I commented on a piece in HR magazine earlier today which reported that a quarter of employees surveyed trust their managers less since the recession.
This set me thinking about how fundamental trust is to relationships. It is a truism of relationship counselling that improving communication between the parties involved is a central task. Equally, it is a consistent finding in research on organisational effectiveness that clear communication is vital.
Poor communication leads to a lack of trust, and a low level of trust hampers communication.
The implications of this can be considered through a couple of examples:
Alastair and Barbara (fictional) are attending couple counselling. Since Alastair’s affair, Barbara finds it hard to trust Alastair. What is it that Barbara doesn’t trust? She has a concern that Alastair might have another affair, and this would leave her hurting again: feeling betrayed, devalued, rejected. She fears that Alastair will leave her for another, and this would result in her feeling abandoned. She is also experiencing loss – loss of her previous picture of her relationship.
One impact of Barbara’s lack of trust is that her communication with Alastair has altered. She is operating from an expectation that he will hurt her, so she is less willing to be authentic and reveal vulnerability. So she says less to Alastair, and her tone has become blaming or withdrawn.
Alastair meanwhile is alternating between feeling guilty, justifying his affair by recalling that Barbara had paid him less attention in the months before it started, and impatiently wanting Barbara to draw a line under this blip and move on. He wants things to be back to how they were when the relationship was at its best. His trust in himself has been affected, and his trust In Barbara as being on his side is under threat. His communication style has become equally reactive: when he feels blamed or criticised he tries to change the subject, justifies himself, or becomes impatient.
Recognising the underlying thoughts and feelings is important in helping this couple rebuild trust, while developing authentic and assertive communication skills will be an ongoing task.
What are the parallels for workplace relationships?
Staff cuts have left Jeff’s team trying to do more work with fewer people. Members of the team are feeling fearful that they will be the next to go, resentful that they’re having to work longer hours, stressed by the feeling that they will never catch up with the workload. They’ve TOLD Jeff how impossible the task is, but there are no improvements, and they’ve lost trust in him as a manager. They also suspect that he has information regarding further cuts that he is not sharing with them. As with Barbara, they feel betrayed and fearful, leading to them operating from a position of expecting to feel let down and pressured. Like Barbara, their communication with Jeff has become a series of moans or despairing silence.
Jeff is feeling pressure from his manager to achieve targets, in order to safeguard the continuing existence of the team. Jeff also has more work to do, as he’s picked up tasks done by an employee who left and has not been replaced. He’s argued for extra staff to be available, to reduce the risk of stress-related sickness absence putting more pressure on the team, to no avail. Like Alastair, Jeff’s confidence in himself has taken a dent, and he feels blamed or criticised by his team. Don’t they realise how much pressure he’s under? Why can’t they just focus on getting on with the job? Jeff’s communication style mirrors Alastair’s: he too responds to feelings of being blamed or criticised by shifting conversation back to task and goal, tries to defend himself by repeating that he asked for more staff, or becomes impatient that they’re wasting time that could be spent on catching up with the backlog.
Jeff needs to remember that good leaders pay attention to workplace relationships as well as the task, and start communicating more effectively: listening to his staff to give them an opportunity to express their fears and feelings, and passing on information in a clear way.