TRUSTWORTHY ORGANISATIONS
Is your organisation trustworthy? Yes? No?
Either way, who says? Children and young people? Families? Foster carers? Staff? Children’s Commissioners? Ombudsmen? Judges? Stakeholders? Politicians? Media? Those on social media? The general public? Whose views matter?
And what do we mean by being trustworthy anyway? Beyond organisations, teams or individuals doing what they say they will do and maintaining the confidentiality of others, trustworthy, trustworthiness and trust, can all be somewhat nebulous terms.
According to Brené Brown, and drawn from her research and Dare to Lead™ programme, “trust is an integral component of all thriving relationships and workplaces”. It can be broken down to seven key elements; boundaries, reliability, accountability, confidentiality, integrity, non-judgement and generosity. As most of you will already know, Brené Brown is an American professor, lecturer, best-selling author, podcast host, TED speaker, Netflix documentary star, friend of Oprah, and Huffington Foundation's Brené Brown Endowed Chair University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work - a celebrity social work researcher and thought leader.
Building Trust Through Boundaries: Brené Brown argues that from her research, while maybe not immediately obvious, setting and maintaining boundaries is essential for trust. Failing to do so can often set others up for unrealistic, and thus unmet, expectations. When under pressure, organisations need to particularly maintain clear boundaries – good intentions are not enough.
Growing Trust through Reliability: Reliability is simply doing what you as an organisation say you’re going to do and not letting others down - again and again and again. As simple as it is, in my experience too many OOHC and child welfare organisations struggle with this. This feature is also closely related to setting and maintaining boundaries.
Regaining Trust through Accountability: Meaningfully owning organisational mistakes, apologising, putting things right, and ensuring the same mistake is not repeated. When all aspects of this feature are done well i.e. not just a (heart-felt) apology alone, Brené Brown says that this kind of accountability can make up for every other element in this model. However, when done badly it causes longer-term reputational damage.
Maintaining Trust through Confidentiality: Not sharing the information of others inappropriately helps to maintain trust. While that can be very clear-cut, sometimes it is not. Be particularly careful if you find yourself telling someone something in confidence – is it your information to share? And if not, how assured can they be that you will not inappropriately share information about them and their organisation?
Developing Trust through Integrity: Organisational integrity is about honest and every day living by the values that likely appear on your wesbite? Brené Brown says to choose courage over comfort, doing what’s right over what’s fun, fast or easy, and living our values rather than simply professing them. As such the future actions of an organisation should to a large degree be predictable on the basis of past behaviour. Organisation-wide decision-making should therefore not be a continuous series of surprises!
Increasing Trust through Non-judgement: Responding to another person’s openness and vulnerability with judgment unavoidably diminishes trust. Instead, responding without judgement when somebody tells us something that is intimate or personal increases trust. Our practitioners do this very well, but how do our organisations support increasing trust through non-judgement?
Keeping Trust through Generosity: To build and maintain trust, we should strive to be as generous as possible with our assumptions and interpretation of others, rather than just thinking the worst. This is also very important when under pressure.
How can your organisation, your team, or you personally establish or re-establish high-trust relationships?