Is 'the deal' almost entirely fuelled on trust?
Wednesday, 03 February 2010
Alex Albert
Category: The Future of HR
Is the employment relationship between a person and their line manager almost entirely fuelled on trust?
Our second paper on the Future of HR research programme would suggest so. But what is trust? With so many psychological and social definitions to hand that don’t seem to really get to the crux of the issue, it seems a hard one to pin down.
Is the true definition of trust a willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others? If as
The Work Foundation’s leadership research suggests, trust means letting go of control and giving people the freedom to try, then risk of failure is inherent in this.
Discussions of the value of failure appear to be somewhat contradictory. How can failure be valued? How is this played out in reality? And yet the apparent value is clear. Given trust and the right space to operate in, people can be empowered by their leaders to achieve, even at the risk of failure.
Whilst
low levels of employee trust in management are clearly of concern, is the real learning from this to pick your leaders well, to learn from the playground and to make the troublemaker the milk-monitor? This would surely instil the value of failure right at the centre, and enhance the inherent trust that goes with it.
There also seems to be an apparent conflict between the systems and processes within an organisation and a culture of trust and empowerment. Who owns trust in your organisation and who’s responsible for rebuilding it when trust’s been broken?
