Page 220 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Trust

trust you to spend fifty dollars, you wouldn’t be working
here.”
11. Policy audit. Conduct a policy audit in which you ask
employees to identify current policies or procedures that are
unnecessary or overly cumbersome. Revise or eliminate as
many as possible.
12. Increase autonomy. Demonstrate your trust in your
employees’ skills and judgment by increasing their autonomy
and decision-making authority. Hold one-on-one conversa-
tions with employees in which you ask them to tell you what
additional responsibilities they are willing to accept.
13. Ask and act. Ask employees for their suggestions and
then act on them. If you don’t plan on following up, don’t ask.
If suggestions cannot be enacted, explain why.
14. Playback. When employees come to you with a concern,
they are often worried that you will not fully understand
their view; they don’t trust that you have heard them cor-
rectly. To counter this, ask questions, take notes, read the
notes back, and ask whether you have accurately and thor-
oughly captured their concern.
15. “I don’t know.” When we ask someone a question and he
or she sincerely responds, “I don’t know,” it actually increases
the extent to which we view the person as trustworthy. It is
when we sense that people are making up an answer that
they lose credibility and we begin questioning whether we
can trust what they say.
16. Have their back. Demonstrate that you support your
employees and will not hang them out to dry. For example,
imagine during a meeting that someone begins to make dis-
paraging comments and questions the work of one of your
people. You might say, “I think you are being unfair; he has