Trust

It all starts with trust. A high degree of trust permeates conscious businesses internally as well as externally with all their stakeholders. Internally, a strong trust exists vertically (between leaders and employees) and horizontally (between employees); externally, there is great trust between the company and all its external stakeholders: customers, suppliers, business partners, investors, the communities in which it operates, and the government.

At Nordstrom, CEO Blake Nordstrom has commented that trusting people to do the right thing has been critical to the store’s success. The company drives this point home during onboarding. New hires receive a one-page statement that we reproduce here:

Looking at trust as a two-way street can create interesting opportunities for a company. Driversselect, a used-car retailer in Dallas, revamped how it worked with its financial partners. It went from working with over twenty financial institutions to going very deep with a handful. The result was a closer working relationship and deeper trust between businesses partners. Accordingly, one of the financial institutions, a major money-center bank, proposed to Driversselect a strategic experiment to speed up and otherwise improve how used-car loans are processed. With the trust they shared, both parties believed they could experiment with a different way of doing business together. Driversselect benefited from being a first mover in its industry in this area.

In discussions about trust with senior executives, the focus often quickly becomes “Do my people trust me and my leadership team?” This is clearly an important issue to look at. At the same time, we have observed that the question is rarely reversed: “Do we trust our employees?” By doing so, we start to understand trust as a relationship, a two-way street. If you don’t trust your people, how much can they trust you? Conscious cultures manifest relational trust in the organization. People trust their leaders, and leaders trust their people.

An important caveat: strive to use objective means for gathering information as much as possible. As leaders, you may find it difficult to be truly objective in assessing how people experience the culture. For the exercises in this section, we suggest you reflect on the following issues and discuss them as a team. You can easily turn these questions into a quick online survey (for example, using Survey Monkey) and get feedback from a broader set of people in the organization. It is extremely useful to compare the scores of the executive team and others deeper in the organization.

You also need to assure those taking the survey that the results will be anonymous. Doing this—reassuring people that they can give candid feedback—is a first step in building trust within the organization.

Authenticity

There is growing recognition of the need for people and organizations to be authentic. Conscious cultures are marked by an absence of artifice. Internal and external communications are frank, devoid of the spin that is common in business and the political world.

Authenticity is something we value in building a sense of trust with people. When companies and leaders try to be something they are not, people can see through that. Zappos prints its core values on the first page of the job application. The company takes great pride in being who it says it is going to be, right from the start. This authenticity helps attract people who will make a good cultural fit with the organization and dissuade those who would not.

Caring

Feeling cared for and caring for others are core human needs. They are powerful drives. Conscious cultures are marked by genuine caring for all stakeholders. Caring begets caring, and when the company cares for its stakeholders, the stakeholders in turn exhibit caring toward the company. People in conscious cultures behave in a manner that is thoughtful, gentle, considerate, and compassionate.

Caring begins right at the top with the CEO and the executive team. They set the tone and demonstrate what this means.

A few years ago, one of us came across a billboard on a New York City bus shelter. It read, “If your company cared, it would be in the caring business.” The ad was for a job site, and the message was clear: the vast majority of companies do not care, and your best option is to find another company that also doesn’t care, but where you may be somewhat better off.

The core question here is pretty simple: Do frontline employees believe that the leaders of the company care about them? There is a trickle-down effect around caring in a culture, and if the people on the front line don’t feel cared for, then there has been a breakdown somewhere in the chain of command. Ultimately, caring should exist at all levels, but the canary in the coal mine is whether the frontline people believe—consistently, across divisions, and across functions—that they’re cared for as human beings.

It’s hard to imagine how people who feel uncared for can feel the passion and commitment that underpins the volunteer premium we talked about earlier. In our experience working with one company recently, it was evident from an employee climate survey and focus groups that they had a very performance-driven business culture. People in the organization obviously perceived that performance came first and people came second. Despite being involved in an exciting area of biotechnology, the company is beginning to see attrition increase significantly as people burn out. The excitement of the mission on the cutting edge of science has been very inspirational to people. However, the lack of true caring from management and senior leadership has created an environment in which even the passion for the science can’t overcome the drawbacks of the company’s performance-obsessed atmosphere. The atmosphere is also beginning to affect the company’s ability to recruit. Others in the industry describe it as a sweatshop. Think about what that means when you are trying to recruit some of the best minds in the world to contribute to your success.

Many mistakenly believe that a culture can be either caring or performance-driven, but not both. This is a false dichotomy. While it is more challenging for leaders to foster both approaches, people who feel cared for can be held to high standards as well. As parents, we both care about our children and expect them to meet certain expectations of behavior. In many cases, it is because we care about them that we set such high standards for them. Paradoxically, people often see a caring attitude and high performance standards as a trade-off rather than recognizing that the way to realize sustained high performance is having people feel cared about.

Too often, people think of caring in isolation. Caring without accountability, caring without empowering people, and caring without an inspiring vision and good execution mean nothing in the end. So the key challenge for leadership is to create a culture that combines caring with other elements that help drive the performance of the business.

When Bill George became CEO of Medtronics, he found that the company had a very nurturing culture and that people seemed to care, but there was a pronounced lack of accountability. People were letting each other and the company down. George sought to increase accountability without diminishing caring in the Medtronic culture.

Bob Chapman, chairman and CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, likens leadership and caring in business to parenting: you care deeply, but you also have high expectations and accountability. Some people can interpret that as a disempowering, paternalistic approach. But it is not. You can empower and care at the same time. We need to empower, trust, care, set limits, and hold people accountable for their behavior and make very clear what is acceptable and what is not. You need to set up guardrails around what’s important to the organization and then empower people to manifest the culture within those boundaries—just as on the tennis court, there are lines that you must play within.

