Building Trust: The Foundation Everything Else Stands On

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

None of the Four I’s we covered in the last four articles work without trust underneath them. A vision from a leader no one trusts is just marketing. Intellectual Stimulation from a leader no one trusts feels like a trap. Trust is not a soft add-on to transformational leadership; it is the load-bearing wall.

Trust Is a Cost-Reduction Strategy

Covey (2006) makes an argument that resonates strongly with anyone who has run a management consultancy engagement: low trust is not just uncomfortable, it is expensive. Every approval loop, every duplicated check, every meeting held “just to be sure” is a trust tax the organisation is paying. High-trust organisations move faster and cheaper for the simple reason that people do not need to verify everything twice. Kouzes and Posner (2017) reach a similar conclusion from a different angle: across decades of research, honesty is consistently the single most-wanted characteristic followers look for in a leader, ahead of competence or vision.

Rebuilding Trust After It Breaks

Inside a telecom company I worked with, a series of missed delivery dates had quietly eroded trust between an operations team and its leadership, to the point where status updates were routinely padded with margin “just in case.” What rebuilt trust was not a single grand gesture. It was a new leader consistently naming risks earlier than was comfortable, including risks that made them look bad, and then following through on what they said they would do. Trust returned in small, repeated deposits, not in one transaction.

A Finding From My Own Research

My MALIC research (Kallmyr, 2017) found that trust in the immediate leader, more than trust in senior management generally, was the strongest single predictor of whether employees actively supported a change effort rather than passively tolerating it. Change programmes tend to invest heavily in communicating from the top; the evidence suggests the trust that actually moves behaviour is built much closer to the ground.

Practical Ways to Build Trust

• Say the uncomfortable thing before someone else has to ask you directly.
• Keep small commitments as reliably as large ones; trust is built more on the small ones.
• Admit a mistake in the same forum where you would have taken credit for a success.

References

• Covey, S.M.R. (2006) The Speed of Trust. New York: Free Press.
• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.
• Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2017) The Leadership Challenge. 6th edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant with a background spanning telecom, e-commerce, and public sector transformation. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.