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Helping hand: To build trust, managers must get to know their employees' lives beyond work Only 26% of staff trust their managers ‘completely', according to research by Investors in People, conducted last November, which also found that eight out of 10 staff believe their manager has let them down in the past. Staff report managers not providing support, failing to respond to their concerns, and withholding information. The result is low morale, damaged team spirit, and staff looking for a new job. So, how should senior staff build trust? Managers must get to learn about their employees as individuals. This means knowing something about their lives beyond work... the name of their partners, whether they have children, and what is happening in their lives. Do they have a pet, are they training for the London marathon, or learning Portuguese? This isn't about courting popularity. As a manager, your aim is not to be liked but to be seen to treat people fairly. This may be in how you allocate work, how you respond to requests to go on training courses, or how you organise the annual leave rota. How hard you work at sharing information with staff will also influence their views about how open and honest you are. Do you work on a strictly need-to-know basis, or do you share what you know? Of course, sometimes you have information that would be of interest, but you have been asked not to share it at this point. Integrity is an undervalued management quality. Staff will quickly form a view as to whether you are a manager who says what they think and does what they say. Clearly, staff won't trust a manager who says one thing to one person and something different to another. Nor will they trust someone who makes a commitment and then doesn't deliver. Often, however, when staff say they don't trust management, they are not referring to their direct line manager, they are thinking of senior managers or those at headquarters. They trust their line manager, but think this person is equally kept in the dark. This is a reflection of their perception of the culture within the organisation, and how they feel decisions which affect them are made and conveyed. This can be anything from introducing staff car parking charges or implementing a no smoking policy to re-locating staff and restructuring services. This comes down to how good the organisation is at communicating with its staff, how willing it is to listen and how safe staff feel in expressing dissent. Trust in an organisation is also generated by whether staff perceive the processes for filling posts, dealing with grievances, and conducting disciplinaries as fair. Is promotion dependent on who you know? Are posts filled by competitive interview? If you make a complaint against a manager, will it be treated seriously and independently investigated? Are disciplinaries witch-hunts? Are junior staff dismissed but senior managers paid off? High levels of dissatisfaction with management in the public sector will disappoint, but not surprise, most senior managers. But, this dissatisfaction should not be dismissed as a reaction to change. It may be an indication of more fundamental issues within the organisation. The fact that a minority of staff endure inconsistent, unpredictable, unsupportive and uncommunicative behaviour from their managers cannot be tolerated, and needs to be tackled via a robust annual appraisal process and an effective leadership-development programme. Whether staff trust their managers is only partially due to the behaviour of their direct manager. The rest is down to the culture within the organisation. Blair McPherson is director of community services at Lancashire CC

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WHITEHALL

Do you trust your manager?

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