Trust: Why You Need It and How To Build It

Trust is essential to build and sustain a successful business. That is why trust is an essential ingredient of employee engagement. Without trust you will find it impossible to ever create employee engagement.

Don't take my word for it. No less a luminary than Peter Drucker implied this when he wrote, "Organisations are no longer built on force. They are increasingly built on trust. Trust does not mean that they like one another. It means that people can trust one another. And this presupposes that people understand one another." (Management Challenges for the 21st Century: 1999)

The theme was taken up more recently in the 2009 Business Week article "Trust: Effective Managers Make It a Priority."  I don't know what you think, but I certainly consider the headline "Lack of trust leads to dysfunction" to be stating the obvious. However, while the solution for building trust should seem equally obvious, you do not see it widely evidenced.

How many business leaders do you know who "don't think I. They think we"? You may think you are doing pretty well on this front, but you are not the judge. Your people are best placed to assess your performance. And with employee engagement surveys suggesting deteriorating employee engagement and other the other surveys quoted indicating "that less than half of workers trust what senior management is telling them" it would seem you are a lot further away than you would like to think.

So how do you shift perceptions and transform corporate culture from "me" thinking to "we" thinking? Again the answer seems obvious: do more to create shared values. And, the easiest way to this is to make all employees co-owners of the business, as I am sure you will agree. Perhaps, however, you are stumbling over that preposition "all." How do you make all your co-workers co-owners, and in such a way they retain their ownership and act like owners?

Well, I invite you to contact me about that. My model for employee ownership offers you that capability:

• With no share capital and non of the administrative problems associated with shares
• At next to no cost to the organisation
• At no cost to your employees.

It's up to you if, as a business executive, you want to take up this offer. I just know that if I were you I would be very excited at the possibilities and asking myself why on earth I wouldn't consider it. Seriously, can you think of any reason why not? I cannot.