New Study Reveals the Link Between Communication and Trust
The biggest wall to scale in almost any communication challenge is credibility. Ask any political candidate. So it’s really little surprise that a new survey by BlessingWhite, a New Jersey-based consulting firm, revealed that employees trust their own managers (75%) more than their senior executives (60%). We North Americans are a little less trusting of the senior execs (53%) than those surveyed on other continents. T+D, August 2008, pg 14 Shall we credit the infamous CEOs of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom for that statistic?
Comparing attitudes of more than 7,500 workers on four continents, the study also revealed some other commonly held misconceptions about communication. The key finding was the premise of my book released last year: The Voice of Authority: Ten Communication Strategies Every Leader Needs to Know (McGraw-Hill). That is, simply giving information is NOT the same as communication.
Let me get more specific: When it comes to routine information, bad news, or good news—whether about mergers, layoffs, terminations, products recalls, innovative marketing strategies, new initiatives for the year, or acquisitions—the typical rank-and-file employee does not feel that he or she knows what’s going on companywide. Yet senior leaders scratch their heads and say, “We sent an email with the announcement and put it on the web. Why don’t they understand?”
Answer: Information has to be interpreted and relevant to the audience to be useful and understood.
Back to the BlessingWhite study: When middle managers do the interpreting and make information from “on high” relevant, they build trust and engage their employees. When they don’t, well,…that could explain much of the distrust suggested in the responses from the other twenty-five percent of the disengaged workforce.
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