Ministry of Education of Republic of Moldova

Moldova State University

The Faculty of Economic Sciences
Business and Administration department

ESSAY:
Theme: “ MANAGERIAL TRUST“

Author : Mazil Adrian

Group: BA1703A

Chișinău – 2019

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CUPRINS

1. INTORDUCTION
2. ABOUT TRUST IN MANAGEMENT
3. THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER - DO YOU TRUST YOUR TEAM?
4. TRUST VS MISTRUST
5. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
6. PARADOXAL ACTIONS
7. CONCLUSION
8. SOURCE OF INFORMATION

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 1.INTRODUCTION

The word "foundational" was carefully chosen here.  Trust is foundational in management, as it's the
solid floor on which the rest of the manager-employee relationship is built.   Without a strong
foundation, a relationship is unsteady at best. Given the importance of trust in any relationship,
business or personal, it's surprising how often it's absent in managerial relationships.  The macro-
level statistics invariably paint a disappointing picture.  The recent Gallup workforce survey, for
example, places the number of disengaged employees in the U.S. at 70%, a figure that should alarm
productivity experts everywhere. Why is trust between employee and manager in chronically short
supply?   There's no single simple answer, but there are identifiable high-level factors.  When I think
back to my own four decades in the workforce, of which more than two decades were in
management, a few broad themes recur.

Disingenuous communication from management to the rank and file.  Lack of credibility will
erode trust faster than you can say "rightsizing."  (Employees have finely honed 'spin detectors,' and
excessive spin seldom yields the intended results.)

Modeling behavior employees don't fully respect. While leading by example should be (dare I say
it) foundational, it's been known to happen that management doesn't demonstrate the actions they
expect of others.

Financial pressures that force management into actions they'd much prefer not to take.   Few in
management enjoy reducing staff, trimming benefits, cutting bonuses and so forth, yet these are
often inevitable consequence of weak business results.  Hard circumstances force good people into
difficult decisions.  In these instances future trust may well be determined by how things are done
(e.g. with transparency and candid explanation, as opposed to minimal or dubious communication).

It's worth noting that issues like communication and behavior are within an individual's power to
control, whereas financial pressures may be uncontrollable.

-- Management systems such as Forced Rankings (aka "stacking") put me in a position to deliver
performance messages I sometimes didn't completely believe in.  Yet I had to deliver them, since
that was my management role, which I understood and fully accepted and was well compensated
for... at times to the detriment of productive employee relationships.   With trust in me eroded.  (No
one ever said management was an easy job!)

- Employees occasionally had unrealistic opinions of their own performance or behavior. (Relevant
old saying: "There are no guilty people in prison.")  In these cases, I never regretted losing
someone's trust, as I was simply doing what I completely believed the job required.

Even with the best of intentions there are innumerable ways in the business world trust can be
undermined - and, once lost, it's hard to regain.  An employee will naturally think:  This person
betrayed my trust before - why should I believe he or she won't do it again?

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 In short, trust is a fragile commodity in management, yet an exceedingly valuable one.  It can make
all the difference between an employee who is emotionally committed to an organization
- engaged - and highly productive, and one who is disengaged or even destructive.

2. ABOUT TRUST IN MANAGEMENT

I’ve written previously that a key benefit of project management is predictability. Without the
benefit of project management, the range of possible outcomes is likely to be quite large and most
sponsors would have insufficient confidence to invest in even moderately complex projects.
Communication is frequently cited as being the activity which consumes most of a Project
Manager’s time and poor communication has been identified as a key contributor to project failure.
While project success is predicated on effective communication, the must-have requirement for
achieving predictable project outcomes is trust. This comes as no surprise when we consider that
projects require the cooperation and willing participation from multiple people to achieve success,
and trust is crucial to developing positive, productive working relationships with these stakeholders.
What happens when there are low levels of trust on a project?
Morale issues are just the tip of the iceberg. The main impacts of low trust are the waste and
opportunity costs resulting from non-value add activities such as:

