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Nobody Trusts the Boss Completely─ How to Overcome the Limits of Trust and the Fear of Candor
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By Ken Chapman, Ph.D.
Ken Chapman & Associates, Inc.

Leaders who can head off serious problems before they blow up in the company’s face are two steps ahead of the game.  Their employers avoid needless expense or outright disaster and they themselves get the promotions they deserve for nipping trouble neatly in the bud. 

In practice, of course, it is never this easy. Everybody knows that one trick to dealing with problems is to learn about them early.  But what is the trick to learning about them early?  How do effective leaders find out what trouble is brewing?  What are their warning systems? 

All good leaders have their own private information networks and many develop a kind of sixth sense for the early signs of trouble.  But by far the simplest and most common way to find out about problems is to be told by a direct report.  It is easy to get information when things are going well, people love to give the boss good news.  But employees are never eager to tell their supervisors that the latest initiative is not working, to assume ownership of a problem by giving it a name, to look like an informer, or to sound like a chicken little.

An employee’s reluctance to be frank about problems is also related to risk.  While it is fairly easy to tell the boss that the machines sent over by the purchasing department are not working properly, it is much harder to admit responsibility for the malfunction and harder still, and perhaps dangerous, to blame it on the boss.  Yet, it is terribly important to get direct reports to convey unpleasant messages. The sooner a problem is disclosed, diagnosed, and corrected the better for the organization.

Almost all organizations would operate more effectively with completely open and forthright employees.  But absolute candor is too much to hope for [and probably too much to bear].  Candor depends upon trust and in hierarchical organizations; trust has strict, natural limits. 

The Limits of Trust and Candor

In a hierarchy, it is natural for people with less power to be cautious about disclosing weaknesses, mistakes, and failings, especially when the more powerful party is also in a position to evaluate and punish.  Trust flees authority and above all, trust flees a judge.  Leaders are inescapably positioned to judge direct reports.  Good leaders may be able to confine evaluations to formal occasions to avoid all trace of a judgmental style in other settings.  They can even communicate criticism in positive, constructive ways. 

But there is no way to escape completely a direct report’s inclination to see the boss as a judge so one of the limits on candor is self-protection.  For example, people often hide the failures of their own department and hope they will correct themselves.  In a typical case, the development group for a piece of special software fell behind on its schedule.  But no one told the manager until the delivery date could no longer be met.  Delivery was three months late and the company had to absorb a financial penalty.  The lack of candor was not self-protective in the long run because the development group was ultimately held responsible for the delay.  But human beings are often short-sighted and at one time or another most of us have chosen an uncertain future calamity over today’s immediate unpleasantness. 

A variation on this scheme is when direct reports protect their own direct reports in order to protect themselves.  Sometimes a direct report may try to protect a client.  In one case, a salesman withheld the information that one of his largest customers was in financial trouble.  The customer went bankrupt and the company lost $125,000.  We can only guess at the salesman’s motives – eagerness to get his commission before the troubled company failed, fear of losing an old customer, reluctance to give official warning of a danger that might be exaggerated.  The fact remains that he failed to communicate the problem.  His boss saw no sign of danger and the company lost a lot of money.

Often the motive for silence is somewhat praise-worthy.  People keep quiet about a developing problem while trying to solve it.  Most believe solving problems on their own is what they are paid to do and in many cases, they are right.  Direct reports are not paid to run to their bosses with every glitch and hiccup.  As problems grow more serious, however, leaders need to know about them. 

The difficulty lies in the bewildering territory between minor snags and major disasters.  Handled promptly and decisively, the problems in this gray area sometimes turn out to be insignificant, but self-confident supervisors, particularly inexperienced ones, are perhaps too eager to prove they can cope on their own.

Politics is another common obstacle to candor.  Organizations are political systems and employees are often involved in political struggles.  There is no guarantee your direct reports will be on your side. 

In these days of mergers and acquisitions, political infighting is often acute after absorption of or by another company.  Restructuring and consolidation can produce epidemic fear and rupture lines of communication.

