Paula Bartholome says:
>
>I have been working on a model for effective organizational communications
>which combines trust with the old standbys of targeted messages delivered
>in a timely way. If the issue of trust can be succesfully addressed, and
>then maintained, I submit that communication becomes much quicker and
>easier, no matter what the topic.
Paula is correct, but I would like to put a little twist on this. When
she says 2 out of 3 employees don't believe management when they say
various things, it isn't exactly a matter of trusting or not trusting
here. Rather, it's about what employees trust management to do and mean
by their pronouncements. Through experience, employees have come to
understand that when management makes pronouncements that smack of valuing
openness and information sharing, for example, they never act on it.
So clearly management has come to understand, and by their behavior,
taught employees to understand as well, that what you do to be a
successful manager is spout platitudes but don't act on them. Managers
would not do this if they understood that all this game playing is
actually detrimental to their success. But they have come to believe that
openness is not a good idea (even if all the books say it is). And that
belief is what guides their behavior and what they are teaching employees
to do, as well. Only when top management wakes up to this problem can we
expect pronouncements on openness and subsequent actions to make that a
reality happen throughout the organization.
Paula's model is, I am sure, a good one. But unless management believes
it, it's not going to happen, regardless of the platitudes they spout.
And in that case, we can expect that employees will continue to trust that
success as a manager depends on being a pretty good hypocrit.
John Woods
jwoods@execpc.com
--John Woods <jwoods@execpc.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>