What Builds Trust in Organizations?

Source: www.openaccessgovernment.org

PwC has recently conducted an extensive research study on the topic of trust in organizations.  They asked consumers, employees, and executives about the factors that enhance trust in a business.  Among consumers and employees, the top three factors that build trust were:

1.  Accountable to customers and employees

2.  Clear communications

3.  Admits to mistakes

I found #3 particularly interesting, and of course, it relates directly to the top item in the survey responses (accountability).  Every organization will make mistakes.  How does that firm respond in those situations? Do they own the mistakes, apologize to customers and/or employees, and work diligently and transparently to rectify the situation?  All too often, executives don't own up to mistakes in a timely fashion, if at all.  Or, they try to blame external conditions or uncontrollable factors for lower-than-expected performance.   Customers and employees see right through such unsatisfactory explanations.  Employees also come to believe that a double standard exists.  They are held accountable for errors, but executives are not.  Leaders need to create a safe environment where everyone, including the people at the top, can talk candidly about errors so that learning and improvement can take place.  

Creating a Culture of Accountability

How can I hold people accountable without creating a culture of finger pointing, blame avoidance, and excuse making?   Leadership coach and consultant Peter Bregman argues that leaders must achieve clarity on five dimensions if they wish to build a culture of accountability in their organizations. 

1. Expectations - make sure your people know the objectives and outcomes that you expect them to achieve by a particular date. 
2. Capabilities - make sure the people have the skills and capabilities to achieve those goals, and if they don't, put in place a plan to develop their capabilities accordingly. 
3. Measurement - inform people of the metrics that will be used to evaluate performance 
4. Feedback - put in place a mechanism for providing feedback on a regular basis 
5. Consequences - insure that everyone understands the consequences of failing to fulfill key obligations 

Creating Personal Accountability Systems

How do we motivate ourselves to achieve our important, but not necessarily highly urgent, goals and objectives?   Writer Laura Vanderkam has a neat article at Fortune.com about how to use personal accountability systems to keep us on track when it might otherwise be easy to procrastinate.   Vanderkam explains:

"So what do successful people do? They create external motivations for things they want to do but that life has a way of crowding out. They create accountability systems that boost important but not urgent items to the top of their priority lists -- ideally in a way that makes failure really uncomfortable. Effective people know that we succeed when success seems like the easiest choice."  

Vanderkam actually tried this technique herself while working on her novel.  She tapped someone as her "writing buddy."   She set out to write 2,000 words per week, and Vanderkam checked in with her writing  buddy each Friday to see how things were going.  Soon enough, she was writing more than 2,000 words per week, and then she actually finished her rough draft.   The buddy system worked. 

Why does this type of personal accountability system work?   Vanderkam argues that we don't like to appear lazy before others. Therefore, we are motivated to reach the goals that we have set out, and that we know our partner(s) will hold us accountable for achieving.

The Bad Apple vs the Systemic View

Whenever an organizational experiences an accident, crisis, or scandal, many people rush to find fault. They want to identify the individuals to hold accountable. They ask about the CEO: What did he or she know and when did they know it? I think we have to resist this urge. We must adopt a more systemic view. In most cases, the problem stems from more than just one bad apple. Firing the bad apple might be appropriate, but that alone won't prevent a recurrence. The systemic issues must be addressed.