Saturday, May 08, 2021

Trust Capital

Everybody is aware about different capital employed in organisations like man, machine money etc. But do you know that there is another type of capital which is imperative in any organisation. And that is “trust capital”. This can’t be created by anybody else, but it is created by the leaders. But the fundamental question remains, ‘how to create that trust capital?’ We all know what trust means. Trust is one of the important elements in leadership. But how are we going to create that trust among employees? Employees expect that the organisations and specifically leadership team and managers trust their employees, they are respected, valued and their contribution is recognised. They reciprocate it by demonstrating their trust in the leadership. 

Trust capital is directly proportional to the cultural index of the organization and your leadership mindset. The more transparent, genuine, and empathetic your leadership is, the more trust by the employees.  During this pandemic few organizations are going the extra mile to support employees, however there are few other organizations who are asking employees to work from office and reducing their salaries. In the first case, organizations are creating the trust capital, in later it is just a business. Employees would keep this in mind always.

If you don't have trust in your team, you tend to micromanage your team, hold the knowledge within yourself, become insecure. This is again reciprocated by employees. When people don’t trust you, it becomes obvious in their behaviour.

The fundamental question is how to create the trust capital?

Trust capital has the following vital elements.

Elements of Trust Capital

Credibility: Every leader has to establish his/her credibility in the organization. Credibility is pursued by employees and by the people at large based on their experience with you, based on the behaviour you demonstrated in the past. It also means while communicating, how genuine you are with the people, how transparent you are in your behaviour. When you are credible, people trust what you say.  

Reliability: Cambridge dictionary has defined the meaning of reliability as “the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well”. Employees are always watching their leaders, when they observe the gap between saying and doing, they would not trust you.

Consistency: Consistency is referred to as adherence to the same principles in a steadfast way. It also means your behaviour is the same for similar actions where employees believe that the leader is not unfair. S/he is consistent. If you want to be trustworthy, then you need to be consistent in your efforts towards creating the trust capital.

Empathy: Emotional intelligence is the crucial leadership trait. You can learn it with some effort. One of the elements of emotional intelligence is empathy. Unless you don’t put yourself in the shoes of others, you will not understand their emotions. If you demonstrate empathy, it is easy to connect and decide your strategy to deal with the person.   

Insight- Self vs Others: While you are demonstrating above all behaviours, it is very important you do it with right intentions. The first question you should ask is, am I doing with right intentions? Is my focus primarily on ‘myself’ or ‘others’? Am I self-centered and thinking more about only myself? Your trust index will be impacted if your focus while dealing with people is more on you and less on others.  

When every leader, every manager and every employee demonstrates above behaviours, it creates collective trust capital in the organization. If you want to calculate the trust capital index, just rate the behaviour on the scale of 1 to 5 on Credibility, Reliability, Consistency and Empathy; divide the sum total by Insight score. Insight score can be given high (5) when intentions focuses towards more on self, (it means you have limited insight of others, you are more self -centered) and minimum (1), when it is towards others, (it means you focus others also and have the insight of their feelings).

Trust Capital Index

Trust is an important part of any relationship. You can build your trust capital individually. If all come together, then you along with others can create the trust capital in the organization, society, or family. You jointly can create the collective trust capital by being authentic and demonstrating the right behaviours.      

(Opinions are purely personal & does not represent my organizations, current or past) 

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1 comment:

Pramod Kumar tripathi said...

Truley awesome insights sir

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