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The enemies of trust.

Robert Galford1, Anne Seibold Drapeau

  • 1Center for Executive Development, Boston, USA.

Harvard Business Review
|February 13, 2003
PubMed
Summary

Building organizational trust requires consistent managerial virtues and active defense against common trust enemies like poor communication and incompetence. Rebuilding trust after a crisis involves objective assessment and transparent change.

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Area of Science:

  • Organizational Behavior
  • Management Science
  • Leadership Studies

Background:

  • Trust is foundational to organizational effectiveness and employee engagement.
  • Individual trustworthiness does not automatically translate to organizational trust-building capacity.
  • Effective trust management requires proactive strategies and defense against common pitfalls.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To identify key managerial virtues essential for building and maintaining organizational trust.
  • To delineate common 'enemies' of trust within organizations and strategies to counteract them.
  • To provide guidance on navigating trust crises and rebuilding trust when it has been broken.

Main Methods:

  • Conceptual analysis of established research on organizational trust.
  • Identification and categorization of factors that erode trust (trust enemies).
  • Prescriptive recommendations for trust-building, defense, and crisis management.

Main Results:

  • Managerial virtues such as consistency, clear communication, and addressing difficult issues are crucial for trust.
  • Common trust enemies include inconsistent messaging, tolerating incompetence, dishonest feedback, and corporate underperformance.
  • Crisis management requires objectivity, emotional availability, and transparency; rebuilding trust necessitates understanding the breach and implementing specific changes.

Conclusions:

  • Proactive and consistent application of managerial virtues is necessary to build and protect organizational trust.
  • Vigilance against identified trust enemies is a continuous leadership imperative.
  • Effective crisis response and a structured approach to rebuilding trust are vital for long-term organizational health.

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