 Excessive follow-up and verification of status updates and other routine information
provided by team members and other stakeholders
 Procrastination when making decisions until all underlying assumptions and rationale have
been validated
 Increased scrutiny or micromanagement of the Project Manager by their sponsor or of team
members by the Project Manager
 Increases in the level of detail or expected frequency of status updates
 Finger-pointing or other forms of assignment of blame instead of alignment towards
resolving the root causes for issues
 Inefficient meetings resulting from participants inviting others to bolster or protect their
interests

These behaviors further reduce trust and the vicious cycle continues.
On the other hand, when there are high levels of trust between key stakeholders, there is greater
willingness to accept recommendations and updates at face value, risks and issues are managed
quicker and more effectively, and micromanagement gets replaced with management by exception.
So what helps to cultivate trust, especially in those situations where team members or other key
stakeholders haven’t worked together previously?
Trust usually begins with competence or familiarity.
When a sponsor wants to hire a Project Manager who has significant domain expertise or when a
Project Manager requests team members who have worked on multiple similar projects in the past,
they are trying to bootstrap those relationships with a high degree of trust. With more junior team
members, there is a greater likelihood of close monitoring and follow-up. Once expertise is
demonstrated and proven on the current project, trust grows.
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 3. THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER - DO YOU TRUST YOUR TEAM?
However, when those that we perceive as being highly competent let us down, the sense of betrayal
resulting from expectation gaps is significant and it will take them that much longer for them to
regain our trust.
This is why vulnerability is so important.
Being open about one’s weaknesses in front of others is one of the best ways to gain trust and secure
support. Most people want to be perceived as being helpful and vulnerability on the part of someone
they work closely with provides them with the opportunity to highlight their strengths and to provide
assistance. In the same way as proven expertise increases trust, honest expressions of vulnerability
cultivates confidence in the observer that there will be similar openness in the future.
Vulnerability has to be authentic. We have limited tolerance for false modesty or for excessive self-
critique and such behaviors will quickly be perceived as self-serving or duplicitous.
The close cousin of vulnerability is transparency.
Taking the time to understand the information needs of your key stakeholders and then meeting
those needs in a reliable manner in spite of how good or bad things are going earns trust. Working
with the sponsor and key stakeholders early in the life of a project to define criteria for escalation
and communication can help to ensure that when a problem or action is needing their engagement
arises, it is presented in a consistent, objective manner.
Transparency with team members is equally critical - if a recommendation they have developed is
not accepted or if a decision is made which isn’t in the organization or their best interests, help them
understand why.
The final elements in establishing trust are warmth and empathy.
Recognizing other’s efforts, showing an interest in their lives and aspirations, or providing support
when they require assistance will all help gain their trust. Listen actively and focus on them – the
more you demonstrate through your actions that you are paying attention to what they are saying,
the more appreciated they will feel. Giving stakeholders the benefit of the doubt unless they’ve
given you reason to judge them otherwise also helps to generate trust reciproci. In order for a
company to have a healthy, thriving culture, one of the key components is trust. Yet how many
people can say without a doubt that they trust their managers and the company they work for? A
recent study by Edelman found that one in three employees don’t trust their employer, while another
study by EY found that number to be even lower. Only 46% of people had trust in their organization
and only 49% in their boss/team.

These statistics are shocking as without trust, employees are more likely to be disengaged and - in
the worst-case scenario - this might even result in a toxic work environment. This is not something
you want to happen, and it certainly won’t support developing an effective feedback culture.

So how can you, as HR, help close the trust gap between employees and their managers?
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1. Honesty is the best policy

It’s always hard to share difficult news or constructive feedback. We naturally tend to believe that
delivering bad news will impact other people’s opinion of ourselves. But being honest, even during
tough times, is something the most trustworthy leaders learn how to do.

Whether your company hasn’t met its goals, or you’ve decided to let a member of your team go, it’s
important to nip it in the bud. Top leaders and managers should lead by example and start the
conversation with team members, even if it might be difficult for them. But if they’re able to do so
as opposed to putting off the talk, they will be able to avoid gossip and speculation and reassure
others about where they stand.

Employees will be more likely to respect a manager who can talk openly with them about difficult
situations, answers questions and give them the facts. In turn, this should encourage employees to be
honest themselves and bring difficult topics to the table, be it with their manager or their peers.

