“If people like you, they will listen to you. But if they trust you, they’ll do business with you” – Zig Ziglar.
We live in a time when trust in leadership is at a historic low. In what has been deemed “an implosion of trust”, 60% of those who responded to the annual Edelmen Trust Barometer survey said they view their peers as credible, compared to 37% who are willing to place their faith in a CEO or other business leader.
It’s cause for concern. Such a distrustful attitude can easily lead to decreased financial performance, a workforce that can no longer see the value of their work, and even outright dissent.
Experts offer a range of solutions for how this can be rectified: providing stability, building relationships, and rewarding competency are some of the key ones.
Another important tip is not simply to say, but to do. As Honest Abe once said, actions speak louder than words.
Yet I don’t believe this goes far enough. Actions are critical, obviously, but what’s even more valuable is allowing employees insight into these actions, in order to strengthen the feeling of community that lead to them turning to each other for solutions, not their leaders.
In short, transparency is the foundation on which organisational loyalty is built.
To a leader driven by ego or fear, that might seem ludicrous. The very notion of being completely honest with their employees – even with themselves – seems counterproductive to their position. They push on silently through adversity and concern until they can announce their success as if it were ordained.
Great leaders do the opposite. Leaders like Mark Zuckerberg who, on a weekly basis, sits his 16,000 employees (including interns) down for a frank discussion about everything from their competition, to weekly accomplishments, and even secret projects.
Some problems have cropped up as a result – Recode recalls a particular incident in which an employee leaked information regarding a prototype messaging assistant tool to the press – but ultimately, it’s lead to the kind of community that has allowed Facebook to dominate so thoroughly.
“People would be pissed if someone else leaked something,” a former employee told journalist Justin Sullivan. “You don’t betray the family.”
The skeptics amongst us might argue that Zuckerberg doesn’t need to go to such lengths to instil trust. That his reputation and success would see to that, no matter who ran the meeting.
I don’t believe that’s true, and the statistics support this. Regardless of how hard a CEO works to attain such a position, people don’t respect the title on its own. It proves nothing. What people do respect is people. They respect honesty, integrity, and commitment. They expect that if they trust in their leader, that trust will be returned.
Maybe it’s about time we stopped worrying about what we are, and start proving who we are to those who deserve to know.