Trust

A while back, Eric asked what I thought the role of trust is in a dynamic organization. And can trust scale?

I believe that trust is an important part of an organization culture. With real trust:

• employees have great job satisfaction
• they can focus on doing their job well, confident that others are doing theirs well
• they can ask questions and make suggestions to help the product or the business, without being considered overly critical (i.e. they are free to speak their mind without recrimination)
• they can innovate and pursue freely in their area of responsibility

• organizations are streamlined
• there is very little overhead needed for management at any level
• no need for policing functions (as HR can sometimes grow to become in an organization)

I have worked in organizations where there has been real trust:

1. As a student, I worked for a Telecom company who was rolling in money. Our management was young, enthusiastic, and had the ability to decide what our team would do without any interference from upper management. The team was smart, the work was interesting and we made great progress. We were confident and no one questioned what we were doing. It was invigorating. But then the company's resources began to dry up and as cuts began, trust began to erode.  Although our work may have furthered the company's goals, the path to success was not clear and there was another group attacking the same problem in a different way. Instead of cooperating together, we were essentially competing, using  at least twice the necessary resources to achieve the results. Throughout the company there were many projects that were duplications, dead ends, or seemingly unrelated to the goals of the company. Groups were cut, budgets slashed, command and control replaced trust. The company did survive but it was a completely different type of company after that.  
2. Early in my career, I worked for a consulting company which gave me well defined constraints: the scope of work, the delivery schedule, and the resources. Once I was given a project, they fully trusted me and my team with completing the work, as long as we reported good progress each month. However, it was pretty easy to trust everyone, since there was so little room for any variation or any innovation. 
3. I also worked for company that had been stripped to the bare bones with cutbacks and all we had left were the people who wanted to make the company a success, a leader who we believed in, and a plan that we thought would work. We had no choice but to trust each other to do their part of the plan as we were under resourced in all areas. Everyone was motivated and criticism was all taken as constructive. After we turned around the company, trust continued for a short while, but then we started to grow quite rapidly, we hired more haphazardly, we brought in executives who were micro managers and the trust that we had evaporated. Trust had not been a core value of the company but more of a side effect of the position we had found ourselves in.

Although I have seen organizations with real trust, I have not seen it scale for any length of time. For trust to scale I believe that

• everyone needs to have clear direction and needs to be working toward the goals of the company
• it should not be as restrictive as my consulting company example, but it should not be a "free for all" like my Telecom company example
• trust must be a core value of the culture
• and you must work to ensure it stays that way; even though there may be trust at some point, if it is not key to the company culture, it can erode as in my comeback story
•  you must have a great hiring process
• you need to make sure that you hire talented people that fit in and share your values