Mandating Trust – Why You Can’t
Behavioral mandates in business can be effective for safety, process or regulatory compliance. They clearly communicate expectations and operational guidelines, helping employees understand required standards and appreciate defined work boundaries.
However, in workplace culture, the effectiveness of mandates is significantly limited. While organizations are responsible for establishing standards of conduct and ethics, prescribing behaviour becomes less impactful in areas such as psychological safety and trust, as these aspects depend on the relationship between the organization and its employees.
When a company fails to demonstrate trustworthy leadership, it automatically creates distrust and a psychologically unsafe space for its employees. The organization cannot mandate trust or a psychologically safe workplace. These elements have to be earned, and the attempted shortcut of mandating will only result in more distrust and lower engagement.
Setting a standard is different from mandating. When organizations set a standard of trust and psychological safety, it must be operationalized and actively lived. When trust is consistently violated, the company can’t circumvent the restoration work simply by telling people they’re “starting over” with a reset to full trust. Mandating trust is sometimes resorted to in an effort to skip the work, but it is not possible to erase what’s been done in the past. People’s feelings and memories don’t have a light switch. The only path forward from broken trust is to go through the deliberate, consistent, slow and proving work of restoration.
Trust is broken in a variety of ways:
1. Poor financial performance – employees lose trust in their leadership’s ability to create a successful company
2. Harmful leadership – bad leadership is not only experienced by the immediate circle but also a wider audience observing those behaviours. Distrust can form quickly on multiple levels of interaction from immediate to more remote interfaces.
3. Organizational failure to deal with harmful leadership – when a company won’t deal with problem leaders, the message to employees is that they condone the bad behaviour, not just ignore it.
4. Unethical business practices – when ethics are compromised in certain areas of the business or situations, it signals to the employees that they are vulnerable to unethical practices towards them as well.
So, what is the path to repair?
1. Admission from senior leaders of mistakes made in the past. An organization must face its failings in order to get credibility of their desire and intent to change.
2. Definitively state the new direction of the company with a revised or renewed code of conduct.
3. Problem leaders must be held to account. Either change the person or change the person. That is, change their behavior or release them from the company. This may also include immediately dismissing leaders who are known problems.
4. State clearly the intolerance and consequences of unethical practices – quick and sure.
5. Create a system of employee engagement that will ensure available and anonymous feedback.
6. Ensure that communication to employees is consistent and regular, keeping them informed on the trust restoration journey. There is nothing more harmful than silence from leadership in this effort.
Employees don’t expect any company to be perfect. They know that problematic leaders will surface, or ethics may, from time to time, be violated. But trust in the organization can be upheld when leadership makes quick and effective course corrections.
Ultimately, trust and psychological safety cannot be mandated or imposed; they must be cultivated through declared, consistent actions and positive experiences.
#workplacecuture #trust #employees