Building and Destroying Trust

Given the natural obstacles to trust and candor - fear, pride, politics, dislike -leaders need to make the most of whatever opportunities they may have to increase employee trust.  Trust is not easy to build in the best of cases and the kind of trust that concerns us here has to grow on rocky ground between people at different levels of authority.

The factors affecting the development of trust and candor fall into six categories – communication, support, respect, fairness, predictability, and competence. 

Communication is a matter of keeping direct reports informed and providing accurate feedback, explaining decisions and policies, being candid about one’s own problems, and resisting the temptation to hoard information or use it as a tool or a reward. 

Support means showing concern for direct reports as people.  It means being available and approachable.  It means helping people, coaching them, encouraging their ideas, and defending their positions.  It may mean socializing with them.  It certainly means taking an interest in their lives and careers.

Respect feeds on itself.  The most important form of respect is delegation and the second most important is listening to direct reports and acting on their opinions.  In the two examples cited below, the boss shows genuine respect for his direct report’s judgment and intelligence. 

Example A:  My boss put me in charge of a project.  It involved a big risk for me, but an even bigger risk for her if I failed.  I asked her how she wanted me to do it and who else I should contact for a clearance.  She said you have free rein on this, whatever you do is okay with me. 

Example B:  Six years ago just after I joined the bank, my boss told me he had decided to buy a company and asked me to look into it and give him my opinion.  I did my own work and told him I thought it was a bad idea.  So he eliminated me from the team he had put together to manage the acquisition.  Somehow I succeeded in persuading him to listen to a fuller presentation of my analysis.  He not only took the time, he really listened to my argument and finally canceled the purchase.

In interpersonal relations, the law of reciprocity tends to rule.  When leaders use a lot of fine words about trust and respect, but behave disdainfully, direct reports are likely to respond in kind. 

Fairness means giving credit where it is due - being objective and impartial in performance appraisals, giving praise liberally.  The opposite kind of behavior- favoritism, hypocrisy, misappropriating ideas and accomplishments, unethical behavior is difficult to forgive and hugely destructive of trust.  Chronic lack of fairness will dry up trust and candor quickly, but every act of support and fair play will prime the pump. 

Predictability is a matter of behaving consistently and dependably and of keeping both explicit and implicit promises.  It is absolutely essential that the people who report to a leader be able to predict that leader’s behavior.  And when I say predict the leader’s behavior, I mean the employee can count on the boss behaving in a fair and reasonable manner whatever the issue.  Remember your employees want to know that they are valuable and they want to be able to make sense out of things.  And when a leader is predictive in his or her behavior, that leader is someone who helps people make sense out of the work to be done.

Competence means demonstrating technical and professional ability and good business sense.  Employees do not want to be subordinate to people they see as incompetent.  Trust grows from seeds of decent behavior, but it thrives on the admiration and respect that only a capable leader can command.

Learning to Recognize Signs of Trouble

Building trust and candor is a gradual process - a long chain of positive experiences; trusting employees with important assignments, publicly defending their positions, and supporting their ideas, showing candor and fairness in evaluating their work, etc.  And because trust takes time to build and has natural limits once achieved, it is easy to destroy.  Betraying a confidence, breaking a promise, humiliating an employee in public, lying, withholding information, or excluding direct reports from groups in which they feel they rightly belong.  Any of these can do instant and irreparable damage to a trust relationship that has taken months or years to develop. 

Given these limitations, can leaders rely on direct reports to come forward with problems before they become critical?  The obvious answer is no, not entirely.  Honest, forthright communication is the best source about problems that leaders have and good ones make the most of it.  At the same time, they learn to recognize subtle signs of danger and they develop and refine alternative sources of information to fill in the gaps. 

Interviews indicate there are several important warning signs that leaders can look for.  Decline in information flow is often a first sign of trouble.  Streams of information suddenly go dry, direct reports communicate less, express opinions reluctantly, avoid discussions and meetings. They are more difficult to reach and follow up has to be more thorough and deliberate. 

