A good corporate culture is easy to foster in the start-up phase, or indeed in small businesses, where everyone knows everyone by name, there’s a shared sense of purpose, and a strong sense of all being in the same boat.
But as an organisation scales and grows, numbers rise, and new offices and even geographies open up, maintaining its culture, and ensuring it is aligned such that employees everywhere have the same experience, is much harder. That’s because trust is not so much difficult to establish, as difficult to maintain.
“While it is not easy, there are pretty good guidelines for how to build trust within organisations,” says Colin Hughes, head of TU Dublin’s Graduate Business School.
“However, even if leaders are successful in building high trust relationships and organisational cultures, it can be difficult to maintain trust, especially as a company scales.”
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Communication and clarity
As organisations grow, they move from smaller teams to large complex structures with multiple layers.
“It gets more difficult for colleagues to communicate and connect with each other, and for senior leaders to ensure clarity around values and strategy. The role of the leader then becomes less about delivering, as before, and more about formulating a vision, developing and communicating a strategy and empowering others to deliver,” he explains.
Goals and objectives are of critical importance. “This is where prioritisation and leader effectiveness become crucial,” says Hughes.
“Great leaders spend a lot of time ensuring clarity of expectation and, in turn, encouraging their team members to prioritise. Unfortunately, many leaders still spend too much of their time on low-value tasks, doing things that others should be doing or getting caught up in endless firefighting.”
It’s understandable but comes at a cost. “I get that it can be hard to escape this in certain contexts. However, setting and communicating a small number of objectives that link to the strategy, building trust and empowering others to deliver should be priorities for any leader,” he cautions.
Consistent approach
Another challenge he identifies is ensuring that leaders and line managers right across the organisation are aligned in their commitment to building a high trust culture.
“As organisations grow they have to hire lots of people leaders. Unless these leaders are committed to a similar value set and to building high trust cultures in their teams, pockets of low trust or distrust will very quickly emerge,” he points out.
“It is also challenging to achieve a consistent culture across multiple business units, office locations and teams. Add to that the challenges of building culture in a hybrid working environment and you really have a challenge. The best virtual or hybrid leaders see the value of meeting people in person and commit to travelling to build relationships. Bringing teams together allows for relationship-building but also helps to ensure alignment on values and strategy.”
Another consideration is the fact that organisations will often grow through acquisition.
“I have seen how this can create difficulties in practice. Again there can be pockets of different cultures, and sometimes employees in the acquired organisation can feel unhappy with the change and disconnected from the culture of the parent organisation,” he says.
“It is often necessary to focus a lot of attention on building trust, especially at the early stages of the relationship. Listening and understanding concerns, showing empathy and providing clarity and reassurance can all be very important. However, given the pace of change there is often inadequate focus on these activities.”
Trust through uncertainty
As organisations grow, managing all of this becomes, by definition, more onerous.
“People will invariably have to work harder as a company scales and may have a certain level of apprehension or maybe a dip in motivation along the way,” he says.
In most cases leaders are asking people to go on a journey with them and to trust in their vision.
“A high-trust culture, in which colleagues trust each other and trust in the senior leadership team, can help employees to be vulnerable in the face of uncertainty,” he explains.
“However, if people don’t trust the leaders in the organisation, at multiple levels, they are less likely to commit the extra effort required and effective change can become incredibly difficult, if not impossible.”
