People are either trustworthy or they are not.
This stems from upbringing and character moulded when you were a child and cannot be added later by psychological or mystical means.
There was a time in the Western world where a person,s word meant something and a handshake was enough to conclude a deal.
People understood the difference between right and wrong without having to consult a lawyer or pore over the legalese themselves.
Today ,I and my colleagues a long time checking people out to electron microscope levels of scrutiny,getting them to sign NDA,s,non circumvention agreements,secrecy agreements and evaluating their willingness and ability to pay.
Even then it is necessary to evaluate body language and listen for what they are not saying as well as their inflexion on each word uttered.
This never used to be the case but unfortunately the watchword has to be the old Russian proverb “Trust but verify”.
In other cultures the process of knowing a person and their habits,background takes very much longer but once they do trust you ,you can rest easy in the knowledge that they will not try at some later stage to unpick or renege on what was originally agreed.

Jackie,
These for many people are very difficult times .
Price Waterhouse Coopers characterises economies in this condition as “Zombie Economies” and Jeff Inmelt the CEO of GE calls it “The New Normal”.
When people are desperate or money is tight the fact is the incidence of petty crime and fraud increase as the crime statistics show in Europe and in the USA.
This manifests itself in credit card fraud,salespersons padding out expense claims,politicians committing fraud as happened with British MP,s,a scandal broken by the Daily Telegraph.
On a bigger scale $2.9 trillion USD disappeared from the Pentagon budget and this money remains unaccounted for along with billions more from the bailout fund and a further $400 billion USD which disappeared just before Lehman Brothers ,the cornerstone and retaining wall of the global financial system went down.
In the UK the Ministry of Defence operates to a 6% to 8% Project tolerance using the Prince 2 standard yet in my entire lifetime not one piece of military procurement or project has ever been completed on time or to budget in my entire lifetime
Some people say that this Lehman Brothers money disappeared to an undisclosed location in Israel and yet no attempt has been made to track down the culprits and bring them to justice or recover the money.
Many people now practice “moral relativism” when they see malfeasance on this monumental scale and attempt where they can to avoid tax on repair bills,understate their income or even operate in the black economy.
They justify their actions by saying to themselves that if the rich and powerful can get away with it then they (the little people),need to “wet their beaks” as well.
HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO DO THE RIGHT THING
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This starts in the home and the classroom whereby people must be taught right from wrong within whatever religeous or philosophical tradition they come from.
With adults there has to be a certainty that if they are caught engaging in malfeasance and criminality they will be caught and punished under existing laws and made an example of.
People must see that whether you are a billionaire or a pauper the punishment is the same and that the existing law is applied fairly.
As it is people see that justice is not even handed and recently a Masonic lawyer ,the judge and a defendant were seen using sign language which affected the outcome of the case without most of those present in the courtroom,other than other Freemasons,knowing what was going on.
For those adults who have not gone off the rails they need to be incentivised in such a way that by committing acts of fraud and petty theft against their employers they are hurting themselves financially.
This is cheaper than security measures and surveillance to prevent fraud.

Hi Jackie

To create trust, first be trustworthy yourself (as I am sure you are).

When we hire an employee, or engage that employee in an activity or conversation, we get the whole person. We get the body the mind and we get the heart. How often do we ignore the mind and the heart? How often do we expect a person to leave their mind at the front door when they come to work? A persons whole being is the body, their mind and their heart.

Just think how effective our organization would be if every employee brought their entire being to work with them every day. The true leader understands this and attempts in all dealings to capture the whole being of every employee. One of the ways we do this is by living out the following operating principle:

Value the person for who they are rather than what they do.
If the value that we place on a person is based on their job, their role or their work, then we limit the value that this person has to the organization or the company. If however we value that person for who they are, then we begin to consider their mind and their heart and look for opportunities that may well be outside of their current role.

