Trust Them (Again and Again)

Early one morning in 2015, Chris, a high-performing member of my leadership team, knocked on my door. “Have a minute?”

As you know by now, I always have a minute to speak with Kronites. I invited Chris to come in and sit down.

“You’ll never guess who called me,” he said, cracking a smile.

“Who?” I asked.

“A recruiter. I’ve got to say, it’s a great opportunity.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Tell me about it.”

A large technology company wanted Chris to consider a high-profile job opening. Chris would have to move his family to a different city, but his status and compensation would increase considerably. Chris asked me whether I thought the opportunity sounded promising enough to pursue. Would I pursue it if I were him? I told him I probably would, and suggested he agree to an interview.

Now, as a manager or leader, you might be shaking your head. Why in the world would I possibly advise one of my high performers to investigate an opportunity at another organization? Am I crazy?

No, I’m not, and I’ll explain why in Chapter 11, when I describe the unusual approach to retention and career development we embrace at Kronos. (Oh, what the heck, here’s a quick preview: we believe that we don’t own people’s careers, even if it means leaving them free to leave Kronos and pursue opportunities elsewhere.)

For now, let’s address a different question. If Chris had such an attractive job opportunity, why would he have come to me, his boss, for advice? Wouldn’t it have been smarter for him to keep it to himself until he was ready to make his move? For all he knew, I might have felt betrayed or fearful and moved to retaliate.

Chris came to me because he trusted me, and he trusted our relationship. Yes, he knew my general philosophy about retention, my belief that as employers we don’t “own” people and their careers. But leaders can espouse idealistic philosophies and still act differently when confronted with a real-life choice. Chris knew from past experience that I would treat him as a friend. I wouldn’t freak out upon hearing that he was interviewing somewhere else, and I would give him advice that was in his best interest, not the company’s. Only if he actually received an offer would I put on my “Kronos” hat and do my damnedest to convince him to stay.

Deep, abiding trust among team members is vital to building an engaged workforce. It was important to Chris that we could talk honestly, and that he could trust me to take his interests to heart. He didn’t feel trapped in his job, as so many people do, nor did he feel like he had to live some “secret life” at work while exploring an opportunity elsewhere. He could relax and be himself, tapping into my perspective and insight. This in turn made him more loyal and more committed to the company. Not surprisingly, he hasn’t left Kronos, even though recruiters inundate his inbox with job offers. To date, he has declined two attractive offers to become CEO at other companies. Other aggressively recruited Kronites have chosen to stay, too. Across our workforce, we sustain sky-high retention levels, even in an industry as talent-hungry as ours. While all the principles discussed in this book contribute to that, trust ranks highly.

We’ve worked incredibly hard to instill trust throughout the organization, one manager at a time, starting with me. First, we give employees atypical degrees of latitude and freedom. Until proven otherwise, we assume their competence, judgment, and good intentions. Because we place so much faith in employees, they return the favor, placing a remarkable degree of trust in us. Their trust in turn leads to far better performance—more innovation, quicker recovery from mistakes, more energy and enthusiasm at work.

Think of how much more inspired your team members would become if you put your faith in them, if you didn’t constantly look over their shoulders, if you assumed they were competent and would do the right thing. Think of how much better your team and organization would function if trust prevailed, with more fluid communication and quicker identification of problems as they arise. In my case, Chris’s willingness to openly discuss his career possibilities allowed me to plan staffing on my team better, and it allowed me to manage him better. Because I understood his goals and challenges, I could find the right opportunities and experiences for him so that he could grow his career within Kronos—yet another way that trust supports engagement and retention.

Trusting others isn’t easy, especially if your workplace has a history of strained relationships. Also, although the vast majority of employees prove worthy of your trust, a few don’t, and on occasion you might have to deal with the consequences. That’s OK—life isn’t perfect. On the whole, the benefits of infusing trust into the culture far exceed the costs accrued when individual employees disappoint you. Bottom line: For a more engaged, higher-performing workforce, start by assuming competence, and then demonstrate to people over and over again that you trust them. Toss micromanagement out the window!

CULTIVATING TRUST AS A LEADER

As beneficial as the idea of trust might appear, it’s still a pretty “soft” concept to many leaders and managers. Can individuals and organizations really nurture something as abstract as trust throughout an entire workforce? And if they can, does cultivating a culture of trust really help foster engagement and propel a team or organization forward?

