You may remember or have heard of the 1966 movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach. It was a Western of sorts where Eastwood did some good things, some bad things, and some very ugly things.
In relationships, people also do some good things, some bad things, and sometimes some pretty ugly things. In a marriage, the bad and ugly can lead to divorce. The partners can just move on and, for the most part, hope to forget those bad and ugly things that happened. Some never do. As I was once told, second marriages are a triumph of hope over experience. For some people, the bad experience never leaves them.
In most situations in the workplace, there is no opportunity for divorce, short of leaving to get another job or transferring somewhere else in the organization. Those options are not available to everyone. For some employees, memories of a bad supervisor never really leave them. The employees carry them around for years to come. They can leave an indelible mark on someone’s view of their work life.
Often, in a group, I will ask, “Has anyone ever had a bad supervisor?” The response is often overwhelming. Many in the group can still relate the bad things that a former supervisor did, even if they were years ago.
In one intervention I did several years ago, one high-level supervisor related how badly he was treated by a supervisor 10 years before the meeting, and that supervisor was in the room. He had never told the supervisor how he felt, and he had never forgotten or forgiven that supervisor.
Losing Trust
Quite often, the bad and ugly things result in a loss of trust. The loss of trust can have a direct effect on productivity. Attempts at improving productivity often are centered around innovative technology or new whizzbang management theories. These things do work but do not solve every problem. Unfortunately, few deal with the actual relationships between employees and their supervisors.
Losing trust in the workplace is not an uncommon thing that happens. It can be a loss of trust between employees and their supervisors, trust between supervisors and other supervisors, or trust of the employees in the organization they work for and not just individual supervisors. Once trust is lost, it is a hard thing to get back.
The loss of trust can be a one-time event such as where a manager did not live up to an agreement with an employee. This agreement could have been in the eyes of an employee rock solid but in the eyes of the manager only something the manager was considering.
Once the manager denies the employee’s request, which the employee thought was agreed to by the supervisor, the toll on the relationship begins. The manager may not even be aware of how important this agreement was to the employee. Misunderstandings are the playground of loss of trust.
The loss of trust can be because of institutional changes which are deaf to the concerns of employees. These changes may not be something a manager has any control over but affect the employees’ attitudes toward the organization they work for.
These employee sentiments are often disclosed in government-wide surveys which evaluate how employees feel about their workplace. Even if the manager has no control over organizational changes, they can have input into the reactions of employees to the changes.
The essential question for a manager is whether they are interested in how employees perceive their workplace. Is it important to a manager if employees trust them or not? Is it important whether employees are satisfied with their workplace or not?
Often a manager is rated on the overall productivity of their work unit and not on how well the employees feel they are treated or how satisfied they are with organizations they work for. Those issues are often only looked at if there is a problem because of EEO charges or other employee complaints.
Forget, Forgive, or Fix
In my book, Communication and Trust, I explain the value of trust and communication in the workplace. I recommend that workplace relationships that have trust problems work on three basic concepts.
The first step is to discuss the problems. In a facilitated conversation, the parties to the relationship talk about those issues that have bothered each side and caused a loss of trust. The basic ground rules for the discussion are to be sincere and open to discussing what are the problems in the relationship but be civil in the presentation and not cutting or derisive. Both sides also agree that there will be no retribution for what anyone says. Once the participants have described the problem areas, then they decide what to do about them.
Often, problems are based on false assumptions or inaccurate facts, which once discussed can lead to new understandings. The parties can come to recognize that this new understanding of what took place has helped them to no longer allow this misunderstanding to continue to define their relationship. While not everything is forgotten, the participants can at least forget some of the negative feelings they had.
In relationships, often one person or the organization has done something that can never be forgotten, nor can what was done be fixed. A heartfelt apology can go a long way in the process of making the workplace relationship move along the road to recovery. Saying I’m sorry is difficult for some people to do. Acknowledging that you made a mistake if truly sincere can help to change people’s attitudes about the interactions they will have in the future.
In some relationships, it is necessary to, as much as possible, fix what has led to the loss of trust and the dysfunction in the relationship. This means producing jointly agreed-upon solutions to problems causing relationship issues.
Jointly producing solutions to problems can lead to innovative approaches to moving the relationship in a positive direction. Over the years, I have participated in many workplace interventions where the participants were able to develop solutions to intractable problems once they had started exploring what were the underlying issues in their relationship that were holding them back.
While these approaches have proved effective in highly conflicted workplaces, they also can be of use in taking the temperature of your workplace. Just because things in your estimation are going all right does not mean they are. A solid discussion of how things are going can lead to an understanding of issues which need to be dealt with by the participants or can provide clear explanations of actions which were not understood.
