Why Trust and Respect Enable Success

Business improvement and trust

Anyone who has ever been involved in improvement will recognise the need for trust. It is an essential ingredient to generate productive employees and engaged stakeholders. A productive employee is someone that feels safe, safe enough to experiment and challenge, which is exactly what is required in all working environments, it’s also imperative for the improvement professional focused on step change improvement and innovation. An engaged stakeholder will provide valuable support to enable results through change, improvement, and transformation.

When working with people to change their thinking and/or the work they do, from where they are now (current position) to where they need to be in the future (desired outcomes), it is the bottom part of the Gibb model, how those people feel about it, which has the most influence over the success of the quality initiative, change or improvement.

Trust has a close partner in the form of respect, they are two sides of the same coin. When these go hand in hand, respect shifts from being a behaviour to becoming a deeper feeling.

The greatest respect comes when people:

Value you for who you are
Trust what you say and how you behave
Trust how you will treat them and others
Believe you are honest and,
Feel confident in what to expect in terms of your attitude and beliefs.

What does respect involve?

Respect is like a baton passed off to someone who then passes it back. Thought of in these terms means that to gain respect, the feelings, needs, wants, ideas, fears, thoughts and preferences of others must be considered first. It’s about modelling the desired behaviours.

In the workplace, there are leaders who use power and/or fear to command respect. But does that work?

Can respect be commanded? Is that a sustainable long-term strategy?

Sometimes it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment, or when one is looking for a new behaviour strategy to make a change, how that behaviour will be interpreted and what impact it will have. Witnessing poor behaviour in others, particularly from a colleague or leader, makes others feel uncomfortable because trust gets eroded and respect is lost.

People who witness this style of behaviour naturally reflect, they stop trusting the colleague or leader concerned and as their trust diminishes, so does their respect.

When an improvement professional is trusted and respected, they earn the voluntary cooperation of others, people want to work with them and be involved with what they are doing. The actions of the improvement professional, their words and behaviours will enable them to build or lose the trust of others, and this is a critical component to their success.

To be successful in the workplace, trust is required in several relationships:

Peer to peer
Direct report to Manager
Worker to Senior Leader
Customer to Employee
Supplier to Customer

Some people may only have to think about one or two of these levels in their daily work, but others may have to build respectful relationships at every level.

Why else is respect important?

A theory suggests that the notion of respect dates to a time when mankind lived in tribes. As the tribes roamed, hunted and looked after its members, those who weren’t respected could be left behind in the wilderness, excluded from a share of the food, left out because they were considered to have no worth or value to the tribe.

It’s no different today. Every improvement professional, indeed any professional, needs to build trust and respect because when a working culture is founded on trust, loyalty is engendered.

Upstream the benefits of this approach mean that:

Businesses are more likely to retain their customers
Suppliers will give of their best
Talent retention is improved
Morale will improve
People will be more motivated to do their best

Trust and respect are the glue that holds relationships together. Where they exist, so does integrity, and where integrity exists for the skilled and dedicated improvement professional, success also resides.