2. Be comfortable owning mistakes

While being transparent about bad news is difficult, another important leadership skill to develop is
ownership of mistakes. As covered in “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink, the ability to take
ownership not just for a team’s success but also its failures will help to develop trust. Admitting to
mistakes makes leaders seem more “human”, approachable, and likable, otherwise known as the
Pratfall effect. It also helps take leaders or more senior team members off the pedestal and put them
back on the same level as other members of their team.

Often the risk is that more junior or inexperienced team members hold leaders in high esteem,
thinking they are incapable of making mistakes and do their jobs “perfectly”. However this is not
true, so when leaders can admit to and take responsibility for their mistakes, it creates a safe
environment and encourages others to do the same.

3. Treat employees like people, not numbers

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers. If their job is based on meeting certain performance metrics,
managers can often get into the habit of seeing their employees in terms of output achieved.
While managers don’t have to be their employee’s best friend, they have a responsibility to maintain
a healthy work environment. This means getting to know their team members beyond their job
description and day-to-day tasks they execute, to build a relationship with them. This, in turn, will
help managers provide meaningful recognition and help people feel valued.

It’s not about knowing all the details of people’s personal lives, but managers should have a good
understanding of what their employees enjoy about their job most. In so doing, they can also better
support their professional development.

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4. Give credit to team members

In addition to taking ownership and building rapport, team leads should ensure they show
appreciation and acknowledgment for their team’s hard work. Managers might often be presenting
results of their team’s work to stakeholders, or be representing their team at higher-level meetings.
It’s therefore important they give credit where it’s due and allow team members to shine externally.

If on the other hand, managers take credit for their team’s work or present individuals’ work as their
own, this will quickly create a sense of superficiality and lack of trust amongst the team.

Encourage managers to recognize individuals, and create a culture where people are comfortable
sharing feedback with one another. A recent study by Globoforce showed that employees who
received recognition from their leaders recently were significantly more likely to trust them (82% vs
48%).

5. Make the team’s interests a priority

To gain trust, managers should be their team’s best advocate. While they may have constructive
feedback for their team about the way they approached an assignment, it’s important that to the
outside world they present their team in a positive light and be proud of their accomplishments.
They should not criticize or demean their team in public, as this undermines the individuals, not to
mention that it breaks trust and dampens team spirits.
When team members make a mistake, managers need to help them see what they can learn from it
and view it as an opportunity for growth, as opposed to chastizing. Managers can and should share
constructive feedback with their team, but this should be done within the team’s safe environment
rather than publicly.

6. Teach your managers how to overcome unconscious bias

As people, we have a natural tendency to make assumptions about others, which means that once
someone becomes a manager they might unintentionally favor some employees over others. This is
a common phenomenon known as the ‘rater bias’. And while there is no intention to harm or offend
a colleague, unconscious bias contributes to a major loss in trust between managers and employees,
even more so when it affects performance reviews.

Help managers and all employees learn how to identify and avoid unconscious bias in the
workplace. For example, you could host a course, bring in an external speaker to educate employees,
or identify events on the topic for employees to attend. You can also put together a list of resources
such as books and podcasts, to help them better understand the issue.

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7. Ask for feedback

Managers should be open to receiving feedback from their team members. Often there is a barrier as
employees feel uncomfortable sharing constructive feedback, let alone with their manager. But if
managers are open to feedback, they can slowly grow a culture of feedback within their team,
thereby increasing trust.
Managers can show their openness by asking for feedback, either in person, via email, or your
performance management platform if you have one. This, in turn, will help employees be more open
to taking and reflecting on feedback from their managers.
Support your managers by teaching them how to develop trust within their teams, and in turn, you
will strengthen your overall company culture. Most importantly, these behaviors should be
displayed at all levels of the organization including senior management.
Download our white paper on How to Develop your Managers for more insights.

4. Trust vs. Mistrust

Since 1950 and the publication of Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, many developmental
psychologists have viewed trust and mistrust as the cornerstones of human development. Erikson
divides the human life cycle into eight stages and suggests that each period is a time for a major
developmental dilemma or crisis. The first of these crises is the trust versus mistrust crisis, which faces
the human infant on entering a world of confusion and complexity. The determining relationship is, of
course, with the infant’s mother.