Let’s take these questions one at a time. Individuals and organizations most certainly can take steps to increase trust among employees. I know because I’ve done it as a manager, and Kronos as a whole has, too. In many cases, executives and team managers who have entered Kronos mistrusting others have become noticeably more trusting in just a few short months or years. One of our high-performing leaders didn’t seem especially trusting when he first came to Kronos. That wasn’t entirely a surprise. In his field, sniffing out unfavorable terms in contracts is a big part of the job. Still, over the course of a few years, I saw a clear shift in this leader’s behavior—he became incredibly trusting both of me and of his own team members. He no longer assumed that only he had the best ideas. Instead, he reached out to others for input and participation. As a result, he became one of the most valuable and respected members of our leadership team.

Trust isn’t something you can expect or claim for yourself. Rather, employees must choose to bestow it on you—or not. It’s theirs to give. Leaders and managers can earn employees’ trust by behaving respectfully and communicating honestly. And just as important, leaders and managers can take the first step and bestow their trust on employees. The best way to persuade people to trust you is not to lecture them about trust, but simply to trust them. That way, you establish an underlying expectation of trusting behavior, modeling what you wish to cultivate in your team, department, or entire organization.

In managing my own team, I don’t just refrain from micromanaging—I trust enough to require independence. During the 1980s, when I oversaw our direct sales force, team members would ask to talk through a difficult decision. “Sure,” I’d say. They’d describe the situation, which might have involved how to negotiate part of a contract, and they’d ask me what I thought they should do. “I don’t know,” I’d say.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Well, I haven’t met the customer. You have. What do you think we should do?”

“Well,” team members would say, “I think we should price it this way”—and then they’d describe their plans.

I’d shrug my shoulders. “Fine. Price it that way. It sounds great!”

The team members would stare at me. “So, I have your approval?”

I would smile. “Of course you have my approval. You’re the expert on the ground. You’re the one who knows the situation better than anyone else. I trust your decision making. Let’s go for it!”

Make no mistake, I haven’t devolved all authority to my team members. I reserve the right to overrule people when they veer off-track or to supervise work more closely. I’ve also held my team members accountable for their mistakes. But my default move has been to solicit employees’ perspectives and let them decide. I haven’t wasted a lot of time second-guessing people or assigning blame when business developments didn’t work out as planned. Have I personally been burned when trusting people? Have I had to crack down on people who didn’t learn from their mistakes? Absolutely! But almost always, my trust in team members has proven well founded.

As CEO, I’ve continued to take a largely hands-off approach to my senior team, in some cases asking them to shoulder large amounts of responsibility. When we decided to invest $150 million in Workforce Dimensions^®, a new product line that we hoped would one day “put Kronos out of business” (Chapter 13), I put a small group of our senior executives in charge, giving them clear direction up front, but otherwise letting them run the project as they saw fit. I checked in every several weeks, giving feedback on the general direction and offering encouragement. Likewise, when we decided to relocate our headquarters, I charged key executives with selecting and designing the new offices, giving them some initial guidance, checking in periodically, and only making decisions on matters that I especially cared about, such as doing away with window offices for executives.

In retrospect, I’ve relied on my colleagues to execute just about every major strategic initiative we’ve attempted during my tenure as CEO. In 2009, we decided to adopt a vertical approach to selling our software. Instead of our salespeople covering geographic territories, they would sell into specific industries, like healthcare or manufacturing. We made this change because we felt our salespeople would operate more effectively if they could master the intricacies of a specific industry. Going vertical was risky. Our salespeople would have to serve new sets of customers, and we would have to structure their compensation differently. If we executed the shift poorly, morale might have suffered, impacting our sales. Many salespeople expressed concern when we first broached the prospect of verticalization. Would they receive the bonuses they were counting on? Could they really excel serving just one industry?

I put one of our executives, John, in charge of verticalization. He oversaw the plan’s execution with little involvement from me. After analyzing the customer base for every one of our salespeople, John discovered that a single industry already accounted for 80 percent of a typical Kronite’s sales portfolio. Armed with this data, he sat down with salespeople and showed them that for the most part, verticalization actually represented business as usual. Instead of regarding the new strategy as a threat, they started to see it as an opportunity to enhance their own effectiveness and increase their bonuses. To date, verticalization remains one of our most successful strategic moves, one steeped in and enabled by trust.

