Executives and managers invest a lot of effort and time building trust in their teams: both establishing trust in their employees and ensuring that their employees trust them in return. But many employees say they do not feel trusted by their managers. And when employees don’t feel trusted, workplace productivity and engagement often suffer. It’s up to managers to signal trust in their employees in consistent and thoughtful ways.
There are at least three reasons why leaders and organizations don’t demonstrate their trust in employees:
- Managers often lack the self-awareness required to realize that their own actions may communicate a lack of trust.
- Organizations often design their structure, policies, and culture in order to minimize risk and optimize efficiency. But organizations that are risk averse may also signal that employees cannot be trusted with resources and information.
- Pressure to reach performance targets and control costs sometimes leads managers to do things that unintentionally signal a lack of trust.
Despite these common obstacles, there are several ways managers can signal trust in an employee:
- First, don’t assume that your employees have high trust in you. Learn to read their trust levels by understanding the risks and vulnerabilities they face. Take an inventory of the practices, policies, and controls found in your organization: Are they risk-tolerant? Take an assessment of your own conduct, too.
- The onus to grow mutual trust is on the manager. That means not only cultivating employees’ trust, but conveying prudent, incremental trust in them.
- Another important way leaders take risks is communicating openly and honestly with employees. Being transparent signals that you trust your employees with the truth, even in difficult circumstances.
- Pushing for needed change. Earlier, we mentioned a company whose innovation was constrained by a risk averse culture; one they knew they needed to change. By expanding this authority, the company conveyed trust in employees across ranks.
- Finally, letting employees know you are willing to invest in their potential and advocate for them conveys confidence and trust. Get to know their career aspirations, then help them reach their goals.
Managers may be unaware of the unintended signals they send regarding how much they trust their employees. To build an environment of sustained mutual trust, learn to read the trust landscape and take care to clearly signal trust and confidence in employees.
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As the pace of change has accelerated in the ever faster-changing tech industry, Silicon Valley's most innovative companies have used a variety of methods to foster innovation and grow fast.
When tech behemoth Microsoft found that it needed to learn fast and act even faster, CMO Asia-Pacific Justin Spelhaug found a way to get teams innovating and quickly building growth capabilities in sales and marketing. He used a data-driven, "test-measure-iterate then build" method.
Spelhaug gave five teams $10,000 each and 45 days to develop and test an innovative marketing idea. It could be anything as long as it had a high return on learning (ROL).
Spelhaug's experimental approach allowed the marketing team to try out and test several approaches quickly. By formally stating hypotheses, setting up a study design, and gathering data to evaluate the outcomes, the teams were able to learn quickly and at the same time, they ultimately delivered a valuable marketing campaign.
When growing a business, there are times when you need to go faster and grow capabilities to meet evolving customer needs or stay ahead of the competition. By experimenting, thinking big, and measuring return on learning rather than return on investment, like Microsoft did, you can quickly develop growth capabilities where you need them.
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To the question “Does working past the traditional retirement age keep you mentally sharp?” the answer was a qualified “yes” among several scholars attending the recent 2017 Age Boom Academy at Columbia University in early June. (I’ll get to the caveats later.)
Work may even help stave off dementia. A large study of nearly half a million self-employed workers in France suggests that delaying retirement means people may be at less risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
What is it about work that keeps the brain nimble?
Work often gives people a sense of purpose in life, a boon to well-being and mental health. The workplace is a social environment, a community with colleagues and coworkers. You must communicate with people to do your job, while still finding time for gossip, the lifeblood of any organization. You have tasks to accomplish and, much of the time, even routine jobs require learning new software programs, shifts in schedules and meeting new hires.
What is it about work that keeps the brain nimble?
Work often gives people a sense of purpose in life, a boon to well-being and mental health. The workplace is a social environment, a community with colleagues and coworkers. You must communicate with people to do your job, while still finding time for gossip, the lifeblood of any organization. You have tasks to accomplish and, much of the time, even routine jobs require learning new software programs, shifts in schedules and meeting new hires.
Science these days is moving away from the bleak image of aging as an inevitable process of brain damage and decline. Researchers have discovered that an aging brain compensates for declines in some capabilities with improvements in others.
Okay, what about the caveats?
One qualification about working longer being good for the brain is that the research doesn’t show cause and effect. It isn’t easy disentangling whether people with better cognition are migrating into more complex jobs or whether those activities protect cognition. That said, scholars have found that even workers with routine jobs can enjoy mental returns on the job if their employer introduces variety and training to what they do.
One qualification about working longer being good for the brain is that the research doesn’t show cause and effect. It isn’t easy disentangling whether people with better cognition are migrating into more complex jobs or whether those activities protect cognition. That said, scholars have found that even workers with routine jobs can enjoy mental returns on the job if their employer introduces variety and training to what they do.
Bringing “novelty” into the job (learning new skills and tasks) was associated with improved mental processing speed and working memory.
So let’s focus on building all kinds of work options for older employees, from semi-retirement programs to flexible and part-time work schedules. And employers: train those workers to keep their skills current and to keep the employees engaged with their jobs. That’s a smart way to rev up the brain’s performance among older individuals and raise the cognitive capacities of the nation.
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