The other seven crises are autonomy versus shame and doubt (during the first year or two), initiative
versus guilt (during the remaining preschool years), industry versus inferiority (during the early school
years), identity versus identity confusion (during adolescence), intimacy versus isolation (during
young adulthood), generativity versus stagnation (during adulthood), and integrity versus despair
(during old age).

Working through and tentatively resolving each crisis brings an accompanying strength and a basis for
future behavior. Thus viewed very roughly, for example, the young child who works through the
autonomy crisis achieves an expected virtue of self-control, which provides a behavioral base for
holding on and letting go.

Although Erikson sets up the trust/mistrust dilemma in an either/or form, he is careful to add that
variations of the same problem continue on through life despite a tentative and precarious balancing of
trust and mistrust during the crucial infancy period. If that tentative balance tilts in the direction of
trust, Erikson suggests that the infant gains a basis for expecting the virtue of hope in the future, which
in turn lays the groundwork for giving-and-receiving behavior.

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 5. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

So far I’ve discussed how—even though separately each may be very useful—long-term problems
arise when managers combine the three harmless assumptions. The same is true when we combine
their most obvious alternatives, which, in good either/or fashion, happen to come from their exact
opposites. Manager Jones would most likely reject the idea that pervasive trust (the obvious alternative
to pervasive mistrust) could possibly replace his assumption. His experience has taught him otherwise.
And he would surely (and with reason) reject the idea that a prolonged-tolerance-for-ambiguity or a
soft-is-better-than-hard viewpoint is a suitable replacement for any more rigorous stance.

Even though Jones might reject these alternatives, others do not. For some people, the concepts of
pervasive trust, prolonged ambiguity, and soft-over-whelming-hard fit together and have great appeal.
With almost religious fervor, like flower children or sensitivity training converts, they promote their
causes to proclaim the new utopias. Typically, that fervor is all it takes for their more mistrustful
adversaries to draw new lines and define new battle-grounds.

Ultimately, holders of opposing viewpoints emerge and throw loaded overstatements at the other side,
as both parties get drawn into defending fixed positions.

Over the years the management pendulum swings back and forth from liberal to conservative, from
centralization to decentralization, from harsh layoff periods to expensive benefit programs, and from
severe survival controls to expanded product development and cries for creativity. A major problem is
that early dialogue between the opposing viewpoints often triggers defensive thinking within each
position, as happened in Jonestown, Watergate, and Iran. In each case, typically—and tragically—
either/or, mistrust, and hard-drives-out-soft prevail in the short term.

At the same time, people in organizations can and do learn. What appears to be pendulum behavior
isn’t merely that. Opposites sometimes converge or change as they develop. Sometimes new managers
and new situations phase new assumptions into old issues. Sometimes a wise, experienced manager
can rise above a repeated false dichotomy and furnish the impetus for finding new approaches. Such
approaches, however, require people adept at a third path, not just a middle way, as well as specific
steps toward organizational trust and constructive reciprocities. To do this, managers need to abandon
the three assumptions and their opposites in favor of less rigid, more creative combinations.

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 6. PARADOXICAL ACTIONS…

The mysteriousness of paradox has fascinated poets, scientists, philosophers, and laymen for
thousands of years. Paradoxical puzzles can both pose unanswerable questions and lead to insightful
creative answers; Kierkegaard called paradox the “source of the thinker’s passion.” The reconciliation
of apparent contradictions underlies some of the most truly creative discoveries of science, not to
mention most religions, while the suggested unity of opposites permeates the works of great writers,
like O’Neill and Conrad. Most important, partly because it is based on an unfamiliar logic or rationale,
a paradox’s true workings always seem to be just beyond our understanding.

Once we see these same paradoxical situations as and/also propositions rather than either/or
contradictions, the reconciliations seem relatively obvious. That awareness, though, doesn’t always
help us find the underlying unities the next time we face a set of apparent opposites. Manager Jones is
not the only one who finds it difficult to break old reciprocities or the patterns that reinforce them.
Sometimes, however, change requires the very opposite of what appears to be logically appropriate
behavior.

