Trust is the glue that holds all relationships together. When we drive, we trust others to follow the road rules. At a restaurant, we trust that the employee has prepared the food safely. When visiting a doctor, we trust that they will act in our best interest. 

Take a moment and think of the people you work with and who you trust the most.  

• Have you got someone in mind?  
• To what extent would you go out of your way to help that person? 
• Now think of someone who you have much lower trust in. To what extent would you go out of your way to help them? 

You’ll notice a big difference in your response. 

To keep a team working cohesively, willing to put in the extra effort necessary, and most of all, to support you as their manager, it is essential that you have the highest degree of trust possible between team members.  

It also requires having the strongest level of trust between you and all of your direct reports. 

Check out: Increasing Objectivity in Hiring Decisions

The Problem and the Opportunity 

Every manager must deal with times when employees don’t do what we ask. How you choose to respond will either strengthen the person’s trust in you or weaken it.  

A friend of mine recently told me about asking a subordinate to send out confidential material. This was to be sent only to the Board members. 

Instead, the staff member distributed these notes to everyone in the company. This mistake caused considerable embarrassment and disruption. 

My friend was understandably irritated and upset. Her response was to tell the staff member that “When I give you instructions you have to pay attention! You cannot let this happen again!” 

This is a common and understandable response. 

My guess is that this caused the employee to feel guilty, perhaps even ashamed.  Hopefully, this might lead them to be more careful in future. There is also a good chance that they will be more hesitant to admit the less obvious mistakes that will inevitably occur. 

I found myself wondering if this response enhanced the level of trust between the two people or diminished it.  Acknowledging that it’s always easier to be wise in hindsight, I wondered if there was a better way to handle this problem. 

Understanding Human Behaviour 

The secret to understanding almost all human behaviour is this: an employee will work to avoid pain and seek pleasure.  

Not convinced? Look at any advertisement, in print or any other media. Every one of these is built on this principle: “Use this product or service and you will feel pleasure, or avoid feeling pain”.

Millions of dollars are spent on these ads, and they are all designed to shape your buying decisions. This is a tried and true principle developed after massive research, refined over the last hundred years. 

An Alternative Approach 

Instead of a reprimand, I wondered if another way to approach this would be to pose questions. When you ask a question, your mind is engaged in discovering answers. 

There are questions that are of low quality, in that they do not advance one’s thinking toward a solution to the problem. 

Have you ever lost your keys? If you’re like most people, you begin with these questions: 

• I know I left them ( fill in the blank). Who moved them? 
• How can I be such a jerk? 
• What’s wrong with me…I keep doing this? 

These questions make you feel bad, and do nothing toward advancing a solution. 

Try these instead: 

• Where did I last have them? 
• Do I have any spare keys? 
• What do I have to do so I’m never in this situation again? 

I hope you see the difference between low-quality and high-quality questions. 

Returning to my friend and her problem employee, I thought of these questions, most of which contain the words “we, us or our”. I have taken the liberty of highlighting those words in the following questions. 

For example: 

• How do you suppose this will make us look as a department? 
• Do you think that others in the organization will have more or less trust in our ability to handle confidential information? 
• What can we do to remedy the situation? 

Check out: Can Public Service Hiring Decisions Really Be Objective

The Psychological Reasoning Behind This Approach 

These questions are designed to involve the employee in solving a mutual problem. The goal is to maintain and strengthen the trust between you. 

While the questions reflect the effect the error has on others, they are designed to focus on improving things, inviting the staff member to be part of the solution rather than being identified as the cause. 

Later, once the crisis has passed, and everyone has had time to settle down, there will be another opportunity to ask further questions. These might include: 

• Looking back on this, where did we miscommunicate? 
• Was there some way that I could have made things more clear? 
• What else led to this problem happening? 
• What can we do together to prevent this from happening again? 

Conclusion 

To ask these questions requires courage. It means giving up thinking of yourself as better than others. It requires accepting, with a big dose of humility, that everyone, including you, makes mistakes.  It also requires giving up the opportunity to be “right” while making someone else “wrong”.  

While such an approach can temporarily make us feel better, it will inevitably chip away at the trust between you and others.  

Here’s an old saying: “When trust is present, anything is possible. When trust is absent, nothing is possible.” 

As a Corporate Psychologist for more than forty years, Dr Byrne has consulted in numerous areas of public service throughout Australia. He is the author of Seeing Behind the Job Applicant’s Mask Before You Hire: Secrets of a Corporate  Psychologist, available from Amazon. 

Dr Ken Byrne

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For the last 40 years, Ken has specialized in serving as a second opinion to clients making a hiring or promotion decision. In Australia his advice has been sought by the ANZ Bank, Coles-Myer, The Walt Disney Company, Tattersalls, Optus, Telecom, Wrest Point Casino and a host of businesses in the SME market. For over twenty-five years he consulted to many Australian police departments and a range of other public safety agencies.

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