Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.
About a decade ago, in an effort to understand how company culture affects performance, I began measuring the brain activity of people while they worked. I identified eight management behaviors that foster trust. These behaviors are measurable and can be managed to improve performance.
- Recognize excellence.The neuroscience shows that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public
- Induce “challenge stress.” When a manager assigns a team a difficult but achievable job, the moderate stress of the task releases neurochemicals, including oxytocin and adrenocorticotropin, that intensify people’s focus and strengthens social connections. When team members need to work together to reach a goal, brain activity coordinates their behaviors efficiently.
- Give people discretion in how they do their work. Being trusted to figure things out is a big motivator.
- Enable job crafting. When companies trust employees to choose which projects they’ll work on, people focus their energies on what they care about most.
- Share information broadly. Only 40% of employees report that they are well informed about their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics. This uncertainty about the company’s direction leads to chronic stress, which inhibits the release of oxytocin and undermines teamwork. Openness is the antidote.
- Intentionally build relationships. The brain network that oxytocin activates is evolutionarily old. This means that the trust and sociality that oxytocin enables are deeply embedded in our nature.
- Facilitate whole-person growth. High-trust workplaces help people develop personally as well as professionally. High-trust companies adopt a growth mindset when developing talent. Some even find that when managers set clear goals, give employees the autonomy to reach them, and provide consistent feedback, the backward-looking annual performance review is no longer necessary.
- Show vulnerability. Leaders in high-trust workplaces ask for help from colleagues instead of just telling them to do things. Asking for help is effective because it taps into the natural human impulse to cooperate with others.
My team also found that those working in high-trust companies enjoyed their jobs 60% more, were 70% more aligned with their companies’ purpose, and felt 66% closer to their colleagues. And a high-trust culture improves how people treat one another and themselves. Compared with employees at low-trust organizations, the high-trust folks had 11% more empathy for their workmates, depersonalized them 41% less often, and experienced 40% less burnout from their work. They felt a greater sense of accomplishment, as well—41% more.
High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults.
Searching for the next generation of business leaders represents one of the biggest headaches for any organization. To identify promising candidates for promotion who are not on the list of usual suspects, companies need to apply more rigor and better tools than many currently use. The rewards can be significant. Expanding a company’s leadership capacity is not only valuable in itself; it can be inspirational for the hidden leaders who are elevated and for those around them, bringing further benefits.
Most organizations we know have more leadership power within their ranks than they recognize. In our experience, there are three common reasons why leaders get overlooked, none of them easily overcome by the leadership-harvesting approaches prevalent at many organizations.
The first explanation is size: in large organizations, it’s easy for hidden talent to stay hidden or be drowned out by the noise of complex organizational processes. Another reason why promising future leaders go unnoticed is bias in the selection process. Finally, there is the problem of the narrow top-down lens that senior leaders often use when looking for leadership talent.
Finally, there is the problem of the narrow top-down lens that senior leaders often use when looking for leadership talent. Finding employees with the qualities to be tomorrow’s leaders requires more than harvesting talent and should include what we call “hunting,” “fishing,” and “trawling.”
By acknowledging that overlooked leaders can be identified through more proactive efforts, executives should be able to reshape their leadership culture, increase the available talent, save on recruiting costs, and raise retention rates.
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As organizations begin think about the next year’s goals, here are some ways to help bring about a more diverse workspace.
STEP 1: ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THERE IS NOT A PIPELINE PROBLEM
Numerous studies show that there is an abundance of women and non-white people with applicable skills.
STEP 2: BE MINDFUL OF YOUR TALENT SOURCING
Employers can approach new sources—different universities, for instance—to find candidates outside of their networks.
STEP 3: TRY (AS BEST YOU CAN) TO AVOID BIAS
Remove as much bias in decision making as possible. Recruiters can do their job blindly so that only qualifications can be seen. But avoiding bias goes beyond just hiring. It’s making sure that people within a company are aware of how they present themselves to each other. To help with this, companies can bring in trained counselors to lead bias training exercises.