As CEO, I have similarly extended trust to other stakeholders, most notably our customers. I tend to be very open with customers, liberally sharing information and personal anecdotes. I also have a habit of taking the customers’ side during a negotiation, trusting that they won’t try to take advantage of us. “You’re absolutely right,” I’ll say to them, “Kronos shouldn’t be requiring that of you.” I’ll also frequently take the customers’ side during internal conversations with members of our team. In one instance, a customer, a small golf course, was struggling to implement our software. After reviewing our contract, our service team concluded that we had performed as we’d promised and owed the customer nothing more in the way of free customer service. When the customer continued to complain, our service team came to me and told me of their intention to cut off the customer. I insisted that we continue to work with the customer to help the business succeed, regardless of whether our contract required it. As I told them, our brand is all about customer success, and I’m prepared to trust that customers aren’t trying to take advantage of us. This conversation made a big impression on the leader of our service team. Years later, she still talks about it. In general, when I have conversations like this in the presence of Kronos salespeople, they not only perceive a display of trust, but validation of our commitment to always do right by customers, even when it puts us in an uncomfortable or financially disadvantageous position.

Perceiving that I trust others, my team members feel more inclined to communicate freely about their own projects, initiatives, and new ideas. They also bestow trust upon their own teammates more often. That’s how it works at Kronos: trust displayed at various levels of management filters through the organization, creating a general climate of mutual faith and respect.

If you manage others, start infusing trust into your culture right now. Provoke your people to come up with answers to pressing business questions rather than dictating them yourself. When you can, drop others into roles that will challenge them and build their confidence. Don’t check in on your reports every two minutes. When mistakes occur, don’t go ballistic. Hold people accountable, but then frame mistakes as “growth opportunities,” giving people the opportunity to mature and achieve stronger results in the future.

INSTITUTIONALIZING TRUST

If you run an organization or team, you have the power to create broader, more formal mechanisms to instill trust. Here are several important techniques we use at Kronos:

Set Expectations Around Trust

Instilling trust organizationally begins with clarifying the behavior you expect of all employees. Several years ago, we introduced under the framework of our three core competencies (character, competence, and collaboration) a larger set of desired behaviors that apply to Kronites at all levels. We began basing 40 percent of employees’ annual performance ratings on how well they adopted these behaviors. One behavior we emphasized was “establishing trust,” which we defined as: “Gains the confidence and trust of others through principled leadership, sound business ethics, authenticity, and follow-through on commitments. Establishes open, candid, trusting relationships; treats all individuals fairly and with respect; maintains high standards of integrity.”

In formulating this definition, we looked to behavior norms that had already existed to some extent in our organization, but that had never been identified and highlighted formally. Articulating organizational expectations around behavior is important. By defining trust, we established it as a key element of our culture. In addition, other behaviors and competencies we identified, such as “collaboration” and “open communication,” also contributed to trust.

Deploy Tools to Help Your People Get to Know One Another Better

Like many companies, we have prospective hires complete a behavioral assessment—in our case, a tool called Predictive Index (PI)—that reveals traits such as how detail-oriented a person is, how extroverted, how patient, and so on. The results of this assessment allow us to increase the chances that personalities will mesh well within teams, which facilitates trust building as well as overall performance. After all, in team environments, understanding how your teammates operate allows you as either a manager or employee to set expectations properly and to avoid misunderstandings when others don’t perform in expected ways. At Kronos, we train managers on how to use the tool and its results. Although PI doesn’t single-handedly determine our hiring decisions, it does inform them, allowing us to develop probing questions around behaviors that we might not have otherwise considered.

I’ve found PI useful in my own capacity as a manager. Years ago, I managed an employee who was rather introverted and detail-oriented. Thanks to my exposure to PI, I knew that people with this personality type didn’t require a lot of explanation when their managers assigned them tasks. Their PI suggested telling them to perform the task and leave it at that. If I as a manager delivered a more long-winded explanation, it would only frustrate them. At one point, when I was first beginning to use PI, I approached this employee and described how his personality differed from mine. To my surprise, he became emotional. “Aron, this is such a relief to me,” he said. “It drives me crazy when you overexplain stuff to me. It’s as if you don’t trust me. I get it, just tell me what you want me to do.” Because I understood this employee in a deeper way, we could avoid any misunderstanding that might have arisen due to our different needs and capacities. A higher level of trust could flourish.

Infuse the Principle of Trust into Your Policies

As I’ll describe in Chapter 9, we revamped our time-off policies, doing away with fixed vacation time allocations and instead allowing open time off. Employees can decide when and how much time off they wish to take, so long as they discuss their plans with their managers, get their work done, and coordinate with them to minimize any disruptions to our business and to the service we provide to our customers. A number of considerations went into the framing of this policy, but one of them was our desire to show Kronites that we trusted them to get their work done and that we wouldn’t look over their shoulders to dictate when they were in the office or on vacation. By showing trust in this way (we also show it through our longstanding openness to flexible, work-at-home arrangements), we further cement its importance within our culture.

