No time for trust?

Time pressure is often high in business transformations, especially restructuring. No room for uncertainties. So only a small “elite” is entrusted with running the program.

However, success depends on the share of staff owning transformation activities. Doubling participation rate triples return to shareholders, as research shows. So how to overcome the “trust gap”?

You trust someone based on relevant experience with them (or the experience of trusted others). No data, no trust. You wouldn’t randomly pick anyone off the street to look after your children.

So, onboarding many of your staff simultaneously in a critical transformation is a question of information efficiency: You need to see how each of them are getting on to build trust while not losing time.

Exactly this information efficiency is provided by transformation platforms like ChangeMaker. They build trust at scale. By creating transparency around progress and impact. Where people are visibly progressing well, trust results. Even when not doing well, the cause is often visibly outside peoples’ control, and trust still results.

But trust must be mutual.

Not only must senior management trust in their project members, but also the other way around. Transformation platforms replace the random probing and poking interpreted as distrust (“why did they pick us to report, don’t they trust us?”) by an objective process that treats everybody equal.

What methods do you employ to build trust at the scale of an organisation?