What Your Employees Need and Can't Tell You by Melina Palmer

Author:Melina Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2022-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Reduced Trust = Reduced Speed + Higher Cost

Increased Trust = Increased Speed + Lower Cost

Consider how quickly things can happen when you work with people you trust. Deals are made quickly, teams work efficiently, things click, and people feel great. His book describes a twenty-three-billion-dollar acquisition of McLane Distribution, a business deal between Warren Buffett and Walmart. This type of deal would typically take many months and cost millions to pay for accountants, auditors, and attorneys. They made the deal after a single two-hour meeting and a handshake.

He also shares a story of when Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, was presented with a three-page memo outlining a massive reorganization. Kelleher read it there in the hallway, asked a question (to which the team member gave a satisfactory answer that he shared the concern and was already working on it). In less than five minutes from being presented with the document, he gave the go-ahead, and the project could begin.

Without a high level of trust, interactions like these could not happen. You may be thinking, “We could never do that here.” It isn’t something that happens overnight, that’s for sure. But continued investments in those micro-moments can build up trust over time. Remember back to the Gene Kranz example in the last chapter. Something he said in the buildup to Apollo 11 landing on the moon was creating a culture of trust critical to saving the astronauts of Apollo 13. To borrow a set of terms from Stephen’s father, the late Dr. Stephen Covey who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, every conversation is going into the mental bank account—it is either a deposit or a withdrawal.114 You want to be making lots of deposits and building up that trust account so when you are ready to make a withdrawal, the account isn’t negative.

Your investment in giving the gift of transparency and trust to your team can help them establish autonomy—one of the key factors of intrinsic motivation, which we will talk about more in Chapter 15.

When you think of the company 3M, what product(s) come to mind? If you are familiar with the brand at all, I am guessing Post-its is on your list. Did you know that Post-its, now the flagship of 3M, were created during “experimental doodling” time at the company, which lets every employee dedicate up to 15 percent of their time to projects that aren’t directly related to their job?115

It’s a common case study, so you might know that one. But what about Gmail, Google News, and Google Translate? They came out of a similar program at Google of “20 percent time.” Atlassian claims zero turnover in engineering because of their similar policy. It’s important to note that when they started to implement this flex time at Atlassian, many managers resisted and said they wanted to get reports from their team members to make sure they weren’t messing around during this time—they were told no.116 Autonomy requires trust. Trust helps teams overcome the fear of the unknown and try new things.

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