Can You Identify the Least Trusted Person in Your Organization? We Can.
About 170,000,000 results. That is how many pages on Google we found when searching the term KPIs.
While managers are always looking for ways to evaluate the success of an organization, it can be a daunting task to know which indicators should be measured and which are having an influence on your organization. Would trust be at the top of your list if you had to pick one?
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Top Organizations Understand the Significance of the Right KPIs
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British-American author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek explains in this video why the Navy Seals would rather work with a medium or low performer with high trust than a high performer with low trust.
The most effective and influential leaders are those who can build a high level of trust within their organization. Isn’t it ironic, given this, that trust is one KPI that most companies don’t measure?
There are one of two reasons why. The first is that they are not aware of the importance of trust, and the second is that they don’t have a way to measure it.
Why Is Trust an Amplifier for Growth?
Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow famously wrote, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.”[1] This is true for both people and businesses alike! When individuals, especially employees, place their trust in a business, the company has an opportunity to thrive.
In 2018, Accen
ture scored more than 7,000 companies across interdependent dimensions of competitiveness: growth, profitability, sustainability, and trust. The study revealed a direct correlation between trust and competitive agility. More than half (54%) of the companies examined experienced a material drop in trust during the past two and half years. While this has most likely been exasperated due to the pandemic, their study revealed that the average company experiencing “a drop in trust also saw their Competitive Agility Index score decline by two points. For every point, a company’s score on the Competitive Agility Index drops, significant revenues are at stake.”[2]
Trust Fuels Trust
Studies continue to show that when employees strongly believe
their managers, follow through on promises, and demonstrate the values they preach, profits are substantially higher. When people trust their manager, they care more about the company, are emotionally committed to it, improve their customer service, and tend to stay with that company longer. These trusted relationships make goals easier to meet.
When there is a lack of trust in managers, and managers are evaluated only on skills and productivity, they are toxic to the organization and tend to cause a higher turnover, lower profits, and lower customer satisfaction.
Trust as a Key Performance Indicator
Now that you have a good understanding of the effect of trust in an organization, how do you measure it and develop strategies to increase trust?
these 3 assessments work together to build higher trust so that you have higher engagement, better customer service, and higher profits.
Most companies have different ways to measure performance, but very few measures look for ways to improve trust. As a leading indicator, though, if you are monitoring trust as a KPI and it is going up, your other KPIs are likely improving and vice versa.
We are advocates of tools called the Trust Inside Assessments. Using the Integro Trust Model, these assessments identify and support the four behaviors necessary to build trust: acceptance, openness, congruence, and reliability.
The assessments build greater trust by benchmarking the current levels within an organization and then focus your leaders on action plans to increase trust at every level – organizational, team, and leader. There are three types of assessments:
- Employee Passion Survey – The Employee Passion Survey measures two aspects critical to developing engaged and passionate employees: Are you meeting the five intrinsic needs required by your employees to encourage passion, and the level of trust employees have for management, their work, and their organization. Download a sample profile here.
- Team Alignment Survey – The Team Alignment Survey measures a team’s clarity and agreement with the organizational purpose, values, vision, goals, priorities, and roles. It also measures the level of trust among team members – a critical element in achieving alignment. Download a sample profile here.
- Flexibility and Trust Survey – The Flexibility and Trust Survey uses input from the leader’s team members, typically their direct reports, to measure leader flexibility and trust-building ability in one assessment. Download a sample profile here.
As a certified Integro Trust Inside associate, we will administer the assessments in a secure, confidential, online platform that can be completed in about 15 minutes. The results are delivered in an easy-to-read report with graphs and charts to explain the outcomes and provide interpretation. Upon delivery, a full debrief is supplied to the appropriate people, complete with workbooks and development notes to ensure meaningful action plans that can be measured over time to determine the accomplishment of trust as a KPI.
If you want to add trust to our dashboard of KPIs, contact us today.
[1] https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/people/kenneth_j_arrow
[2] https://www.accenture.com/a_acnmedia/thought-leadership-ssets/pdf/accenture-competitive-agility-index.pdf
