In today’s harsh financial climate the most valuable management commodity is trust. Unfortunately it seems to be in short supply.
Only twenty six percent of staff in the public sector trusts their manager “completely”. According to research by Investors in People, eight out of ten staff believes their manager has let them down in the past. Staff report managers failing to provide support, failing to respond to their concerns and withholding information. The result is low morale, damaged team spirit and a cynical attitude towards changes. Yet the current financial climate requires managers to deliver efficiencies and innovate. This means getting staff to work in different ways and getting them to do more with less.
How should mangers build trust? Managers need to get to know their staff as individuals. This means knowing something about their lives outside of work, the name of their partner, if they have children – what’s happening in their lives, do they have a pet, are they training for the London marathon or learning Portuguese? This isn’t about courting popularity. As a manager, your aim is not to be liked but to be seen to treat people fairly. This may be in how you allocate work, how you respond to requests to go on training courses or how you organise the annual leave rota. How hard you work at sharing information with staff will also influence their view about how open and honest you are. Do you work on a strictly needs-to-know basis or do you share what you know? Of course, sometimes you have information that would be of interest but you have been asked not to share it at this point.
Integrity is an undervalued management quality. Staff will quickly form a view as to whether you are a manager who says what they think and does what they say. Clearly staff won’t trust a manager who says one thing to one person and something different to another. Nor will they trust someone who makes a commitment and then doesn’t deliver.
Often however, when staff say they don’t trust management, they are not referring to their direct line manager, they are thinking of senior managers or those at Headquarters. They trust their line manager but think this person is equally kept in the dark. This is a reflection of their perception of the culture within the organisation, how they feel decisions that affect them are made and are conveyed. This can be anything from introducing staff car parking charges or implementing a no smoking policy to re-locating staff and re-structuring services. This comes down to how good the organisation is at communicating with its staff, how willing it is to listen and how safe staff feel in expressing dissent.
Trust in an organisation is also generated by whether staff perceive the processes for filling posts, dealing with grievances and conducting disciplinaries as fair. Is promotion dependent on who you know? Are posts filled by competitive interview? If you make a complaint against a manager, will it be treated seriously and independently investigated? Are disciplinaries witch-hunts? Are junior staff dismissed but senior managers paid off?
High levels of dissatisfaction with management in the public sector will disappoint but not surprise most senior managers. The fact that a minority of staff endure inconsistent, unpredictable, unsupportive and uncommunicative behaviour from their manager cannot be tolerated and requires robust action. Whether staff trust their managers or not is only partially due to the behaviour of their direct manager. The rest is down to the culture within the organisation.
Blair McPherson www.blairmcpherson.co.uk