Teach Managers to Nourish Trust in Their Teams

Manager training and accountability offer another important vehicle for trust building at the organizational level. I’ll talk more about these subjects in the next chapter, but for now I’ll note the emphasis we place on trust in our “Courage to Lead” manager training program (see figure on page 55). All of our hundreds of people managers attend this program, which instills trust and transparency by focusing managers on three key behavioral areas.

First, we ask managers to be both “bold” and “humble.” In elaborating on these terms, we specifically ask managers to build trust by trusting people in their functional areas and beyond, and assuming that people are competent when tackling difficult issues. Don’t jump to conclusions, and don’t point fingers. Humbly accept that you don’t have all the answers, boldly look to your people for insight and expertise, and ask questions that others dare not ask. We also instruct managers to share information openly and honestly and to make the tough decisions required to solve problems, additional expressions of boldness that will also help to build trusting relationships over time. One employee put it well: “As a manager, take responsibility when something is wrong. No excuses. Take ownership. Everything we do, we do together as a team. Good or bad.” As we tell our managers, if they can’t “be real” with employees, they simply won’t gain their trust.

The second plank of our Courage to Lead model asks managers to “challenge and support” their team members. Managers should support team members—and build trust—by communicating a strategic vision (Chapter 5). Team members will gain confidence that their efforts at work meaningfully contribute to team and organizational goals. By empowering team members to innovate and take risks, managers further demonstrate the trust they place in their people. As one of our employees said of her manager, “I don’t have to ask for permission. I feel comfortable enough to make a decision and my manager supports me.” Another said: “My manager provides me independence and trusts me to do the right thing.” Those are the kinds of responses we want from everyone who works at Kronos. Employees who feel trusted will return the favor, allowing a general atmosphere of trust to prevail. We also teach managers to build trust by creating an environment in which people can develop professionally and share their views. “Know where your employees want to go,” one Kronite advised our managers. “Know their career path and set up a mentor or support system so that they can grow.” If managers are challenging and supporting Kronites fully, Kronites will trust that managers have their best interests in mind as well as the team’s.

The third plank of our Courage to Lead model instructs managers to “disrupt” their teams and the organizational status quo generally while also forging connections between team members. By challenging outdated norms and by helping team members forge connections across departments, managers inspire their team members’ trust that they can remove organizational obstacles and facilitate their work. Likewise, by prioritizing customers and the company’s interests, managers can help team members feel more confident in their motives and in the quality of their decision making.

Courage to Lead model

We train managers across these behavioral areas in a variety of ways, depending on the amount of time they’ve spent in their role. New managers receive basic training that defines our expectations around them. Four to six months into their new roles, managers undergo an intensive, two-day training in which they practice Courage to Lead behaviors in the context of specific situations and challenges. As we discover behavioral weaknesses in managers, we give them extra training in the form of half-day modules. We also support them with one-on-one coaching as needed.

Throughout this training, we practice what we preach when it comes to open communications. We don’t minimize the difficulty managers will have when it comes to trusting employees. Trust is hard, especially if you haven’t lived or worked in an open and supportive environment, or if you have an anxious or controlling personality. That’s where the courage part of Courage to Lead features prominently. We ask our managers to muster up a resolve that in many cases might be unfamiliar and even scary. Take the risk and trust your employees. As a manager, you must learn to feel comfortable both with uncertainty and with having your boss hold you accountable for other people’s decisions. If you can’t imagine ever feeling comfortable, then you won’t inspire trust, and you shouldn’t manage others.

All of our people managers have undergone this training, and our trust levels have increased palpably. In 2017, 88 percent of Kronites in an internal survey agreed that “At Kronos, people treat one another with trust and mutual respect,” up three points from the previous year. A full 82 percent of respondents agreed with “I trust the people I work with to put the work group’s goals before their own goals,” up 3 percent from the previous year. Likewise, in 2017, 93 percent of 1,335 Kronites polled for the Great Place to Work’s Trust Index survey in the United States indicated our company was a great place to work, while 93 percent reported that our “management is honest and ethical in its business practices,” and 92 percent “trusted in management’s competence at running the business.”¹ Whereas previously some Kronos managers might have learned about trust by virtue of their direct interaction with me and others in the company who practiced it, we’ve now established trust as a baseline expectation throughout our organization. Managers beware: at Kronos, you will be held accountable for trusting behavior. I suggest you require the same in your organization.

