CommLog

* One powerful way to sustain trust is to put the interests of others ahead of your own. Putting others first means knowing their goals and concerns, and helping them. Is a colleague a passionate baseball fan? Give them your Red Sox tickets some afternoon, for no reason at all. Is that the game where the Red Sox win the World Series? Even better! You'll suffer real pain at giving up your tickets. Public sacrifice, if it's real and visible, builds huge credibility when it's in the service of others. And the sacrifice must be real. Reducing your bonus from $2 million to $1.75 million just doesn't count. * If you get a reputation for taking advantage of others, however, even people whom you have treated well can start to doubt. One CEO wrote articles trumpeting his ethical behavior. Employees knew otherwise; they'd seen him cheat distributors and shirk on his commitments to his partners. So the more the CEO crowed, the more the grapevine passed anonymous notes highlighting his lies. * In business, one bad manager rarely destroys trust in the entire company. But several bad managers, armed with policies that clearly treat people as disposable implements, can destroy trust in an entire organization. At that point, bringing in a new management team that takes clear, visible action might have a chance of rebuilding trust. These actions will be hampered because employees have learned to distrust the organization as a whole. But at least the new leaders will have a chance to gain one-on-one trust and translate that into the organizational changes needed to build trust throughout.