Transparency

We live in a transparent world in which much information of any value soon becomes known. Conscious cultures embrace this reality and benefit from it. There are few secrets in a conscious culture because there’s little to hide. The question here is, do people throughout the organization understand how you operate and make money in your business?

At Whole Foods Market, salary information is widely shared with all team members. Financial books are unusually open, and strategic plans are widely discussed and disseminated. As a result, the company experiences greater team member involvement, initiative-taking, and leadership.

An approach that manifests transparency well is open-book management. One key to using this form of management successfully is educating people about your business model. They can’t help improve the business results if they don’t clearly understand how the business makes money. Sharing the information without putting it in the context of “here’s how you contribute to it and can make a difference” can create anxiety and confusion. So hand in glove with sharing the information is education on what this information means and empowering people to do something with the knowledge.

One of our major retail clients had translated the business model down to the level of the store construction department tasked with purchasing, installing, and maintaining fixtures in the stores. A member of that team impressively explained to us how saving 5 percent on fixture costs by this department across all the stores amounted to annual savings that would finance the opening of a new store. The team members saw themselves helping support the growth strategy of the company—not just as cost savers.

Another key element of transparency is communication. How clearly and openly does the leadership team explain things to the organization? Transparent communication includes sharing how the organization is doing and explanations when major programs or changes are announced. The more transparent an organization, the more comfortable the leadership feels in being open about its decisions and why they were made. Again there is an interesting paradox here. Leaders often fear that too much communication will distract people and raise concerns or even fear about things that they can’t control or need to know. How often is this fear truly warranted? Just as often, a partial announcement or no announcement gets the organizational grapevine working overtime on rumors and builds more worry and concern: “What is management hiding, and why? Are things worse than they say? Is there more bad news to come?”

Being clear from the start that you will tell people what you know when you know it is a key element of transparency and strongly reinforces trust in the leadership team. If you want your people to act like adults, to have ownership of the performance of the business, and to play a full role in trying to help you achieve goals, then you need to treat them like responsible adults who can handle the truth. Importantly, when people in the organization can see reality clearly, they can act effectively to address the issues and challenges you are facing. Otherwise, they are flying partly blind—never a good place to be if you want them to help you land the plane safely!

Integrity

A conscious culture is marked by strict adherence to truth telling and fair dealing. The commitment to integrity goes far beyond mere adherence to laws and company policies. There is no tolerance for spin or whitewashing. People say what they mean and mean what they say. Their word is their bond.

Important questions to ask are these: What do we refuse to compromise on? What behaviors are we not going to let slip by? These questions force a leadership team to draw a proverbial line in the sand. The idea of integrity was driven home in a professional service firm that had been working on a diversity program. A well-respected senior partner had a reputation of not being on board with this initiative, saying, “What does this have to do with my clients?” Despite his enviable track record in developing business and connecting with some of the firm’s biggest clients, his unwillingness to get on board with the program and his notso-subtle undermining of the program led the executive team to make a tough choice, asking him to retire a few years early.

Learning

As living and self-organizing communities, conscious organizations are continually evolving to higher states of collective consciousness. As expressed by Whole Foods Market, “Many of our Team Members are committed to lifelong journeys of growth and development. Continual growth is not only acceptable, it is also expected. As Team Members learn and grow, so too does the organization as a whole.”

Learning is sometimes seen as a “motherhood and apple pie” issue; after all, who is against learning? However, there are noticeable gaps between rhetoric and practice in most companies. At organizations that embrace learning, everyone has a personalized learning agenda each year. Companies should identify what each person wants and needs to learn and ensure that they support that learning.

At Johnson’s Sausage, a well-known “small giant” in Michigan, there is only one major fireable offense—if employees don’t learn anything new in a year. The key question the company asks at the employees’ year-end evaluation is “What did you learn this year?”

Conscious companies encourage a clear learning and development plan for employees and hold them accountable for following it. Accountability means that companies evaluate people on, and reward them for, continuous learning. In a conscious culture, there is great weight put on helping people develop and grow in the organization, and leaders and other people who deliver on this get recognized for it.

Empowerment

If you hire people who are a strong fit with your company’s culture, you can readily trust them to act intelligently and thoughtfully in service of the organization and its overarching purpose. Every team member of a conscious business should be a microcosm of the whole business, authorized to act on its behalf for the benefit of the whole company.

Here the key question is, Are frontline employees and managers empowered to act on behalf of the benefit of the whole company? This sense of empowerment is often manifest in terms of what individual employees can do to resolve a customer complaint. How much leeway do they have to spend resources on such things? A leadership team must consider several issues: Have we empowered people in our organization to make decisions that we feel will be responsible to the organization? Do we trust our people, and have we enabled them, to know what doing the right thing means in our organization? Have we as leaders and managers demonstrated with our own actions what doing the right thing means?

The next set of questions relates to how we empower people. For example, expense-reporting systems that require inordinate amounts of time signal a lack of trust and empowerment. What other systems in your organization might disempower people? The best way to found out is to actually ask people. Most companies have too many rules, which have the impact of diminishing freedom. As Dov Seidman says, “A handful of shared values are worth more than a thousand rules.”

In our experience, the critical issue in empowerment lies in the mindsets at the top of the organization. Leaders who can find the right balance between setting standards for their teams and empowering them to deliver results embody more of a servant leadership orientation than they do a traditional command-andcontrol approach. We will come back to this issue in our discussion of conscious leadership.