Pursue the Other Principles Described in This Book

Other chapters in this book present an array of organizational practices and policies that help establish norms of trust in various respects. For instance, because we take care to communicate transparently, honestly, and frequently, Kronites are far more inclined to trust their bosses at all levels. Our efforts to take care of Kronites (Chapter 7) and keep them safe (Chapter 8) establish our workplaces as spaces where employees can trust one another to look out for them and treat them respectfully. The work we put into framing, communicating, and resourcing our strategies (Chapter 5) allows Kronites to trust their leaders and feel confident that leaders are making effective decisions. And our efforts to welcome Kronites from different cultures and geographies (Chapter 12) help employees trust that they will be accepted and their perspectives valued.

FAIL SOONER

If it’s possible for individuals and organizations to enhance trust, is it really worth the effort? Or, in this rough-and-tumble world of ours, would it behoove companies to set aside this “soft stuff” and focus on something more tangible, like designing amazing products?

Based on our experience at Kronos, focusing a team or an organization on trust is absolutely worth it. Since I’ve become CEO, we’ve grown our revenues from around $500 million in 2005 to more than $1.4 billion in 2018 . . . and we’re still growing. Obviously, results like that owe to many factors, but I strongly believe that our culture of trust has proven fundamental. It would be nice if we could quantitatively track the incidence of trusting behaviors throughout Kronos and then demonstrate statistical correlations with measures like engagement, retention, market share, and revenues. But I don’t need statistics to convince me. As so many Kronites will affirm, both the spread of trusting relationships throughout Kronos and their pivotal role in our growth story are obvious.

I’ve suggested why trust might contribute to higher engagement and retention, but let’s quickly consider a couple of specific ways that it helps drive business results. In 2009, we assigned Chris, the executive I introduced earlier, to assemble a team that would create, sell, and manage our first cloud software offerings. Chris did a fantastic job, as I knew he would, launching the initiative and bringing in an annualized $40 million of revenue by 2012. By the fall of 2012, however, the business was faltering. A variety of performance issues had cropped up, including data center mishaps, customer outages, even some natural disasters that impeded our delivery of services. Customers were getting angry, and sales reps began grumbling about feeling unsupported.

Chris did his best to resolve these problems. But as the months went by, we made little headway and had to confront a difficult truth: he was out of his depth. As skilled and experienced as he was, he had never managed a data center before, or handled other specialized parts of that business.

One morning in December 2012, Chris knocked on my office door and asked if we could chat. “Aron,” he said, “I’m sorry about the problems we’re having with the cloud, but I’m not your guy to fix this. I just don’t know how to do it.” He might have expected a stern lecture from me, or some kind of “punishment” for having failed. But I only cared about one thing: If Chris couldn’t fix this business, who could? How could we devise an alternative solution so that we could ultimately succeed at being a cloud company?

It took us a few weeks to figure out a way forward, but we wound up recruiting another leader within Kronos to take over the team. This new leader helped us solve our service issues so that we could stabilize and grow the business. Today, our cloud offerings bring in more than $400 million in revenues, accounting for over 90 percent of our new customer accounts. Customers are incredibly happy and are served by a world-class cloud operations team.

Chris didn’t have to approach me right away. He could have struggled with this part of the business for another year or two, hiding or explaining away the failures as best he could. Had he feared my response, he might have done exactly that. Instead, Chris came to me immediately because he knew that I trusted him and that I would react in a healthy, rational, respectful way, even when confronted by unwelcome news. This mutual trust enabled us to confront the problem head-on, devising a sensible solution together. Our conversations and the decisions we made enabled us to come up with solutions for our cloud operations that were much more profitable and sustainable.

MY SECRET WEAPON: TRUST

If you haven’t trusted others easily in the past, now is the time to start. If you have, then rededicate yourself to deepening your trusting relationships. Look around: Are you empowering team members by encouraging their creativity and autonomy, or are you inadvertently stifling them? Are you communicating as openly and honestly as you think, setting an example for others? And are your expectations about trust-promoting behavior as clearly defined as possible?

Despite the effort it requires, trusting others still represents a far easier way to manage. Think of what happens when you learn to let go of fear, anxiety, and control. All that effort you expended worrying about how one of your people would perform, all that time and energy you spent monitoring progress, now can go toward other pursuits that truly add value, like spending more time ideating, collaborating, and innovating. Trusting others doesn’t only yield greater engagement directly by inspiring loyalty and affection and by contributing to others’ growth and advancement. It supports engagement indirectly by freeing you up to take a variety of other actions that build personal relationships and drive growth. People often wonder how I manage to respond so quickly to every employee e-mail, and how I have so many in-person conversations with Kronites, while also fulfilling the “ordinary” duties of a CEO.

Now you know. Trust.