Trust can take years to build, and moments to destroy. Communication lies at the heart of trust, and the more you communicate, the more trust you can build. Keep things to yourself, and people begin to fear for the worst.
Full Transcript
Hey everyone.  I’m Robert Dempsey, CEO and founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions.
And this is my second day in New York City with my family and it is, even though the city is pretty crazy, it’s definitely a lot of fun. And if you haven’t been to New York City, then I highly suggest that you definitely come.
So, yesterday I met with one of my customers. And some of our discussions really hit home, again, the importance of trust. And how nothing can happen without trust. And, you know, trust is something that takes a long time to build up, but can take literally minutes, hours or even seconds to completely break down.
And once trust is broken, it is extremely difficult to build that trust back up. It can take months or even years, depending on how bad that trust has been broken. And so, you know, one of the things though, one of the big organizational disfunctions, as I see it, is that there is a complete lack of trust.
And without trust you really get this very commanding, control structure, a lot of micro-management and effectively horrible working conditions for everyone involved. I mean, who wants to work in a place where no one trusts them or they trust no one.  It’s like the CIA or something, I mean, who knows, you know, spies!
But anyway, for me it all comes down to communication and overcoming the fear of what might happen by doing that communication. So, again, going back to transparency and just really letting people know what’s going on.
When I was in my MBA program a friend of mine said that there were lay offs happening in his company and the lay offs were going office by office by office throughout these different states and different countries. And no one really knew how many people were going to be laid off total or anything. And they just saw the lay off, the rolling lay offs, kind of coming closer to them. And because no one knew what was going on, this caused a lot of consternation of all the employees and productivity all but ground to a halt. And obviously a major problem for the business.
Now I can understand why, maybe, from a business standpoint they would not really tell people what’s going on because if someone knows they’re getting laid off, they could do malicious things. You know, they don’t want people to just all of a sudden stop working if they know they’re going to be let go, or if there’s the possibility of them being let go.
But ultimately, all of those kinds of things, the negative things, really came to fruition merely by the company not telling anyone what’s going on.
And so, really I found the, you know, the best policy to be just tell people what’s going on and explain, you know, their role in it, how they play a part, you know, ensure them that you’re doing everything possible you can to remedy the situation if it’s going to be, you know, something that might negatively impact them, but really let people know what’s going on. Because if not, then that trust is just not going to be there and if you let people know what’s going on, then that trust will be there and could be to an even greater degree.
So, let me know what you think about all of this in the comments or video response or however you feel you really enjoy commenting back. And I look forward to hearing from you all.
So, again, Robert Dempsey, ADS, talk to you later. Thanks.
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