In Development  a web journal

Trust between individuals is like an egg. Fragile. Once broken, impossible to put back right.

In an orWatch for Degrading Trust in Your Organizationganization, the trust between groups rarely shatters like an egg. It tends to wear down, to erode, to dissolve until there is nothing left but distrust.

Since the breakdown of organizational trust tends to be a process, there are warning signs. They can come from any level. Here are some common ones.

The behaviors attributed to Team Members (on the left) with an asterisk ( * ) indicate that these actions also often are exhibited by managers.

The charge that managers exhibit “misplaced mercy” refers to tolerating incompetence, forgiving repeated transgressions and excepting unacceptable behavior in order to obtain results.

A leader intent on maintaining and strengthening trust in her organization will be alert to these danger signals and respond swiftly and decisively to them. (A good leader is always building trust.)

After doing considerable academic research on studies of organizational trust from all over the world, here’s a significant conclusion for you:

Trust building is actionable.

Many leaders I’ve coached or taught get confused between seeing themselves as “having integrity” and doing the things that build trust in the minds of others.

Let’s be clear. Trust is something that another gives to you freely. You can’t even “earn” it. You can only hope that it will be bestowed upon you by another who will — by definition — allow him or herself to be at risk.

Trust always involves risk and vulnerability. Peanut butter & jelly. Bacon & eggs.

I’ve synthesized many disparate studies to cull out five distinct domains of action for leaders and managers. They are (in reverse order of import, with distinctions as defined by the academics):

• Goodwill (do you care about me as a person as well as a means of production?)
• Risk-taking (trusting others, putting yourself at risk)
• Competence (not your technical savvy, but giving others what they expect from you as a manager \ leader)
• Openness —> in two flavors: Access (can I get to you?); Disclosure (do you tell me more than I ‘need to know’?)
• Integrity (Not do you think you have it, but do I think you have it? Do I know what your values are; share them; do I perceive that you live your values, even when that is hard? Are your words and deeds aligned?)

Leaders must take specific actions to build trustWithin each of these five action domains, there are several specific behaviors that leaders can take to make the trust-builiding happen. The diagram here lists many examples. Think of this as a checklist, an action planner.

 Trust is not a function of time-in-place. It grows as the result of diligent attention to actions that matter, to actions that foster feelings of trust in others.

Trust is cultivated; it is actionable.