For those who occupy the lonely position at the top in business, maintaining that position requires accepting that establishing trust is a top priority not to ignored. Gaining trust is important, even a team leader in Mcdonalds will require it from staff members. Without trust, employees won’t be honest with you, preferring to play office politics, leaving you with fragmented bits of information at best. If you are a type of leader that doesn’t stand up for what you believe in, you will find it difficult to command respect and trust from your subordinates.
In November, the global Leadership Pulse Survey published by The Forum Corporation revealed only Eighty-nine percent of managers say that they either always or often apologize for their mistakes at work. This sentiment is in sharp contrast to the only 19 percent of employees who say their bosses always or often says they’re sorry.
There are few workplaces where both managers and employees wont report that trust in the workplace is crucial if not critical, yet trust has eroded away in recent years, according to Forum’s research. 96% of employees say it’s extremely important for employees to have a manager they can trust. 56% percent of managers say it’s extremely important for employees to trust their managers. For staff, the work environment has become more treacherous, with 37 percent of employees saying that they trust leaders less today, compared to past years.
Social media-based recruitment specialist staffbay.com suggest 2014 will see lot of people moving on, because “most of your co-workers don’t trust the boss”. Staffbay says over 87 percent of people will be looking for a new job in 2014 – “and in what will come as unwelcome news to bosses and HR teams around the land, more than half of them find their current boss untrustworthy”. Jim Dougherty on the HBR blog suggests that leaders in companies should take action immediately:
“The best way to start building trust to take the time and meet as many individual contributors as you can as soon as you can. In addition to meeting customers, meeting rank-and-file employees should be your top priority”.
Co-founder Tony Wilmot of the recruitment site says, “The figures from our employment survey should act as a wake-up call to employers out there who might come back after Christmas to find a lot of empty desks. “What this survey shows us is that there is a breakdown between employee and employer – many of the respondents to our survey said they simply don’t trust their boss to do the right thing by them and their career. Others felt they weren’t valued at all”.
One way to repair trust is to listen to employees and their concerns. Developing loyalty based on mutual respect is another. A highly developed sense of trust in an employee-boss/leader relationship encourages loyalty from both sides. Arnold Anderson from Demand Media writes:
“When a manager asks an employee to go beyond her job duties to get an important project done, the employee trusts that she can do the job and agrees to put forth the extra effort. To reciprocate, a manager may allow an employee an extended leave of absence to take care of a personal issue, trusting that the employee will maintain contact with the manager and eventually return to her job duties. This heightened sense of loyalty on both sides, bolstered by a mutual trust, can improve company productivity and maintain employee retention”.
Featured Image credit: BBC
Hayden Richards is Contributor of IntelligentHQ. He specialises in finance, trading, investment, and technology, with expertise in both buy-side, sell-side. Contributing and advising various global corporations, Hayden is a thought leader, researching on global regulatory subjects, digital, social media strategies and new trends for Businesses, Capital Markets and Financial Services.
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