Transformational Trust: What Smart Leaders Know
What if you found a way to inspire your employees, build collaboration, and strengthen trust? Do you want to have an agile and thriving company for years to come?
If you want to have a thriving, agile, and super-successful business that is sustainable for years to come, then I challenge you to re-think your strategic plan, including change and change management processes.
Think differently.
Strategic Visioning and Transformation
A strategic vision encompasses knowing your numbers. However, strategic visioning is much more than the strategic plan you keep in a nice binder on your shelf, which you may review occasionally.
Strategic Visioning is a platform for energizing your employees and strengthening engagement and trust. It sets the north star of your organization's direction and includes the culture and values that matter most.
Smart leaders know it is important to incorporate change and change management into their strategic vision. They know that change is inevitable and that they must find new ways to motivate, inspire, and engage employees and meet evolving customer needs.
Purpose
Creating a Strategic Vision is a process that will improve employee engagement, give everyone a sense that "I belong here," and build communication and trust. It starts with Purpose.
"People don't buy what you do; they buy Why you do it." - Simon Sinek
In my work with clients, I conduct strategic work sessions and retreats. Part of the process is to dive into understanding their "Why." Why does your company exist? What do you and your colleagues believe in?
The answers to these questions are important. They are what bring you and your people to work every day. They are aspirational, an expression of what matters to you and your employees and what attracts your customers to you and your company.
The Trust Gap
A recent PwC Trust Survey showed that:
94% of executives say they face at least one challenge when building stakeholder trust.
86% of executives say they trust their employees, while only 60% feel highly trusted.
93% of executives agree (49% strongly agree) that building trust adds to the bottom line.
Other findings showed that familiarity breeds trust. People don't trust what they don't know, and it's hard to build trust without regular interactions.
Managing change (i.e., transformation) is vital to your firm's sustainable success in an era of accelerating volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Change and complexity in motivating and leading your people, talent management, customer expectations, remote work vs. in-the-office collaboration, and technology, including AI, are here to stay in a big way.
There could be gaps between what your management team believes are the levels of trust versus what your employees and customers say about it. Focusing on customer and employee satisfaction surveys is not enough.
Trust is a bedrock, and narrowing the Trust Gap will positively impact your bottom line. Trust is part of the foundation for your business success. Without it, your company will only go so far.
Embrace A Culture of Trust
All interactions among your employees are affected by the level of trust. Is it safe to speak openly? Do I have a voice? Will they listen?
When leaders avoid tough conversations, it causes confusion and lack of clarity, diminishes trust, and causes company values to get fuzzy.
Protecting your customers' data, quickly responding to and resolving their concerns, and delivering a consistent and reliable customer experience are crucial to earning their trust. How does your firm stack up?
Get real with your people. Create an environment where everyone has a voice. Enable authentic vulnerability to thrive.
Recent studies show that most people leave a company or organization because they don't feel valued enough. Having one-to-one conversations with them shows that you value them.
The PwC survey found that 83% of employees would trust their company more if their direct supervisor involved them in important decisions.
Final Thoughts
If done well, your strategic visioning process will build trust and include these:
Honor the past and where you came from, i.e., the culture;
Honestly acknowledge and assess the present state of things, externally and internally, with clarity and openness, and incorporate the need for change management processes. If there is a trust gap, this is the point at which to honestly assess it;
Co-create your shared vision for the future with purpose as the bullseye;
Identify no more than five key initiatives; and
Put these bold initiatives into play through action.
Strengthen trust by integrating your strategic vision into everything from employee hiring, onboarding, training, customer service, and whatever else you can think of.
Relationships are the lifeblood of your organization. Relationships with your employees, your customers, and other stakeholders. All great relationships are built on trust.
