The Globe and Mail
Published December 12, 2020
Bookmark
The theme I have heard most from managers this year is the difficulty of building trust with staff during a period of uncertainty. Subordinates crave certainty – or seem to – but managers can’t deliver when the future is murky and everything can change so quickly. They fear that it erodes trust, since managers look less than honest, holding things back. Of course, if they had built more trust in the past, the situation today might be less awkward.
Trust is abstract and how to build it can seem confusing, even bewildering. Too often we assume trust flows from competence, says Jordan Berman, a vice-president at the Canadian pharmaceutical company Apotex and author of the recent book