‘The profession needs to hold a mirror to their behaviour’
More than one in three employees (34 per cent) report their level of trust in senior managers is weak, according to the CIPD. And, worryingly, company leaders seem to be out of touch with how their staff feel, with senior managers more likely to report strong trust between employees and senior management (40 per cent) than non-managerial workers (27 per cent). How can HR help senior leaders to rebuild that trust? People Management speaks to employers who have achieved this turnaround.
Encourage senior leaders to listen to employees
In 2008 housing association AmicusHorizon was in a bad place. But by investing in training and involving staff and residents in shaping the future of the business, the organisation has moved from “woe to wow”.
“It’s no secret we were in a fix,” says Kate Dodsworth, executive director of strategy and external affairs. “We had poor customer satisfaction, performance was poor and there was a lack of organisational culture.”
Thanks to a strategy that has created a climate of trust and respect, satisfaction with complaint handling has improved from 55 to 95 per cent. Key to the turnaround was talking to both staff and residents about how the association could do a better job and, crucially, listening to the answers. Employees were actively involved in changing the business and the association moved to a “one team” culture that encompasses the board, residents and staff.
“It’s no good having a chief executive sitting in an ivory tower,” says Dodsworth. “If you have been in the doldrums, you will not turn that around on your own, you have got to listen to people.”
Build self-awareness
When Sue Swanborough, HR director, UK Ireland and Nordics, for General Mills, joined the business seven years ago it had a great culture and was performing well. But, she says, a step change was needed to achieve its ambitious plans.
“What you can deliver and achieve through your people is amazing if you can build trust,” she says. “That absolutely starts with the leadership team, with our fundamental understanding of how we are being as leaders.”
HR’s role, she adds, is about holding up a mirror to the behaviour of senior leaders and helping them “to be the very best they can be”.
“What we’ve done [as senior leaders] is try to role model what we are looking for. We have named some behaviours and ways of being,” she says. “We spent a lot of time building our self-awareness to be really authentic.”
Hold leaders to account
One of the noticeable traits in organisations that have managed to enhance trust despite negative change programmes is their leaders are used to being held accountable, points out Veronica Hope Hailey, dean of the University of Bath’s School of Management.
“The trustworthy leaders we’ve found are tough people, they take tough decisions but they are willing to put themselves in front of the workforce and justify those decisions,” says Hope Hailey, co-author of the CIPD research report Where has all the trust gone?
Dodsworth at AmicusHorizon agrees: “We have got really strong resident governance and we know that has helped us turn things around,” she says. “I think our residents trust us because we have given them prominence in our governance structure. They don’t just do tick box scrutiny, they are with us at every level.”
Encourage leaders to put the organisation before themselves
In her experience, says Hope Hailey, the leaders who engender the most trust in their staff do not have a huge sense of entitlement at a personal level. Their leadership, she says, is not bound up with their own image or any sense that they are worth more than others.
“They are paid fairly but are not taking excessive amounts of money out of the company,” she says. “It’s realising you have got an important job but your personal worth is no greater than someone you are managing.”
Hope Hailey adds that another common factor in organisations with high trust is that the senior leaders have a sense of legacy – the knowledge that they owe something to the people who have built the organisation and to the people who will work there in the future.
“They are leaders for a moment in time, creating something good for people to inherit,” she says.
And finally…show you care
“I’ve never met a human being who doesn’t care about other people,” says Swanborough at General Mills. “Organisations create an environment where people feel they have to behave in a certain way. Maybe they don’t feel they can show they care. But they all do.” The challenge, she adds, is to create the kind of organisational culture where employees feel confident to “bring themselves” to work.
That’s something that Paul Hackett, chief executive of AmicusHorizon, has taken on board. “The one common thing I hear when I talk to staff about Paul is how approachable he is,” says Dodsworth. “We have a really open culture. Paul will talk to and work with people on the front line. He’ll also write weekly thank you letters to staff who go above and beyond.”