I like a clean and tidy house and although I am prepared to contribute to tidiness levels I would prefer to leave the cleaning to others! So I employ a great cleaning service that do a wonderful job of achieving my goal for me. Before I found my current cleaning service I struggled with another one (lets call them the ‘Come Clean Co’) that never quite delivered what I needed and in the end we just agreed to part ways.

My experience with Come Clean left me reflecting on what went wrong. I could go into a long discussion here about the importance of setting clear objectives and goals and how our perceptions of ‘clean’ were not the same but that is only part of the story. The other part is trust. When I saw that I wasn’t getting the outcome that I expected, I started to lose trust that Come Clean would deliver. My attempt to communicate my expectations wasn’t getting anywhere and my trust dipped even further.

Here is the interesting part – what impact did the loss of trust have on our relationship? Well, I was still very keen on achieving a clean house so I started to micro-manage. There were lists of specific tasks for every week, ‘suggestions’ of how they should go about doing their job and I would check the work after they had finished. It didn’t improve things one bit and of course in the end when I initiated a conversation about the quality of the work we agreed to part ways. In that last conversation the supervisor said ‘We didn’t think that we could do a good job for you anyway!’

So that was the impact of the loss of trust on Come Clean. They detected my loss of trust, convinced themselves that they couldn’t do it anyway and therefore didn’t perform. An outcome of the lack of performance was my micro-management which contributed to their loss of confidence and so the destructive cycle continued.

My loss of trust resulted in a lack of generosity that made me blind to the strengths of Come Clean (the ladies were the friendliest I had ever worked with) The consequences of that were that I didn’t envisage a future with them as a service provider and I had already started to look for a new one! This is why trust is the cornerstone to excellence.

Is this happening in your team? Or in your organisation? Lack of trust is spreads like disease and it will hold you back from being excellent. If your managers don’t build trust they may get stuff done in the short term, but they will not be able to achieve excellence. At the end of the day, customers and clients want to work with excellent companies – it is your competitive advantage in a tough climate so don’t for one minute dismiss this as a warm and fuzzy thing that you don’t have room for right now.

One of the people who commented on the article that I read which sparked this newsletter said

Is it not interesting that the ingredients for a successful business are the same as for a successful personal relationship: honesty, trust, and integrity. We need to "rediscover" our strength in each other to be totally successful.

Posted by Eric Ross March 18, 2009 4:28 PM