The fundamental purpose of building and sustaining trust is to accomplish tasks and achieve goals. This is true for any enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit. In this way, trust is an operational and a collaborative imperative. In health care organizations, lack of trust leads to below-average safety, quality, and patient and provider satisfaction.
As a leader you are acutely aware that trust and collaboration are inseparable. Trust and collaboration share the same purpose, and without trust any collaboration becomes a farce. After all, people – not processes, policies, strategies, tools or methods – make up the collaboration, and trust is critical in motivating people to do the actual work.
As a leader you also know that trust begins and ends with your own behaviour. Technical master, intelligence, personal and professional drive, past accomplishments, and even vision are admirable and necessary leadership qualities, but they alone do not inspire long-term trust and collaboration. These qualities must be complemented by interpersonal and behavioural competencies. A leader’s high degree of credibility is the sum of both behavioural and technical skills, and this credibility is what sustains trust. Trust, in turn, leads followers to support the concept of collaboration at first, and then ultimately to fully participate in, or pursue, collaborations.
In the absence of credible leaders, people will still perform their tasks and abide by organizational rules. They only do so, however, because they want to keep their jobs, and they perform at the lowest acceptable level possible. Obviously, this response is a narrow perspective that produces superficial results. A collaboration that is built on trust has a deeper meaning and thus has long lasting power. It energizes, engages and awakens passion and commitment, even in health care where many workers suffer from compassion fatigue, which is the stress, isolation, pain and apathy felt by caregivers.
As a leader you are not just a passive recipients of trust, you are also a proactive giver of trust. You view trust as a mutual practice. You work hard to earn and keep it, and you expect and demand others to do the same. By displaying trust worthy behaviour every day, you serve as a model to your followers and other partners.
For example, you spend time contemplating the qualities and qualifications of candidates for a senior leadership position. You do not hire quickly to expedite the recruitment and hiring processes, especially when the position has been open for a long time. Your goal is to find the most ideal match for the organization and its culture. This reflective practice accomplishes two goals: 1. It lessens the risk of hiring a selfish, uncooperative leader who could undermine the collective success of the leadership team, and 2. It sends the message to the entire organizations that you are serious about building and strengthening trust.
The impact of the low levels of trust ripples down and through the entire organization. If you see an organization with sub-par safety, quality, service, and financial performance indicators, you will find
the one key ingredient for excellence missing among the leadership team – trust! Every organization has great potential for creating high levels of organizational performance excellence – don’t forget that trust and collaboration are inseparable.
John Kotter, a well-known change expert, defines urgency as a combination of thinking, attitudes, and behaviours. Urgency is a hyper-alertness and represents a commitment to addressing an important issue that suddenly arises, whether inside or outside of the organization. When organizational leaders are disconnected from the external world, their followers are insulated from external threats to organizational success and thus disconnected from the internal operational elements of the organization, resulting in organizational inertia.
