Rick James
I’m a big fan of the work of Veronica Hope Hailey. In the last few months she’s published some ground-breaking research on trust in the face of COVID-19, which we will look at in the next couple of weeks. She found that in the first stage of COVID last year, even in the midst of restructuring, divestment and redundancy programs, high trust leaders still lived out the four key ingredients of trust:
Ability: They empowered employees and local managers.
Benevolence: They demonstrated care and support for employees both emotionally and practically.
Integrity: They communicated how they would navigate the crisis in a timely, open and respectful manner. They sought to demonstrate the sense of fairness that underpinned their difficult decisions.
Predictability: They built a bridge to the future in the minds of the workforces by showing employees that in the midst of disruption there was a continuity of values or purpose, sometimes calling upon their historical roots to show how they informed the future vision.
Take a moment to look back on the last year, how have you got on in these four areas?
As you look to the week ahead, what specific actions could you take to live out these four ingredients of trust?