At the same time, paradoxical actions are not foreign to many a modern manager. To buy when others
are selling, to ask questions when others expect answers, or to give new autonomy when subordinates
expect tighter controls are all actions that make sense under certain conditions. And, without
highlighting it, some of the most popular management concepts of recent years have relied on
paradox. The work of McGregor, Blake and Mouton, and Lawrence and Lorsch all entail paradoxes
(see the sidebar, “Paradox in Management Theories.”)

In a sense, these real and theoretical examples highlight the almost unnoticed role of paradox in
organizational behavior. In similar fashion, I suspect, most readers overlook the crucial role that
paradox plays in their own more creative actions. And yet, acting paradoxically constitutes one way to
get beyond tentative trust rather than adopting the extremes of pervasive trust or pervasive mistrust.

Likewise, a manager who avoids either/or thinking or its mushy opposite, prolonged ambiguity, must
consciously adopt an and/also viewpoint whereby ingredients are kept separate but are not assumed to
be in conflict. Finally, and most difficult, managers need to replace the hard versus soft behavior with
paradoxical actions that cope with new information, confront important discrepancies, and care for
individual people and issues. The goal is not to do one or the other; it is to weave them into a pattern
of separate behaviors that sets the basis for new reciprocal patterns.

…AND NORMS OF RECIPROCITY

Earlier, I suggested that the fragile toughness of trust is a crucial factor in blending extremist hard-and
soft-line assumptions into an organizational bonding that holds a company’s disparate parts together.
Trust that is too tentative, emotional, and fragile will fall back into pervasive mistrust. Trust that is too
tenacious, impervious, and tough becomes inflexibly shaped into a pattern of pervasive trust.
Organizations with too much mistrust become overly differentiated, with people succumbing to
either/or expectations and hard-drives-out-soft behavior. Organizations with too much trust become
overly integrated, with people lapsing into prolonged ambiguity and soft-is-better-than-hard behavior.
Both extremist patterns depend on emotions more than on data and self-awareness. Both also build up
ineffective reciprocity patterns.

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The three-path diagram in the Exhibit displays the points I’ve made so far plus another path that is
based on the more modest assumption of tentative trust. The diagram also suggests that the patterns
persist because people reinforce them: i.e., attack/defend/withdraw behavior follows from an
assumption of pervasive mistrust and win/lose expectations. Such behavior begins a cycle that repeats
itself until it becomes a norm of reciprocity and degenerates into a continuing self-oriented need
pattern. Obeying a distorted golden rule, people do to others what they perceive is being done to them.
Beginning with a pervasive sense of mistrust, they shift eventually into a set of destructive
reciprocities and finally to even more divisive and self-oriented needs. As emotions run high, the cycle
continues, engendering even more mistrust.

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7. CONCLUSION

“Some of our problems are our own fault. We lost contact with our own employees. Managements
in large companies say that they get too big to stay in personal contact with their employees. We
swallowed that. Now, however, I think that the opposite is true. The larger we get,
the more important it is for us to emphasize personal contact by top management down through all
levels. We’ve been doing it all wrong. We stumbled over our own assumptions.”

In essence, to prevent mistrust beliefs or their extreme opposites from becoming frozen, we
sometimes need, to live and to create paradoxical actions. We need to know and act as though
some things are both certain and uncertain. We need to polarize and synthesize, to see questions in
answers, to be both inside and outside of situations, to learn while teaching, and to find unity in
opposites as well as opposites in unity. Interestingly enough, excellent managers, though they are
not used to talking these ways, are used to thinking paradoxically. Our hope for dealing with an
increasingly complex organizational future lies in understanding—and making more explicit—the
implicit truth in this way of thinking.

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8. SOURCE OF INFORMATION

1. James W. Driscoll, “Trust and Participation in Organizational Decision Making as

Predictors of Satisfaction,” 

2. Dale Zand, “Trust and Managerial Problem Solving,” Administrative Science

Quarterly, June 1972, p. 229; and R. Wayne Boss, “Trust and Managerial Problem Solving”

3. Zand, “Trust and Managerial Problem Solving,”

4. Boss, “Trust and Managerial Problem Solving Revisited,”

5. W.V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)

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