From an early age trust becomes central to who we become as adults. If you didn’t have people you could trust when you were a kid you found it harder to trust people as time went on, and vice versa.
Why this matters in business is that we are faced with choices on a daily basis of whether or not to trust…in a supplier, a client, a co-worker, or a boss. Many times this is tied directly to the culture of an organization. If a VP tells you one thing and then does another, it breaks down the trust in that organization thereby weakening the culture of that organization.
Companies with a great culture typically have an easier time finding the best people at a lower salary. The opposite is also true; companies with a mediocre culture find themselves either over-paying for talent or settling for the person that is willing to work for them. You might say that this is very nice and slightly nebulous information. The truth is, however, that you can tie a value to trust as a factor of culture by measuring simple turnover statistics for a company. There are many other ways such as employee opinion surveys, online ratings, or social media, but those can be taken out of context and be very subjective. Turnover is objective fact, and ties directly to the bottom line of profitability for an organization. The higher the turnover, the lower the ‘trust-coefficient’ for profit.
When companies hire for culture, and train for skill trust is built in spades and yet the vast majority of companies hire for skill and try to infuse culture artificially. What’s worse is that most managers have a hard time even telling you what their culture is let alone hiring by those basic guidelines. People haven’t really been taught to hire that way though and the companies that have figured it out, like GE or Google, spent vast amounts of time and money identifying their culture and then matching talent to that culture.
I feel very fortunate to have a role in life where I get to help companies do both. If you don’t have the pleasure of being in that kind of an organization where trust reigns please chime in. I would really like to hear what it is that keeps you there, and whether you feel that there is a shift one way or the other in your company.
That may be the price elasticity of your soul, which is probably what I hope to explore next…
