In 1847, Levi Strauss (1829–1902) emigrated from Germany to the United States, where he first settled in New York. When the gold rush started, he followed the hordes to California, but instead of prospecting for gold, he made a smart decision to set up a textile wholesaling business. Between 1850 and 1870 he very successfully expanded that business, repeatedly enlarging his company, which was based in San Francisco. At the time, gold prospectors were faced with the problem that the pockets of their work pants kept ripping open under the weight of the nuggets they found, so the tailor Jacob Davis came up with a clever solution: he used copper thread to rivet together the pants’ lining. Davis, who bought his materials from Levi Strauss in San Francisco, suggested that the two of them take out a joint patent on the copper-riveted denim pants, which were proving extremely popular, because he could not afford to pay the $68 fee himself. On May 20, 1873, Strauss and Davis were finally awarded the patent for copper-riveted jeans. That date is generally considered the day on which Levi Strauss & Company was born, and thus began the success story of a product that has become an integral part of everyday life today.
Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis built up a company in which trust played a very prominent role. On April 18, 1906, a few years after Levi Strauss died, when a major earthquake hit San Francisco causing fires that destroyed the city, the corporate headquarters of Levi Strauss & Company and two of its factories burned to the ground. How did the company respond? It extended lines of credit to its major customers to help them recover from the disaster and continued paying wages to its workers while a new central office and factory were built. Again, during the Great Depression in around 1930, instead of dismissing workers, Levi Straus & Company deployed them at another site, to lay new flooring. How deeply did the company’s workers and suppliers trust the company in the wake of such decisions?
Such dramatic events are by no means prerequisites for creating trust. On the contrary, trust has to be an integral part of everyday working life. Without trust there can be no effective, efficient management. Flying in the face of the widespread assumption that trust grows very slowly and comes about of its own accord or not at all, trust is something you can consciously embrace and develop. Doing this by no means requires falling back on moral justifications, because purely economic considerations make it worthwhile. Just one condition applies: to earn trust you must always show it yourself first. So follow the two specific steps described below to substantially boost the trust in your organization.
Most people maintain that trust takes time to grow. This is sometimes true, for instance, if you make your degree of trust dependent on how well you know somebody. However, if an organization is to function efficiently, it cannot afford to wait for trust to build up slowly so that it can reap the benefits of such goodwill. Instead, you and the other employees must consciously embrace trust. Make a principle of expecting a cooperative attitude to be reciprocated. Expect others to be well-meaning, competent, and to act with integrity. This is not blind or naive trust, nor does it entail treating everyone the same way. Also, trust is not divorced from an assigned task. It is perfectly possible to show more or less trust in individuals, and you are bound to think hard about which tasks to entrust to which person. Perhaps the following maxims can be of use to you: Trust everyone as much as you can. Go to the limit of what you can justify.
So what can you do in practice? You are familiar with the full range of “trust-building measures,” which all have more to do with common sense and decency than directly with management: honesty, dependability, credibility, fairness, loyalty, discretion, the ability to listen, predictability, and honoring promises.
If you want trust in your organization to build up quickly, you must show it first, taking things as far as you can justify. The risk you run in doing this is the potential damage that could result, and the greater that potential damage, the more trust you will be showing in advance—in other words, the greater your “up-front investment” in the relationship of trust will be.
The first step toward creating trust consists of removing or curbing checks, though this does not mean abolishing all means of control. Rather, it means creating room for people to maneuver, perhaps even giving really extensive leeway. There is no universally applicable procedure to follow, but your approach should include working with target agreements, while leaving open how the targets in question are to be attained; curbing the checks in place; loosening the reins a little; and limiting internal reporting to the minimum required instead of striving for what may seem like a tempting maximum. In short: cut people some slack.
However, this does not mean blindly giving employees boundless freedom. Since you must always fulfill your responsibility as a manager, you have to ensure that you hear of any abuses of trust. At the same time, everyone must be aware of what the inevitable, serious consequences of such misconduct will be. People are perfectly capable of judging whether you are imposing checks that are essential for ensuring reliable operation or whether your actions are motivated by fear and mistrust. Assume that people will understand your obligation to do your duty and that, in any cooperative effort based on trust, people will help you fulfill your responsibility. Giving leeway requires a sense of proportion, and nobody has ever said that management is easy. It is always you who has to take the first step: Show some trust up front. If you are mistrusting at the outset, mistrust is precisely what you will get in return. If you show trust, people will trust you. Without trust you will be unable to manage any organization effectively and efficiently.
Invest your trust, taking it to the limit you can justify.
What exactly can you do to build up trust in your organization? Discuss this with colleagues.