Trust is the foundation for creating a civilized working environment
 

Many people are miserable, alienated and overworked primarily because of a lack of trust. Managers take on too much themselves, because they don’t trust their subordinates to do the work properly. They cannot leave people alone to get on with their work, because they don’t believe other people will do a good job without constant supervision. They attend pointless meetings and read futile cc’d e-mails, because they don’t trust their colleagues not to knife them in the back. And they pile up extra tasks, because they don’t trust suppliers not to cheat them, and customers to stay loyal or resist the temptations put before them by competitors.

In an environment that lacks trust, everyone feels suspicious of everyone else. The subliminal message that runs constantly in the background is: “Hurry up to put one over on the other guy before he or she manages to do it to you.” Relationships are scanned for evidence of some hidden agenda. It’s almost a relief to face a truly nasty, hostile person, because at least then you know where you stand.

Not trusting others is a symptom of fear . . .

W. Edwards Deming, mostly remembered as the father of the Total Quality Movement, said that the primary duty of every leader is to remove fear from the workplace. Yet today fear seems more present, and more powerful, than ever. Managing by fear is ubiquitous, whether it appears as straightforward bullying and dictatorial behavior, or more indirectly through constant reminders that everyone’s job is on the line and those who fail to deliver what is demanded will likely find themselves holding pink slips.

Macho managers don’t remove fear from the workplace, they increase it. Command-and-control leadership styles rely on fear to be effective. Even so-called ‘incentives’ are really a subtle form of fear-creation: people are afraid they’ll get less than their colleagues; they’re afraid they’ll miss out; they’re fearful that they cannot rely on that bonus in the way they could rely on a set salary.

Competition—that sacred cow of management thinking and free-market economics—is entirely about fear. Lust for winning is only the other side of the same coin as fear of losing. Success cannot exist with failure. If I win, someone else must lose or that winning becomes meaningless. And if I want to ‘win big’ (as all those tottering banks and hedge funds did), I have to try to work it so that someone else ‘loses big’ at the same time. The scale of the current financial turmoil is witness to the extent to which unchecked competition, once lauded as a source of endless wealth and success, always produces losses on a similar scale.

. . . And so is lack of trust in yourself

The belief in your own ability to find a way through life and come out more or less where you would like to be is founded on self-trust. If you don’t trust yourself, it’s hard to develop any trust in others either. That gnawing, internal fear that you’ll probably screw up transfers itself to a suspicion that the other guy is probably waiting to gloat when you do.

Lack of self-trust is behind much of the dogmatic, rigid thinking that characterizes so many organizational leaders. If you don’t trust your ability to think for yourself, the simplest way to avoid embarrassment is to follow a set of rules produced by someone else. It prevents you from needing to find an answer that fits the current circumstances, of course—which you fear you won’t be able to do anyway—but it allows you to get off the hook of trusting your own judgment. After all, if things go wrong, the rules were to blame, not you.

People who lack self-trust have an extra need to be right all the time to allay their inner feelings of anxiety. In reality, while being right is nice, it’s more important to learn to trust your own intelligence and judgment than it is to be right every time. We all make mistakes. Those who trust themselves try to learn from them; those who don’t try to avoid the blame for future mistakes by doing what everyone else does, even if it’s wrong.

Trust is risky, but distrust is worse

In bad times, people naturally try to gain some kind of stability and safety. They don’t want to add more risks to those they can see all around them. They play safe and act suspicious.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but this is the riskiest behavior of them all. Like the hedgehog who deals with an approaching car by stopping and rolling up in middle of the road (Do armadillos do this, I wonder?), it’s an invitation to be run over. When you trust no one, everyone becomes an enemy of sorts. When you constantly look for safety, the greatest temptation is to follow all the other lemmings off the edge of the cliff.

We are social creatures, whose interconnected world will not allow us to withdraw into our own little castle and pull up the drawbridge. We cannot live with co-operating with others. The belief that markets will be ‘perfect’ when each person pursues his or her own self-interest, regardless of others, is surely one of the silliest and most unrealistic ideas ever to grip that dismal pseudo-science called economics. It was acting on that false assumption that put us all in the mess we’re in today.

Where fear and mistrust rule, there can be no happiness, no enjoyment, no creativity, and no sense of meaning in working life. All there will be is suspicion, anxiety, constant pressure, and the belief that protecting your own butt while kicking someone else’s is what work is all about. Surely it’s time to wake up and see that living like this, however much money is made in the process, is no kind of living at all.

Technorati Tags: trust, relationships, being inter-connected, coping with fear, workplace fears, macho management, workplace stress, management by fear, working life

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