I have always had a love of the water, oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, it doesn’t matter. I find great peace when I am just looking at the ocean or being in or on the water. I’ve never questioned why, it just is. My love of the water led me to go to SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx, NY. The school is the longest running nautical school in the United States dating back to its founding in 1874 aboard the USS St. Mary’s. The campus was moved ashore in the 1920s and located on the grounds of Fort Schuyler, a fort that was built in 1856 to guard the mouth of the Long Island Sound.
As a freshman cadet, I was required to memorize this saying, “The sea is selective, slow in recognition of effort and aptitude but quick in sinking the unfit.” It’s a quote from Felix Riesenberg, the school’s superintendent from 1917 to 1919 and 1923 to 1924. I understood what the words said, but the full weight of their meaning didn’t hit home until a few years later.
Instead of having summers off like most college students, the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes board the training ship and set out to sea for two and a half months. It was on the training ship I learned the tools of my trade, stood watch and learned how to be an officer. I crossed the Atlantic twice on our training ship and there is nothing like looking out and seeing nothing but the ocean and the horizon all around you. It is exciting and humbling at the same time.
Shipboard organization is run as a paramilitary organization; you have a captain, officers, and crew. It is highly structured for very important reasons, and trust in each other is essential for getting where you are going safely. There is a high degree of vulnerability between shipmates knowing help is not that close when you are in the middle of the ocean!
It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security when the sea is calm and the sun is shining; however, that is not always the case. I vividly remember one night on my last cruise when my bunkmates and I felt the ship shudder and we were thrown from our bunks. Ships do not stop suddenly; it takes an awful lot of force to cause a ship to shudder and toss bodies out of beds. At first no one knew what had happened but I can tell you Felix’s quote came quickly to mind and it was the first time I felt completely vulnerable while at sea. It ingrained in me the importance of being ever vigilant while on watch as there were sailors asleep below decks trusting me to keep them safe while they slept.
Fast forward another year and I am the Third Mate aboard the SS Samuel Mather on the Great Lakes. The other mates I worked with were more than twice my age and didn’t appreciate a 22-year-old college-educated kid from Long Island, NY, being a ship’s officer. They didn’t trust anyone who didn’t come up through the hausepipe (nautical term for working your way up from the bottom of the organizational ladder).
It took a little while for me to realize the lack of trust came from a fear of the unknown. It didn’t look, sound, or act like anyone they had ever worked with. They couldn’t comprehend how I had packed their 20 plus years of learning and experience into 4 years. I learned quickly that asking a lot of questions and being open to them “teaching” me what they knew eased their distrust. I was never fully accepted—the gap created by difference in age, knowledge, and perceived experience was too big—but it did make working together much easier.
I share these stories to show how my adult concepts of trust were shaped and to highlight why trust does not appear to be as important in working together as it should. You live in tight quarters on board a ship and for better or worse, you get to know your shipmates pretty well. In the corporate workplace most employees are insulated from each other by the work they do and have lives outside of work. Their life begins again as soon as the work day is done and trust is not necessarily essential for staying alive. It is easy to assume that employees trust each other because in many businesses your staff member’s daily lives don’t depend on high levels of trust inside your organization. The level of trust within the status quo is good enough.
However, good is the anathema to great when another competitor or alternative comes along to disrupt what you are doing (Collins 2001). Think how disruptive Uber and Airbnb were to two very traditional industries. A livery service that owns no vehicles and a hotel company with no owned hotels. Hotels have since lobbied hard to have Airbnb play by their rules and NYC Taxi medallions once worth millions are worth a fraction of that now. Airbnb was so disruptively successful it went from a startup in 2008 to $1.6 billion in revenue by 2017.
After coaching for a few years I knew the knowledge and experience of running a business was not enough to help CEOs and their businesses the way I wanted to. I decided to become a student of business to enhance my coaching. Fortunately, Vistage International, the organization I was coaching for at the time, offered to pay half of MBA so I could better serve our mutual clients. I jumped at the chance and after two straight years of studying nights and weekends (I was still working full time) I finished my MBA in Organizational Development.
