Managers: It's Time to Rebuild Trust With Your Employees

The world of work has changed, and the rules for managers need to change with it.

We used to work in an era of stability and lifetime employment. Employers and employees committed to each other, for better or worse, through bull and bear markets, until retirement did them part. Because both sides expected the relationship to be permanent, both sides were willing to invest in each other.

The traditional model of lifetime employment, so well-suited to periods of relative stability, is too rigid for today’s networked age. Few companies can provide the traditional career ladder for their employees anymore.

Many—probably most—companies have tried to become more flexible by reducing the employer-employee relationship to what’s explicitly spelled out in a legal and binding contract. This legalistic approach treats both employees and jobs as short-term commodities. Need to cut costs? Lay off employees. Need new competencies? Don’t train your people—hire different ones. “Employees are our most valuable resource,” companies insist. But when Wall Street wants spending cuts, their “most valuable resource” suddenly morphs into their most fungible resource.

“It’s just business” has become the ruling philosophy. Loyalty is scarce, long-term ties are scarcer, but there’s plenty of disillusionment to go around.

We can’t keep going the way we’ve been going. Trust in the business world is near an all-time low. A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that’s unable to invest in the future. And a business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies—well, that’s a company already in the process of dying.

Since we can’t go back to the age of lifetime employment, and the status quo is untenable, it’s time to rebuild the employer-employee relationship.

The Alliance

The business world needs a new employment framework that facilitates mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. An ideal framework encourages employees to develop their personal networks and act entrepreneurially without becoming mercenary job-hoppers. It allows companies to be dynamic and demanding but discourages them from treating employees like disposable assets.

That's why this month I launched a new book, co-authored with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, titled: The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.

The Alliance lays out a path forward for companies and their employees. Our goal is to provide a framework for moving from a transactional to a relational approach. Think of employment as an alliance: a mutually beneficial deal, with explicit terms, between independent players. This employment alliance provides the framework managers and employees need for the trust and investment to build powerful businesses and careers.

In an alliance, employer and employee develop a relationship based on how they can add value to each other. Employers need to tell their employees, “Help make our company more valuable, and we’ll make you more valuable in the broader career marketplace.”

Employees need to tell their bosses, “Help me grow and flourish, and I’ll help the company grow and flourish.” Employees invest in the company’s success; the company invests in the employees’ market value.

By building a mutually beneficial alliance rather than simply exchanging money for time, employer and employee can invest in the relationship and take the risks necessary to pursue bigger payoffs. For example, many HR leaders and executives get frustrated when they spend a lot of money on training and development programs, only to see employees walk out the door months later. If you think of your employees as free agents, the natural response is to slash training budgets. Why train a competitor’s new hire? In an alliance, the manager can speak openly and honestly about the investment the company is willing to make in the employee and what it expects in return. The employee can speak openly and honestly about the type of growth he seeks (skills, experiences, and the like) and what he will invest in the company in return by way of effort and commitment. Both sides set clear expectations.

When a company and its managers and employees adopt this kind of approach, all parties can focus on maximizing medium-and long-term benefits, creating a larger pie for all and more innovation, resilience, and adaptability for the company.

It Starts With Three Simple Words

We are allies. Three simple words. Yet when spoken by a manager to an employee, these may be three of the most powerful words possible.

At many companies, managers pretend that employees have a job for life. Employees pretend that they intend to work for their company for the rest of their careers. But deep down, both parties don’t believe their own words.

You can’t build a trusting relationship on a foundation of dishonesty and self-deception. Yet the “honest” approach of considering every job temporary, and every employee a “free agent” leads to a bleak, cynical world without trust or loyalty.

The answer is for managers and employees to treat each other as allies: Independent and autonomous players who voluntarily come together to work towards mutually agreed upon goals.

This open, accepting approach allows managers and employees to be honest with each other, providing a solid foundation for mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. It creates a bigger pie for everyone rather than treating our work relationships as a zero-sum game.

In the weeks ahead, I'll describe more detail about how you craft an alliance with your employees. For now, remember that your journey as a manager will begin the next time you meet one-on-one with an employee and speak the three simple words that show that you’re committed to an open, honest approach: "We are allies."

Join the conversation about The Alliance on the LinkedIn Group. Below is a visual summary of the book.


Heba El Sersy

Senior Consulting Strategic Accounts Management

8y

Very interesting new concept. We definitely need to learn more about it!

Keith Heckelman

Communications Professional

9y

The "We are allies" mantra as stated by the article reflects a new philosophy and paradigm shift in business. And it must start in the executives suite with a clear and right strategy to effectively manage organizational change where managers are held accountable to invest in employee growth alluded in the article. Too often managers are allowed to slide back into the prior comfort of the old business philosophy. This commonly entails its antiquated command-and-control micro-management, unclear or unrealistic expectations up front with arbitrary expectations (which can also be unclear or unrealistic) manifesting along the progressive manager-employee relationship, brow-beating, lack of teamwork and team facilitation, knit-picking common errors, and penchants for increasing threats of punishments out of convenience and from coercive or legitimate power bases. Only when senior team leaders lead by example will employee trust increase and employer-employee relationships adapt and morph into alliances (found in the article) to take deep root into the new corporate culture. Here, the new mantra from the article will not just be a quick passing fad or a stand alone piecemeal program but an effective organizational ingredient now well integrated into a new business philosophy, a habitual healthy lifestyle of winning organizational life for long-term positive change for the better.

Good luck on book..

Like
Reply
Stine Fjell

My purpose is committed to create meaningful change. So you can make confident decisions faster, with the best solutions keeping your people and finance a step ahead.

9y

Do we actually have a choice? Reach out and connect

Like
Reply
Diane Lapine, MA, SPHR

Executive Coach, Kantor Certified, Fearless Organization Scan Certified, Strategic Partner, Organizational Development & Change Consultant, Psychological Safety, Talent Optimization

9y

Can't wait to read the book, Reid. There is great truth here, but it needs to go even further. Wall Street is a very trusting place - no really. They trust that $$ is the only thing worth trusting, spreadsheets, data, dollars, results. They never really seems to connect success to the people who generate it! Trust is a relationship, not a commodity. True trust cannot be bought or sold it is earned. Keeping this thinking going is important, because the instability this mentality is generating in our society is extremely critical to understand. When jobs are essentially vaporizing and employment merely a casual transaction, you can not expect a better society. Rather, you can expect it, but you will not get it. The fear, pain and broken trust will eventually erode society and it is essential that we understand society provides the consumers for these products. When employment is treated this casually, the quid pro quo relationship results in a form of mental prostitution.

Like
Reply

To view or add a comment, sign in

Insights from the community

Explore topics