STEP 4: LOOK CRITICALLY AT YOUR NUMBERS
While companies may be hiring people from divergent backgrounds, what’s important to know is whether they are fostering their success. One of the biggest problems non-white and non-male employees face is a non-inclusive culture. So other statistics like employee retention reveal whether or not companies are succeeding.
STEP 5: UNDERSTAND WHAT IT ALL MEANS
The most important thing to emphasize is that this isn’t just for appearance. Cultivating a diverse workforce has business effects. A McKinsey study concluded that diversity drives better results.
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The presidential transition has been marked by the same attitude: if only the media were less distractible and headlines more accurate. Thinking that way is tempting, but it misses the mark. The media did exactly what it was designed to do, given the incentives that govern it. It’s not that the media sets out to be sensationalist; its business model leads it in that direction. Charges of bias don’t make the bias real; it often lies in the eye of the beholder. Fake news and cyberattacks are triggers, not causes. The issues that confront us are structural.
The analysis here is not concerned with which candidate deserved to win or whose message was “better.” It is concerned with examining the media and its coverage, identifying its root causes, and understanding what we should expect going forward.
The Supply Side I: Connectedness Matters More than Content or Money
In the last two contests in which Hillary Clinton has participated, the 2008 primary and the 2016 election, she won on most of these metrics — and lost the elections.
Two developments bear noting. First, and most obvious, traditional media is no longer the only way to spread the word. Second, and even more significant, social media is distinct from traditional media in that it connects users to each other. This means that messages can spread far more easily and quickly.
The implications are threefold:
- The best product doesn’t always win
- Bigger marketing budgets may not pay off
- Expectations matter - people want to be on a winning platform
The Supply Side II: Ratings Determine Which Messages Get Amplified
Recycling the same message won’t earn amplification. And in today’s media environment, even “normal” news doesn’t break through information clutter; big, surprising events do. The media’s bias toward big events stems from three features of its economics:
- Fixed costs. The cost of covering a golf tournament doesn’t depend on whether Tiger Woods plays. But if he does, ratings — and revenue — double
- An advertising-based model. The main metric by which news outlets are judged is the ratings they command, the page views they get, or the copies they sell
- Spillovers. A big event in media and entertainment doesn’t just draw viewers to the event itself; it also entices viewers to consume follow-on or related products
Each of these factors, individually, means that ratings or page views — the size of the audience — matter a lot for media firms. The outcome is a “ratings bubble” within which companies operate.
In political campaigns, big events arise in one of three ways. The first is sporadically and unpredictably. The second is through name recognition. The third is by being created.
The Demand Side: Consumers Consume What They Want To
Our preexisting preferences largely determine what media we watch. Add it all up, and the implications are profound.
- First, we watch what we believe, but what we don’t watch, we don’t believe
- Second, negative coverage can have unintended consequences. Hear a source you don’t trust, and when it reports something inconsistent with your beliefs, you’ll discount that thing even more
- Third, and for the same reason, charges of media bias can actually help an outlet
Particularly sobering is that all this has nothing do with the much-lamented problem of fake news. Get rid of all verifiably fake news, as Facebook and others certainly should, and filter bubbles, polarization, and charges of media bias will remain.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Three forces combine to create the media coverage of political campaigns we observe today: connected media, which spreads messages faster than traditional media; fixed costs and advertising-reliant business models in traditional media, which amplify sensational messages; and viewers’ news consumption patterns, which leads to people sorting across media outlets based on their beliefs and makes messages they already agree with far more effective.
Even if we could somehow push “reset,” we would have to expect the same sort of coverage that we got. The problems are too deep and structural for anything else.
What’s the way forward? There are no easy answers to the question. Voluntary efforts at restraint by well-meaning journalists won’t work, because of advertising-based business models and competition. Eliminating fake news won’t change the fact that voters ignore ideas contrary to their beliefs. Media companies, their regulators, and their customers — all of us — have to look for ways to confront these challenges. The stakes could not be higher.
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