Why do it? Why go back to graduate school 20 years after college? I knew my skill set was good enough to work with clients but not great; my clients deserve great. All the professors, authors I met were incredible. They expanded my understanding of business, and organizational development in particular, in a way that I could not experience in a single lifetime. Thanks to video conferencing, I was able to work with students from around the globe and see live some of the industry giants who literally wrote the textbooks we were using. I’ll not forget sitting and listening to Michael E. Porter discuss his book Competitive Advantage, Creating and Sustain Superior Performance. I’ll admit to being a business geek, but it was fascinating to listen how the author put all of his thoughts and research into context for students to study and implement.
Over the past decades I have read hundreds of books on leadership, leading change, organizational structure, and corporate culture. I enjoy reading others’ perception of how people and process should go together to create value. Obviously every author has their opinion on what works, what doesn’t, or how to get the most out of your employees. The concept and importance of trust in the workplace is often referenced, but not given the weight it deserves. Trust in the workplace is similar to the friction-based connection between two or more Lego© parts. No glue or other fastener is required and all the Lego© pieces use this patented connection to fit together. However, it is the emotional bond between people that makes us stick instead of friction.
There are a number of prominent businesses that have used trust as the underlying foundation for working together. One of my favorite examples of this is Gore, Inc. I first studied Gore during my MBA course and have been a fan ever since. Here is a brief summary of an interview with the CEO Terri L. Kelly about Gore’s corporate structure. This is part of what she said:
“Gore is a $2.4bn, hi-tech materials company that most people know best for the Gore-Tex fabric that waterproofs their anoraks and walking boots—no one can tell any of the company’s 8,500 associates what to do. Although there is a structure (divisions, business units and so on) there is no organization chart, no hierarchy and therefore no bosses. I am (Kelly) one of the few with a title.”
At Gore—As she acknowledges, that makes her job rather different from that of most CEOs. Bill Gore, who set up the company with his wife Vieve (short for Genevieve) in the family garage in 1958, wanted to build a firm that was truly innovative. So there were no rule books or bureaucracy. He strongly believed that people come to work to do well and do the right thing. Trust, peer pressure and the desire to invent great products—market-leading guitar strings, dental floss, fuel cells, cardiovascular and surgical applications and all kinds of specialized fabrics—would be the glue holding the company together, rather than the official procedures other companies rely on. (Caulkin 2008)
Bill Gore was certainly ahead of his time and the company continues to innovate and thrive today using the same principles it was founded on over 60 years ago. It remains one of those rare companies that has not succumbed to the daily results and bottom-line pressure of Wall Street investing. I truly believe going forward, this type of culture will provide the best competitive edge for any business in any industry. The long-term financial results are there and the best future employees will be attracted to it.
There has been a lot of innovation and shifts in culture away from the more traditional workplaces. Google has office complexes or campuses complete with slides from floor to floor in some locations. Other companies have changed dress codes, created sleep pods, happy hour carts on Friday afternoon, lounges, and many other creative ways for employees to relax and be more comfortable at work. Nothing, however, will replace the feelings of being safe, respected, and appreciated. Trust comes first; everything after that is a plus.
The next several chapters will dig into what destroys trust in your organization and what you can do to build it. Then I will take you through some of the basics that apply to, sole practitioners, partnerships, corporations (for profit and not-for-profit), and family businesses to see how trust applies to all of them. The fundamentals are the same because every structure still depends on employees.
Thoughts for Reflection
• Can you envision how the connectivity of trust in your organization can be a real competitive edge on many levels?
• Does it make sense why your current culture will either attract or repel certain types of people?
• Are the core values for your business clearly defined?
• Are you clear about the core values you want in your future employees?
• Will your current culture attract the employees that fit with those values?