TRUST: One key element in talent retention

For employees to commit to supporting and helping one another to grow their individual and collective talents benefiting the individual, work groups, and organization, trust becomes the necessary springboard for:

· Finding innovative ways to quickly build trust development among co-workers, supervisors, and leaders, especially when involved in short-term projects and/or virtual realty teams.

· Building loyalty to the company and commit to its culture and values.
· Promoting open collaborative communication among diverse work team members to develop and grow talent.

· Establishing credibility and reliability for talent’s “believability” in a promising future with the organization and identifying with its “brand”.

TRUST DIMENSIONS: What are the elements?
· A general definition: the reliance in a person or group’s honesty, dependability, strength or character is authentic.

· Confidence that an individual does posses the ability or knowledge claimed in a specific area or specialty.

· Belief in an individual or group commitment to being supportive and encouraging of each other’s efforts, work and success.

· Sincere and meaningful intentions and agendas of individuals and groups.
· All are in firm agreement about what are the project or team’s goals, methods, process, and roles.

· Active caring and respect of each other – that is – feel that they are a family.
· Alignment of an individual’s feelings (inside) with actual actions (outside}.

TRUST & THE WORKPLACE: A Survey
Regarding your relationships with people in your organization:
The following questions are from a trust survey that Charles Feltman conducted:
Please use a scale from 1-10 where:
1 = Can rarely or never be trusted 10 = Can always be trusted in all situations

QUESTIONS and RATINGS

How would you rate:
a. YOUR trustworthiness? ____
b. The average trustworthiness of the people
you work with as a group? ____
c. The trustworthiness of your immediate
supervisor? ____
d. The trustworthiness of your company’s
top management in general? ____
e. The trustworthiness of your peers? ____
f. The trustworthiness of your staff, if you have any
direct reports? ____
g. The trustworthiness of others below your level
of responsibility in your organization as a group? ____

(From The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman, Bend, OR:2009, p.10.)

Are you satisfied with your assessment outcomes? Were you surprised by any overall general attitudes that emerged from this short survey? If you believe that the levels of trust can or should be improved,, what do you think you can do?

In summary, if trust is not happening on a one-to-one basis, it cannot happen on the organization level. If trust is not happening among and between employees, horizontally and vertically, then individuals will not trust the organization’s entity.

Email comments to: Annabelle Reitman, Ed.D. Career Management Strategist, Author: anreitman@verizon.net