Employees First, Customers Second (Part 2)

By guest author Vineet Nayar

[The miniseries from Vineet Nayar’s book Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down continues with an excerpt from the second stage of the EFCS process: Trust Through Transparency. Nayar is the vice chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies.]

Trust Through Transparency: Creating a Culture for Change

Once you have created the need for change, there is often a significant gap between the intent to change and the actual act of changing. […] One reason for this gap is a lack of trust among employees and management, a condition that is, unfortunately, quite common today. To transform a company, people must align themselves and work together toward one goal, but this will not happen without a culture of trust.

There are many ways to build trust, and many other writers have discussed them. At HCLT, we focused on one specific trust-building action: pushing the envelope of transparency. As we did, we found that most people within the organization know very well what’s wrong with a company, sometimes even before management does, or at least, before management is willing to admit it. When you bring this information out into the open and make the challenges public, employees feel included. They start to see that the problems of the company are really their problems, too, not just those of management. They realize that if management is willing to share important information, even the bad stuff, and encourages open conversations the facts, its intentions could be trusted. Very quickly, you will start seeing some positive action at the grassroots level even before management can decided on actions and solutions. Many times, we saw employees start working on problems without being asked to do so.

[As part of this section, Nayar discusses the nature of trust.]

I have thought a lot about trust over the years, as I have worked with people who say, “I want you to trust me.” Or, “We must build a trust relationship.” These statements puzzle me. What are they actually proposing? I have also done a great deal of reading about trust. David Maister, for example, writes about the management of professional service firms, where trust between consultants and clients is extremely important and quite personal. One of the books he coauthored is The Trusted Advisor. Maister says there are four dimensions of trust:

• Credibility: Credibility comes form professional expertise. If the person possesses deep knowledge and follows good practice, you feel trust in what he or she says or does. […]
• Reliability: Reliability is revealed through actions over time. If you have observed a person’s actions and respect them, you probably trust that the person will do what he or she says, the person is dependable and will behave in a certain ways. […]
• Intimacy: This aspect of trust is about emotions. You instinctively feel that you can or cannot disclose many kinds of issues with a certain person. […]
• Self-orientation: The self-orientation dimension is Maister’s fourth aspect of trust. This one, though, reduces the trust quotient. It is about your motive and the things you care about. Can I trust you to think beyond your own self-interest? […]

If I think abut my trust quotient at the time of the Blueprint meeting and evaluate it on Maister’s four elements of trust, I am not surprised that I saw a lack of trust in the eyes of my hundred senior managers. In that moment, I realized that our first job would be to build trust throughout the organization.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Employees First, Customers Second
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