Being consistent, clear, and reliable is the perfect antidote to these topsy-turvy times, says Rick Wartzman of The Drucker Institute
It is amazing that more corporate executives aren’t being shown the door. A Maritz research poll conducted last April with more than 2,000 respondents found that a mere 11 per cent of employees strongly agree that their managers show consistency between their words and actions. In addition, only 7 per cent strongly agree that they trust senior leaders to look out for their best interest. Other recent surveys paint a similarly bleak picture.
All of this would surely distress Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, who believed that trust was essential to the effective functioning of any organization.
“You cannot prevent a major catastrophe,” Drucker declared, “but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.” In other words, trust must be established in all directions: from the top down, from the bottom up, and from peer to peer across the enterprise.
Let’s begin at the top. “In military training,” Drucker noted, “the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers, because without trust, they won’t fight.”
So, how does a senior executive forge these bonds? It starts by being straight with people. “To trust a leader, it is not necessary to like him,” Drucker wrote. “Nor is it necessary to agree with him. Trust is the conviction that the leader means what he says. It is a belief in something very old-fashioned, called ‘integrity’... effective leadership – and again this is very old wisdom – is not based on being clever; it is based primarily on being consistent.”