I have found that living through this principle helps to generate the trustworthiness you are looking for.

i largely agree with your thoughts here, jackie. when people are given the opportunity to be trustworthy without rules dictating it, they will often fall into that role easily. however, i also believe that for someone to be trustworthy, they almost always have to have been taught it from a young age.

someone who is inherently untrustworthy is probably not going to change just because their company is more flexible with rules. in my experience they will just take full advantage of the lack of oversight. i think people need to be trustworthy in the first place in order for the lack of procedure to work well.

I agree that while clear expectations are helpful, a large number of rules creates resistance. Comparing the U.S. to other countries raises the issue of culture. Homogeneous cultures require less explicit rules since people know the expectations and want to fit in. The diversity of the U.S. breaks down the sense of “we are all in this together,” leaving many marginalized who may commit crimes because they feel a part of the social fabric, they don’t have a strong sense of belonging and security, at least with those who they take advantage of.
In Japan, individualism is rare since harmony is paramount. Relationships and the group are paramount. Trust is high. Competition is subservient to collaboration. So trusting the Japanese makes more sense than leaving one’s camera alone in the U.S. or in Costa Rica, which I visited last month. Great people there but severe poverty and bars on most windows. Also an immigrant lower class.
Creating a culture of trust works most of the time, but we need to protect ourselves from people who prefer win-lose cheating to win-win support.

Well said, Glen and Paul. As someone who’s been conducting a whole ton of focus groups lately, I’m discovering that organizations with trust issues start at the top. Fear of retaliation and/or losing their jobs in this downturn is causing a paralysis which is impacting morale, productivity and of course, this translates to the bottom line results. Good discussion about individualist vs. collectivist behaviors, which by the way, describes (most) men and women in America.

I don’t think that we should lump everyone in the U.S. as being individualists and untrustworthy. Research states that the US is the most individualistic country in the world. I think that we are perhaps also one of the few (if any) countries that is made up of mostly immigrants. And whenever you have people coming together from different cultures, backgrounds, values systems, beliefs, attitudes, etc that are different and even opposite or counter intuitive from each other, there will be conflict and a lack of trust. Add to that: fear of the unknown, competition for resources (jobs, food, social services, power, etc.) and you’ve got a perfect storm if you will for stereotyping, prejudice, bias, mistrust and misunderstanding. How do we reverse this? education. One organization at a time. That’s perhaps why I’m doing what I’m doing – I believe that at our core, every human being is a good person and we mean well. Society, the media, our role models, socio- economic status and our social programming makes us otherwise. e.g. children by age 5 are already programmed in the U.S. to NOT notice color in humans.

Jackie, I agree and have seen plenty of examples of their being an inverse relationship between trust and the number of rules and restrictions. Centralized control and micro-managing essentially is sending a message that “I don’t trust you to think for yourself.” The science of complex adaptive systems argues for “good enough planning” (a few key objectives), “self-organization” (giving employees a few basic parameters and then plenty of room for thinking of creative solutions, and even “mistakes”). Out of that emerges a far more innovative and successful process than mechanistically treating people like a cog on a tightly engineered wheel.

It’s always interesting how some gravitate to the idea that allowing more freedom and fewer rules simple allows slackers and malcontents to have their way. Sure, there’s always a small percentage of those around. But the upside is that creating an honest environment of trust, an open two-way street and not a narrow alley of one-way traffic, usually results in happier, healthier, and far more productive workplaces.

On your above comparisons of crime rates by country, be very cautious of stats. It is a fact that America has higher homicide rates than many Western countries including my own, Canada. But each country has different definitions for many crimes and no country collects crime data in the same way, making accurate comparisons very difficult. We share the border with you, have a democratically-elected government, but I would argue very different cultures. We both strongly believe in free enterprise but in Canada the tough banking laws have positioned them among the top three most stable in the world. Our homicide rate per 100,000 is about seven time lower than the US, but we also have some of the toughest gun control laws in the world. So, it’s a very complex topic.