I was talking to some managers of a client of ours recently and we were talking about one of their peers, let’s call him Brian. When I asked why Brian hadn’t done something he said he was going to, everyone in the room laughed. “What’s funny?” I asked. “Oh, what’s funny is that Brian never does what he says he’s going to. He’s a lovely bloke and he has the best intentions, he’s just unreliable”.

And this brings me to today's blog. I think that Brian’s behaviour is tolerated in too many workplaces, often because these people are good at some other aspect of their work. Surely the Brians of this world are having a massive impact on individual and organisational effectiveness. The performance of millions of people is being hampered because they’ve been let down by someone like Brian. Just think of all those millions of hours of wasted time, all that unnecessary interpersonal conflict and all that extra stress in the world!

Without trust a team is dysfunctional and ineffective

Building trust in the workplace is straightforward. It's all about consistently meeting your commitments. When I say I’m going to do something, and then do it, I earn a little bit of your trust. When I keep doing what I say I’m going to do, you end up trusting me. I become dependable, reliable, trustworthy.

Unfortunately, as I've tried to show in the picture below, it only takes one or two breaches of that trust to destroy the trust that you've built up – I fail to do what I say and I’m back to square one with you. It only takes one person in a team, or one person participating in a process, to undermine the effectiveness of that team or the effectiveness of that process. If you're eratic when it comes to meeting your commitments, you'll be as destructive as Brian before you know it.

Making the link between trust and behaviour clear

Certain behaviours increase trust, and others reduce it or prevent it from ever getting off the ground.

Building trust in the workplace is straightforward. All we have to do is to consistently meet our commitments. And if we can't meet a commitment, the next best thing for us to do is to give advance notice that we're going to be late and to proactively agree or communicate a new date.

Eroding trust is straightforward too. All we have to do is tell someone at the very last minute that we can't meet  our commitment, or worse still, do what Brian does and just let the commitment date pass, keep quiet and hope no-one notices.

I've tried to show how different behaviours affect trust in the diagram below. It shows how we need people to behave in order to earn trust (in green), and what we wan't them to stop doing so that trust is maintained (in red). The width of the triangle shows you how much trust is created or eroded by each behaviour.

I’d like to speculate that if everyone in an organisation appreciated how their behaviour impacts trust, and therefore the effectiveness of others, that even a slight improvement would have a bigger and faster positive impact on the performance of that organisation than any management fad or best practice.

Forget Six Sigma, Lean and ITIL, what we need is the discipline of DBLB (Don't Be Like Brian)!