay are they would call this madness, they would say that it could never happen, it would open the flood gates form fraudulent transactions, yet EBay has less that 28 fraud transactions per day on average. This is an astonishing figure when you look at how many transactions take place everyday. This tryst is based on a “feedback system” that’s in place within EBay.
If the feedback model can be so successful at preventing fraudulent activities with EBay, could we use this same model within Business for our direct reports?
Distrusting people this is called self deception, we see people as objects and no longer as people. We then look to be right and look for confirmation of the deception, we no longer see the good in people we are always looking to "catch them" and confirm our own self deception. This is called self betrayal.
Self betrayal is an act contrary to what we feel is right and what we should do for another person. When we betray ourselves we begin to see the world in a way that justifies our self betrayal. When we see the world in a self justifying way, our view of reality is distorted. Over time these self betrayal's become characteristics of me, and I carry them around with me, this then provokes others to do the same, an the cycle starts again.
Break the cycle. We need to start to trust our people, we need to start to believe that the majority of our staff want an do the right things by the customer and the organisation, giving people the freedom and empowering them with the trust needed to do their role will intern get a better result. To weed out the fraudulent activities we need to give regular feedback everyday about their performance to our direct reports.
If you as a manager are not able to give feedback everyday because “it’s too hard” and you feel that “inspect what you expect” is the right methodology, then don’t be surprised when your start to loose staff and moral drops overall. This distrust that you are passing onto your directs is then reflected onto your customers though your directs.
Referance: HuTrust and The Arbinger Institute.