Deterioration of morale can reveal itself in lack of enthusiasm, reduced cooperation, increased complaints about workload, and a tendency to dump more minor problems on the boss’s desk.  At a more advanced stage, absenteeism starts to rise and aggressive behavior, increased criticism, irritability, finger pointing, and the like may appear.

Ambiguous verbal messages come from direct reports who are not quite comfortable with the information they are passing on.  They may be reluctant to blow a potential problem out of proportion or they may be testing to see if the door is open for a more serious discussion.

Nonverbal signals can take a wide variety of forms from body language to social behavior to changes in routines and habits. 

Body language, incidentally, is easily misinterpreted.  Popular books have encouraged people to believe they can easily become experts, but interpreting body language is risky business.  Distress signals may be triggered by events in a person’s private life, for example, and have nothing to do with the workplace.  A more prudent approach is to see body language merely as a potential problem without jumping to conclusions about what the problem may be. 

Outside signals such as customer complaints and problems spotted by other company divisions are also clear warnings.  But they often come too late.  By this time, the trouble has usually reached the stage of impaired results, decreasing productivity, deteriorating quality, dwindling orders, declining numbers, and by now the leader has long since failed.

Turning Hints into Information   

When experienced leaders see changes in the behavior of the people they supervise, they do their best to amplify hints and gather supplemental information.  As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, by far the easiest way of obtaining information is to get it from a direct report in plain English.  Leaders who have built good relationships with their direct reports often rely on this method.  When they see the early warning signs of trouble, they ask questions.  As I have stressed, the answers to their questions will be only as honest as direct reports want to and dare to give.  In other words, successful questioning depends partly on the level of trust.  However, it also depends partly on the leader’s ability to peel away superficial and sometimes misleading symptoms, much like the outside layers of an onion.

When conflicts arise between boss and direct reports, the most common method of punishing the boss is to withhold information.  So the greater the conflict is, the less effective direct questioning will be.  Furthermore, if an honest answer means pointing out some of the boss’s own shortcomings, almost anyone will think twice.  One way of circumventing this difficulty is to design anonymous feedback processes. 

One leader took advantage of an odd condition in his office space to coax anonymous information from his staff.  The officers were on the ninth and tenth floors of an office building and had two elevators of their own which every employee rode several times a day.  The boss put a bulletin board in each of them and posted frequent notices including a weekly newsletter about office activities, personnel changes, and industry developments.   He then let it be known informally that the bulletin boards were open to anyone, no approvals required, and when the first employee notices appeared, he made a point of leaving them in place for a full week.  There were only two rules.  First, no clippings from newspapers and magazines, contributions had to be original and nothing tasteless or abusive, but complaints and bellyaching were okay.  The bulletin boards flourished partly because most people had at least an occasional chance to ride alone and post their own views in private.  For a while, there was even an anonymous weekly newspaper that handed out praise and criticism pretty freely and irreverently.  It made some people uncomfortable, but it had no more avid reader than the boss who learned volumes about the problems and views of his staff and organization. 

Criticizing the boss’s managerial style and professional competence is probably the hardest thing for employees to do.  Remember two critical points.  First, top performers are the most likely to feel secure enough to criticize so ask them first.  Second, many of your direct reports have learned the hard way that honest, negative feedback can be dangerous.  Never ask for it unless you are certain you can handle it.

Building Information Networks

There are big differences between consuming, disseminating, and creating information.  Effective leaders seem to have a talent for all three.  Using information well is primarily a matter of not misusing it by being discrete about its sources, of using it not as a weapon, but only as a means of solving problems and improving the quality of work life.   

Spreading information well means not spreading gossip, but also not hoarding the truth.  People in organizations want and have a right to information that will help them do their jobs better or otherwise affect their lives. 

In general, they also work better and suffer less stress when they are well informed.  At the same time, and more important for this discussion, information attracts information.  Leaders who are generous with what they know seem to get as much as they give. 

For more information about Ken Chapman and Associates’ Leadership Development Programs, contact Ken Chapman at 205.366.0265 or email Ken at kchapman@leaderscode.com.

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