Articles

Don't Trust Me, I'm Your Leader!

If you are a Chief Executive in your organisation, odds are, people don’t trust you.  Don’t take it personally (just yet), recent research shows that half of UK employees simply don’t trust their CEO.

It is perhaps not surprising, it’s hard to think of a positive image of a successful yet decent CEO whether it’s the caricature of Mr Burns or the media images of uncaring CEO’s walking away from disastrous tenures with giant payoffs.

But is it just CEO’s that suffer from a trust deficit.  Here in the UK there is a natural cynicism about leadership and the motives of leaders.  40% of people feel that CEO’s don’t say what they mean and in our work we regularly come across baffled employees who simply can’t make sense of the ‘management-babble’ that some senior people utilise to cover up a lack of vision or strategy.

Perhaps the most worrying finding is that 90% of employees feel that if their leader has lost their trust there’s just no way to get it back.  This seems a little over-pessimistic.  There is a way to get it back, it’s just hard work and it will take a long time and when employees feel senior people shy away from hard work and are only likely to stay with an organisation two years then their view makes sense.

Senior executives can be trusted and in being trusted get more from their employees, but it takes an understanding of those employees, an empathy and a consistent display of integrity.  4SLeadership helps leaders get to grips with being an effective, successful and trusted leader.  To talk about how you can improve the quality of leadership in your organisation contact:

For more infromation on developing coaching capabilities to demonstrate leadership through the 4SLeadership™ Framework please click here.

Claudine McClean
T: 01789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com