Page 96 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

trust or Bust � 75

trust, Stephen says. The penalty for lack of trust is less speed and
higher cost. He calls it “the trust tax.” The reward for a high-trust
culture, alternatively, is “the trust dividend.” As in his own executive
leadership experience, high trust leads to quantifiable results. It is a
“performance multiplier, elevating and improving every dimension of
your organization and your life.” It improves, he says, your energy,
passion, enjoyment, collaboration, execution, engagement, partner-
ing, innovation, and relationships with all stakeholders, including
your family, friends, and community.
We wanted to know if Stephen thought trust was important when
leading a mobile workforce. It didn’t take us long to find out. “In a
mobile environment,” he told us, “there is an even greater premium put
upon modeling the behaviors that build trust. In the Speed of Trust book
I highlight these 13 behaviors that are common to high-trust people
(high-trust leaders, high-trust companies). Those same behaviors will
be important for mobile managers and a mobile workforce. [They] may
be of even greater importance, because you may not be together.”
As we’ll learn throughout this book, the principles of leading are
the same when managing either a colocated workforce or a mobile
one, but the strategies and techniques may be different or have a dif-
ferent emphasis. Building trust is no different, Stephen told us. The
principles are the same—talking straight, transparency, clarifying ex-
pectations, delivering results, and keeping commitments. “The prac-
tices may change a little bit in terms of the mediums and frequency
of communication and the focus,” he said. “I would differentiate more
between the practices than I would the principles.”
Stephen told us that two behaviors are particularly important in a
mobile setting—clarifying expectations and practicing accountability:

You need to get your mobile employee to really focus on those two, because
the whole premise of the mobile workforce is really based heavily on trust.
It is saying that we can get our work done without all necessarily having
to be present in the same place to do it. The idea that everyone has to be
present in the same place might have some merit in certain circumstances
where there is a synergy taking place. With all the platforms and medi-