This morning, we start with a short essay by radio personality Paul Harvey reposted from the Internet, and then follow with a discussion of trust in our human organizations today.
I Wish
Paul Harvey
We tried so hard to make things better for our kids that we made them worse. For my grandchildren, I’d like better. I’d really like for them to know about hand me down clothes and homemade ice cream and leftover meatloaf sandwiches. I really would.
I hope you learn humility by being humiliated, and that you learn honesty by being cheated. I hope you learn to make your own bed and mow the lawn and wash the car. And I really hope nobody gives you a brand new car when you are sixteen.
It will be good if at least one time you can see puppies born and your old dog put to sleep. I hope you get a black eye fighting for something you believe in. I hope you have to share a bedroom with your younger brother/sister. And it’s alright if you have to draw a line down the middle of the room, but when he wants to crawl under the covers with you because he’s scared, I hope you let him.
When you want to see a movie and your little brother/sister wants to tag along, I hope you’ll let him/her. I hope you have to walk uphill to school with your friends and that you live in a town where you can do it safely. On rainy days when you have to catch a ride, I hope you don’t ask your driver to drop you two blocks away so you won’t be seen riding with someone as uncool as your Mom.
If you want a slingshot, I hope your Dad teaches you how to make one instead of buying one. I hope you learn to dig in the dirt and read books. When you learn to use computers, I hope you also learn to add and subtract in your head. I hope you get teased by your friends when you have your first crush on a boy/girl, and when you talk back to your mother that you learn what ivory soap tastes like.
May you skin your knee climbing a mountain, burn your hand on a stove and stick your tongue on a frozen flagpole. I don’t care if you try a beer once, but I hope you don’t like it. And if a friend offers you dope or a joint, I hope you realize he is not your friend. I sure hope you make time to sit on a porch with your Grandma/Grandpa and go fishing with your Uncle.
May you feel sorrow at a funeral and joy during the holidays. I hope your mother punishes you when you throw a baseball through your neighbor’s window and that she hugs you and kisses you at Hanukkah/Christmas time when you give her a plaster mold of your hand. These things I wish for you—tough times and disappointment, hard work and happiness. To me, it’s the only way to appreciate life.
Written with a pen. Sealed with a kiss. I’m here for you. And if I die before you do, I’ll go to heaven and wait for you.
It’s All About Trust
Joe Wilmot & Bill Stinnett
For this month’s newsletter we’re looking at the role of trust within an organization; who has it, who doesn’t, and what it’s for. For this project I enlisted the help of Leadership Effectiveness Trainer (L.E.T.) master trainer Bill Stinnett, Ph.D. An L.E.T. instructor for over 20 years, Bill has taught the workshop around the world to clients in industries such as high-tech electronics, manufacturing, electric utilities, oil refining, banking, aviation, pharmaceuticals, government agencies and many others.
Gordon Training International will be making a special 3-hour presentation featuring Bill Stinnett on maximizing the potential of work teams this September at the International Conference on Work Teams in Dallas, Texas. For more information, see below.
Q: Bill, you teach team-building and leader development courses in companies all over the world. What would you say some of the biggest issues that are on peoples’ minds right now?
Well, the biggest thing out there right now, of course, is that nobody has any money. Businesses hunker down when money gets tight, so a lot of things that they might be doing to help—like improving teamwork or their leadership—are being put on hold.
In a deeper sense, one of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is a sense that a lot of things have been done to try and change corporate cultures or improve performance, but that they’ve been tried piecemeal: A little bit of this, a little bit of that. A lot of people are discouraged. In talking to HR and training people at companies, I hear stuff like: “We had this program that recommended 10 things that we’re supposed to do. What our company did was 5 of them, and of course we didn’t get the results we were supposed to get. And then somebody said ‘that was a bad idea,’ so we looked for something else, something brand-new. Of course this new program gave us 8 things we were supposed to do—and our company did 4 of them. So, once again, it was a ‘bad idea.'”
What happens is that people start to get real cynical. Every time a new program or class or something comes along, people roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, yeah, here’s this kind of thing again.” Over the years, on top of the normal resistance you get to changing a culture, you get people who’ve learned how to pretend to go along. They just put on their happy faces and keep their mouths shut.
