Who Do You Trust?
Do you trust your employees, customers, vendors, and management? If there is little or no trust between these groups, your business is in trouble. Trust is the social oil that makes things happen with much less effort. When you trust your boss, you have less stress and feel empowered. When you trust your staff, you have more time to mentor, facilitate and innovate. Trusting your customers gives them warm fuzzies and results in better experiences for companies and customers. Trusting vendors helps with scale and transforms them into partners.
This kind of trust does not just happen. It’s primarily a byproduct of culture. Your company’s culture has to bring about trust. Companies like Zappos, Netflix, Semco, Google, and Best Buy have cultures that result in trust. What do all of these companies have in common? They embrace transparency; they help their employees get good at their jobs and find their passion. They treat their employees like adults. They build relationships with vendors and treat them as partners. They have cultures that don’t lend themselves to bullies or assholes.
It turns out that trust is a chemical, oxytocin, not to be confused with oxycontin. Paul Zac, known as Dr. Love, discovered its ability to induce trust during his research in 2004. When we trust someone and demonstrate that trust, we secrete a bit of this chemical, and it feels good. Compare that with the feeling you get from doing a fraud investigation or feeling that you have to keep someone under your thumb. We are wired to trust people. Think of how young children are.
Recently I went to TEDxConstitutionDrive, TWTRCON and the Creativity World Forum. It was at TEDx that I met Paul Zac and heard him speak on trust, which was the theme of the event. At the time, I didn’t really get the theme. This morning while going through my blog roll, I came across a talk by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path: The Economist, Ideas Economy: Human Potential. It tied together the idea of trust that had been building from my research for the last several months. Thanks, Peter! Now I can see the importance of trust in every aspect of our lives. As I look back at the reading I’ve done in the last year and the conferences I’ve attended from a trust perspective, I see it everywhere.
In my last job, trust was a scarce commodity. After my hiring manager jumped ship, my trust went with him. There were only 3 or 4 people higher than me in the food chain, and they no longer inspired trust. Most of the staff didn’t seem to trust their supervisors and the feeling went both ways. With a lack of transparency, lack of trust, and a down economy, things were not going well.
During my second year, the director team, which I was a part of, was left to solve our budget shortfall. The execs were hands-off, and we solved the problem. In the next budget cycle, the execs decided to fix the budget problem behind closed doors, with minimal input from the directors. The first budget cycle was stressful and manageable as we could keep our staff up to date on developments. In the second budget cycle, we didn’t know what would happen. Talk about stress! It was compounded by a series of events that lowered trust, and people jumped ship when they saw the writing on the wall.
Don’t let this happen to your organization! Develop a culture that inspires and encourages trust. Care about the people you work with, work for and serve. Remember, caring for someone is demonstrated by action, not words, though the words are nice too. Be careful about who you hire and about their acculturation process. Create a culture that discourages bullies and assholes and encourages trust and engagement.
Hacking at the Branches of Evil
Larry Lessig takes on campaign funding and congress. According to Lessig, excessive campaign dollars are the problem behind most of our nation’s woes. Everything from childhood obesity to global warming, environmental disasters, and our recent financial meltdown can be blamed on special interest groups’ spending money to influence lawmakers.
I prefer to be apolitical. We live in interesting times, and so did the folks who lived in Florence during the Renaissance. They had war, strife, corruption, and great art. We have many big problems to solve and little time to address them. There’s global warming, the economy, health care, the war on terror, moving to the ideal economy, population issues, globalization, human rights, education, and lots more.
And what does this have to do with Motivation 3.0? If we want to have control over our lives, and ensure that they are fulfilling and that we’re happy and engaged, we need a country to live in that supports these values. We can rally for laws that limit climate change all we want, but when XYZ Corp decides it is against this quarter’s profit goals, then we’re screwed.
In Lessig’s latest presentation at TEDx Boston, he talks about the results of a government controlled by big business. Childhood obesity can be traced back to corn subsidies and sugar tariffs, making corn insanely cheap and sugar more expensive in the US by 2 to 3 times more than in any other country. The only reason we feed corn to beef cows is that it is so cheap. Cows can’t digest corn very well. It’s why they get so many antibiotics.
Let’s look at Deepwater Horizon. This offshore drilling project was approved after only 17 pages of documentation were submitted. The Minerals Management Service exempted them from further documentation, and congress mandated that the project be approved in 30 days. Contrast that with the Cape Wind Project, off the coast of Massachusetts. It took 10,000 pages of documentation and nine years of review for this project to go forward, for wind!
How about global warming? Is there anyone out there doubting we have a global warming problem? The oceans are dying, and the ice caps are melting. We might not all agree on the cause, but it is happening. Lots of learned folks say that we have to do something, that immediate action needs to be taken, or the end is near. So after two years of work, with a majority in the house and senate, a president in favor of taking action, and 110 million dollars spent, what is the result? No action is being taken this cycle; the climate change bill is dead.
I am not going to touch the bailout other than to say that the average salary for the top 10 hedge fund managers was 2.5 billion dollars in 2009, and they only pay 15% in taxes due to capital gains laws.
11% of Americans have confidence in congress. The British Crown had a higher approval rating in America during the American Revolution than congress does today.
Lessig is supporting the Fair Elections Now Act through his website: www.fixcongressfirst.org. It would create citizen-funded elections, and small-dollar donations for citizens only, not corporations, not aliens (that’s foreign citizens, not little green people). So let us get off the couch and strike at the roots.
…government of the People, by the People, for the People shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau
