Page 94 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

trust or Bust � 73

` why trust Is ImportAnt

The people we interviewed told us that trust is essential for manag-
ing a mobile workforce. You can’t listen to a management guru or
pick up a book on leadership that doesn’t extol the virtues of trust for
building teams, organizations, and relationships between leaders and
followers. For virtual teams, trust is even more crucial. Our friend
Kit Brown-Hoekstra, writing with Brenda Huettner and Char James-
Tanny, says trust is even more important virtually because the super-
visor can’t manage by “walking around.” When employees work away
from the office “the supervisor must have a high degree of trust in the
employee, as well as being comfortable with a certain lack of control,
for this situation to work.” 3
Trust also makes a big difference in the quality of your team’s de-
cision making. Author Jana Kemp believes that trust affects not only
decision making itself but also what happens after decisions are made:
“When there is no trust, no confident decision-making for positive
action can occur. When there is trust, decision-making can occur
with the hope for positive implementation to follow.” Without that
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trust, good luck. Moving from a consensus style of decision mak-
ing to a command-and-control type of decision making, she says, can
“break the trust” of a team. Command and control at a distance is
nearly impossible; you are going to have to trust the members of your
team to solve problems, think creatively, and take the initiative when
opportunities come up. If they wait for you to give them instructions
every time a decision has to be made, you are in big trouble.
In fact, your ability to do something special with your organiza-
tion will rest on the ability to establish trust. James Kouzes and Barry
Posner, best-selling authors of The Leadership Challenge, when talk-
ing about the practice of Enabling Others to Act, include an entire
section about creating a climate of trust. They start by saying, “At
the heart of collaboration is trust. It’s the central issue in human rela-
tionships within and outside organizations. Without trust, you cannot
lead. Without trust, you cannot get extraordinary things done.”
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