Building trust into sustainable change
Michael Frankenburg, WCL Associate, asserts that there are going to be significant changes of expectations and experience in the workplace during the next few years. Adapting to this will be a political necessity for public service provision and a commercial imperative for competitive private enterprise.
Our world has become familiar, if not comfortable, with geo-political, technological, cultural and generational changes. We have now added the most severe financial limitations that challenge the status quo and threaten the very survival of existing structures and service delivery models.
Forced into change, management will be keener than ever to see effective implementation. The business of driving change through organisations is now a sophisticated combination of art and science. We strike the right balance of intellectual and emotional drivers.
We understand the asymmetric progress of these programmes through different component communities. Nowadays, we embark on a change programme with the expectation that it will be successful. But the new question for any programme sponsor or planner will be – Will this
programme be successful enough?
To be able to answer yes, the bar has been raised. Organisations will need to go beyond structural and technical changes to establish new cultures and behavioural patterns that are able to capitalise on the new opportunities and overcome the new challenges of the 21st century and its second decade.
Till now, this scale of sustainable behavioural change has by definition been a long commitment perhaps needing one or two generations of managers to succeed. But in the next few years, we may not have such time. And competitive and reputational advantage will go to those who can achieve it in significantly shortened timescales.
There are three intrinsic qualities of change programmes that are severe barriers to their ability to go beyond structural and procedural adjustments to achieve these behavioural and cultural transformations. Firstly, for easy identification they are mostly positioned as something 'other' than the main business.
Words like 'programme', 'project' or 'campaign' invite people to see them in isolation and separate to business as usual. For settled employees, many of whom occupy positions of informal influence, this raises considerations of different narrative timescales.
A change programme (together with its sponsors) often has limited time horizons, measured in months or one or two years. For many of those affected, they have memories and expectations that may extend into decades. With this comes an impressive resilience to change and stress-tested strategies for 'surviving' change programmes. Secondly, change programmes are seen as top-down or centralist in nature.
This runs counter to the modern assumption that true change relies on alterations found within the individual rather than just imposed behavioural and procedural norms from outside. This is a significant and limiting factor for Generation Y. Finally as corporate initiatives, they are the products of the existing leadership and management structures.
At worst, these may be discredited; as a norm their deliberations and decisions are often seen as incidental and incremental to the real work of the organisation which many employees feel is carried out in small teams like their own. In consequence, the sponsors of change have to fight for attention and commitment outside the formal programme interventions.
At the core of these three qualities is the relationship between any employee and their line management. For many employees, looking towards the centre, levels of trust are not sufficiently high to carry the additional burden of change. For senior management, looking outward, they need to trust line management to sponsor and proselytise change.
Otherwise they will have to reinforce the otherness of the programme by creating an alternative structure of change agents and ambassadors, which further weakens line management credibility over the longer term.
Organisations will create and sustain advantage if they spend time in advance of a programme, during its rollout and after its formal end by concentrating on these management relationships and fostering levels of trust up and down the line and across functional barriers. It is the most important asset and enabler.
Its lack, or withdrawal, can condemn the best plans to falter and fail. In this way, they can prepare the environment for success, manage the day-to-day business during any change initiative, and accelerate its effective adoption. The many deconstructions of trust seek to identify specific areas on which to concentrate.
Any adopted definition is a matter of choice and should be agreed as part of the programme. But it must be based on an understanding that trust is a quality of relationships and therefore is dependent on the trustee, the truster and the existing enabling conditions.
For the trustee – there has to be a perception of competence, predictability and good intent
For the truster – they require a perception of free will, an ability to accept some risk
For the context – there should be feelings of shared outcomes and a level of effective communication
There is work to be done by the advisors and supporters of organisational change. Before any change programme begins, these things should be measured and steps taken to improve them, independent of any change programme. They should be regularly monitored and actions taken to build on any improvements and eradicate any identified weakness or barriers.
This is achieved through the regular qualitative and quantitative tools of measurement and analysis. These provide benchmarks and metrics that can be followed and regularly reported.
In many cases, the trust-builders and trust-busters will be predictably simple – willingness to answer questions, visibility of overriding targets, misunderstanding of the decision process, lack of feedback on personal and team performance, tolerance of situations that are seen as 'unfair' or processes that are thought to be ineffective.
In many cases, improvements can be made in advance that will significantly improve levels of trust at a very early stage. And this is important. Launching a programme on a rising level of trust between managers and teams, management and leadership eases the early stages of a
programme.
Managers are more able to work with individuals or their teams and influence them to broaden their behavioural range.Trust building dialogue and actions act as a bridge between business as usual and the requirements of the change programme. It allows everyone to play a part in the development of the organisation and creates a sense of momentum across the community.
Of course, each situation requires individual analysis and the opportunities and solutions will be unique for each. However, there are two lessons that remain constant across all communities, across geographies, cultures and context.
If you want to be trusted, you have to earn it. Being trustworthy is not a performance but the aggregation of actions, perceptions and assumptions built over many years.
Despite historically low levels of trust, people continue to want to trust their colleagues and managers. So these low levels can be raised. And the sensation of progress is often seen as a proxy for successful fulfilment.
The simplest way to build trust in organisations is to demonstrate it. If you want to be trusted, you have to trust others. This is the real and unique attraction of this approach.
The remedy for removing the sickness of mistrust is contained within the diagnosis itself. The very act of consulting with people to identify what would raise trust and what currently suppresses its levels is itself an act of trust. It is the most effective
beginning to the long and vital journey to sustainable change.
Michael Frankenburg. Michael has been working with employee engagement and change programmes since the dark days of the 1980s. He ran his own consultancy that worked with BT, ScottishPower, Shell,Abbey National and London Underground amongst others. He was Head of the Employee Engagement practice for Ogilvy in the UK.
© Frankenburg Ltd
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