Trust is the new currency of organizational life. It is a central requirement for many types of process innovation that depend on
 teamwork and close cooperation. Often, trust must be cultivated in a historical context of distrust. Improving quality, for example, often relies on improving the relationship between a manufacturer and its suppliers in order to facilitate joint efforts to minimize defects and ensure smooth, just-in-time operations. To streamline the distribution chain, retailers must keep key suppliers informed of sales patterns, information previously closely guarded and used as a lever to negotiate prices and terms of supply. Within firms, cross-functional teams must overcome functions' distrust of one another. The healthy impacts of major process innovation that changes the basics of work and, hence, employment will be blocked by management-worker distrust. Partnering efforts by service vendors and their clients will amount to little more than public relations exercises in the absence of trust.
There are two, quite distinct components of trust: trustworthiness and trustability. Trust is a skill as well as a value; trustworthiness is the value part, trustability the skill. To cultivate trust thus requires value-honesty, openness, sincerity-and skill-reliability and dependability. To say "I trust you" must imply both.
Trustworthiness is manifested in sincerity and the honoring of agreements. It can be developed and sustained through personal relationships and track record, or through painstaking crafting of formal contracts designed to avert misunderstandings and provide metrics for ensuring that commitments are met.
Trustability is essential to cross-functional, inter-organizational process coordination in a just-in-time environment. Each party must be confident that the other will deliver on time and as specified; both must avoid the dropped-ballerina problem. Operating at the extreme of just in time, ballet companies are ruthless about competence: "If you can't dance, get off the stage" is an oft-reiterated adage. And for good reason. A male dancer who lifts up the ballerina and then drops her onto the stage during a performance of Swan Lake cannot turn to the audience and explain, "Never mind. I'm still at 99.95 percent uptime this performance. Up you get, Vanessa. Maestro, if you'll just go back a few bars, we'll start again." Arts teams are fundamentally concerned with trustability, not trustworthiness. They do not have to (indeed, often may not) like each other in order to collaborate.
In this regard, and as a consequence of cross-functional linkages of processes, just-in-time operations, and customer-supplied electronic links, businesses are becoming more and more like arts teams. As processes are designed or redesigned to eliminate waste and delays and the activities and players become more tightly coupled and highly interdependent, breakdowns in one part of the process immediately affect the other parts.
Much of the management literature on reengineering, total quality management, customer-supplier links, and other process initiatives that rely on cooperation and collaboration presumes mutual trust between actors but neglects entirely its cultivation. Yet these almost invariably generate distrust. Reductions in staff, for example, are an inevitable consequence of reengineering. "Empowering" workers in this context as part of the reengineering "team" without making it clear in advance that loss of jobs may be or even is intended to be the outcome is both demoralizing and unjust. "Downsizing," however necessary and urgent management might perceive it to be, is likely to be construed by loyal workers as a breach of trust that will predispose them to doubt the sincerity of future management pronouncements. Well-publicized examples abound of loss of trust impeding the ability of firms to make changes essential to their business survival. General Motors under Chairman Roger Smith was, for example, a regime of massive process innovation and massive resistance not to change but to management.
A supplier that can't deliver on time and quality won't be trusted. An unreliable and incompetent department won't be a welcome addition to a cross-functional team. The functional stove-pipes, fragmented activities, delays, waste, and excess inventories disdained by the process movements had the advantage of reducing interdependencies and the impact of time on performance. Incompetent, unreliable departments didn't drag competent, reliable ones down with them, and ample inventory stock covered late deliveries.
In the process of compiling this glossary, the authors encountered numerous articles and books dealing with partnership, teams, and the need for trust but practically none about building trust.
Extensive experience with companies pursuing process innovation has convinced the authors that trust or lack thereof is absolutely at the core of the relationships companies are trying to forge. The
absence of discussion of "trust processes" is puzzling. What sense does it make to presume trust in the absence of knowledge of how to build it, or for the untrustable to demand trust?
Managers considering major process changes need to answer the following
questions:
- Which relationships are key (e.g., between us as management and our staff; between us as a vendor/supplier and our clients and customers)?
- Are we perceived by our partners to be trustworthy? How are we regarded by prospective partners, competitors, clients, and customers? Do we fulfill our promises, advertising claims, announced plans?
- Are our partners trustworthy? Do we really want to work with them if they are not? Are the proposed process changes realistic? Are formal contracts needed or desirable?
- Are we trustable, i.e., so competent in all the processes relevant to ensuring trust in the relationship that the others in the relationship can rely on us? (What about our billing system? The legal department's handling of contracts? Fairness of bonus program? Speed in completing paperwork?)
- Are our partners so competent in all the processes relevant to ensuring trust in their relationship with us?
Process innovations that depend on trust relationships greatly raise the stakes for all involved. Trustworthiness demands high standards of business ethics and frankness.
Trustability demands total competence.
Trust is more than words.
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