What causes this?
Well, sometimes consultants, human resources people and training directors have made some mistakes that have contributed to this resistance. In particular, they’ve been too timid at times about challenging management about the piecemeal implementation of training programs. They’ve gone ahead and recommended programs that they knew probably weren’t going to work given the limited buy-in by upper-level decision-makers. They hear things like, “Can we just do these four things? Do we really have to spend all that money and do the whole thing?” It’s not that they’re doing this on purpose, but they may be afraid to speak up, they want to protect their jobs, so many times they just cave in and allow programs to get half-implemented. There’s always the hope that half-doing something will at least yield better results than doing nothing.
Management, on the other hand, has to be able to quantify the performance of any training investment. They feel that programs will cost too much money, or take people away from their work for too much time, so they seek shortcuts. Also, it’s prudent for them to try and leverage as much value as possible from as little investment as possible, but when this leads to team-member (and ultimately their own) cynicism, and when this cynicism sabotages the successful implementation of current and future training programs, you see that this is money badly allocated. It begets a culture of cynicism.
Another thing at play here is that some leaders may feel threatened by the changes programs like L.E.T. aim to make. In particular, they feel these changes open the system up too much, that they will encourage feedback about things they might not want to hear.
One of the things I tell people is that the #1 obstacle to achieving successful change—culture changes, performance improvements—is that people don’t believe what leaders and managers tell them. Good intentions aren’t good enough. Employees have to believe that the company is doing the right thing, and that their opinions and concerns are being heard.
So it’s an issue of trust.
That’s it. In a way, it’s the only issue. The technology for this stuff is solid; we’ve known for years what it takes to produce culture changes, performance improvements. The kinds of issues that have to be overcome are those having to do with trust. Employees don’t believe what their managers tell them. Obviously, the leadership resists hearing these messages for all kinds of reasons. One of the reasons is that managers are telling the truth. They say, “It’s not fair. People should believe me because I am telling the truth.” And many times that’s the case, they are telling the truth—but that’s not the point. The point is that people don’t believe it. Until that obstacle is overcome you can’t get things to start moving.
How do you help companies to see this? And how do you help them fix it?
It’s not that hard to fix; it’s fairly straightforward. First of all, you have to have a system in place that allows communication from the people who get things done to reach those who provide direction. The company’s leaders need to find out what the obstacles are to getting those things done. If team members, however, don’t feel they can speak freely, if they feel their jobs may be at stake, they’ll not be too forthcoming with the truth. And leaders need to hear this truth in order to make sensible decisions.
That’s why I like L.E.T. so much. It focuses so heavily on the communication and problem-solving components of leadership. Directives—no matter how brilliant—always fail in the execution. If people don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing, it won’t happen. They won’t roll up their sleeves and put their shoulder to the wheel—and all those other clichés—unless they believe it’s worth doing. They’ll pretend to, though.
So leaders benefit from hearing what team members have to say?
Absolutely. What leadership has to do is answer their questions—all of them. They have to say “Yes” or “No” or “Later.” If it’s “Later,” it has to have a name and a date attached to it. A system has to be in place that encourages the kind of open communication that allows this kind of information to flow freely. That openness is what breeds trust.
Now, there’s also something else really important here. If these managers are expected to change and adopt the new culture of openness that L.E.T. recommends, it’s very important that this new ethic come from the very top. Managers will never fully buy into the philosophy if their own superiors continue to use their power and authority to make decisions that affect them without first allowing them to express their feelings and thoughts. Just as team members need to trust their managers, these managers need to be able to trust in top leadership. Trust flows in all directions. Once it’s free-flowing, lots of obstacles disappear (or at least get easier to navigate around).
If you’re doing fundamentally what you need to do—that is, you have a system for hearing what people need, and you have a system for responding to that credibly—Yes, No, or Later, and being accountable for what you say—then in very short order you’ll find out what you need to change. If it’s salary, you change it. Work hours? Change it. If it’s recommendations for improving a process or equipment, listen to it. The first step is to build the trust. But then you have to protect that trust—it’s very fragile.
We’ve known about this for a long time; and our clients who have made these changes have proven that it works.