My Pispective on Trust

(A pispective is when you write about something in 314 words).

The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer tells management professionals that we're not managing well. Or being professional enough.

Management is about integration. Being professional is about setting and observing your own standards.

When I think about limits to integration, insufficient learning tends to stand out.

As in, people aren't learning enough. People are busy. They're being 'productive'. They're 'delivering'. But too much of that strikes me as meeting the needs of the hamster wheel.

Learning is about cultivating and satisfying curiosity. It's about reading more. Books. Journals. Newspapers (quality ones). It's about asking questions and being dissatisfied with the answer.

The main limit to setting our own standards is, I think, a sense that we can't change the system. Or it's about being ground down to the average. Or it's about getting caught up in the short term.

I have a basic rule: always strive for the great work. I never get there. There's always something that's not right. Often I fail miserably. But I force myself to give hard things a go. Because that's where my professional standards are.

Trust between people rests on our personal relationship to integrity. Integrity is the gap between we say and what we do. For management professionals this means recognizing what we don't know and making an effort to remedy our ignorance. It means being clear about where good is and doing all we can to get there.

We live in a society of organizations that built by management professionals. We don't have to be managers to be management professionals. Indeed, some managers aren't that professional.

To turn trust around, we need to rediscover our curiosity and make things harder for ourselves. We will then give ourselves the best chance to grow, first as people and then as professionals. The two always go together.

Only then will we start to trust ourselves more. And then so will others.

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