3 ways to develop a trusting organisational culture

Leaders want people in their organisation to trust them. But creating that trust or, perhaps more importantly, re-establishing it when they’ve lost it isn’t always that straightforward.

A major study of 87,000 business leaders, however, identified three key elements that are associated with trust.

By understanding these behaviours, leaders are better able to elevate the level of trust that others feel toward them.

1. Positive relationships build trust

Trust is in part based on the extent to which a leader is able to create positive relationships with other people and groups. To instil trust a leader must:

• Stay in touch on the issues and concerns of others

• Balance results with concern for others

• Generate cooperation between others

• Resolve conflict with others

• Give honest feedback in a helpful way

2. Leaders with good judgement and expertise builds trust

Another factor in whether people trust a leader is the extent to which a leader is well-informed and knowledgeable. They must understand the technical aspects of the work as well as have a depth of experience. This means:

• They use good judgement when making decisions

• Others trust their ideas and opinions

• Others seek after their opinions

• Their knowledge and expertise make an important contribution to achieving results

• Can anticipate and respond quickly to problems

3. Consistency builds trust

The final element of trust is the extent to which leaders walk their talk and do what they say they will do. People rate a leader high in trust if they:

• Are a role model and set a good example?

• Walk the talk

• Honour commitments and keep promises

• Follow through on commitments

• Are willing to go above and beyond what needs to be done

Of course, people don’t need to be perfect to be an excellent leader. But when it comes to commanding trust, leaders need to excel in all of the three above qualities.

Conclusion

Effective leaders create trust by building positive relationships, showing good judgement and expertise, and by being consistent in word and example.

How to Rescue Meetings That Become Tense

It can be surprisingly easy to bring order to a chaotic meeting and to turn conflict back into conversation—if you know how, says business author Joseph Grenny in the HBR.

Consider these four steps for turning conflict into conversation:

1. Interrupt the chaos

All emotions have a tempo. Calm emotions like happiness and connection are slow and deliberate. Emotions of arousal like hostility and defensiveness are fast and confused. Pulse quickens, thoughts race, and words fly.

One of the best ways to change the emotion of a group is to change its tempo.

As you attempt to intervene, decelerate your pace of speech. You may need to raise your voice a decibel or two to be heard above the rumble. But once you’ve attracted attention, lower your voice and speed.

For example, you might say slowly and calmly, “Hey team, let me take a moment to point out something I’m noticing.” Smiling while you speak can also lower the emotional temperature.

2. Shift to process

Call attention to what is happening in a matter-of-fact way. This helps in three ways:

• You give egos and tempers a chance to cool by changing the subject of discussion from the immediate problem to the problem-solving process.

• You help the group soften their judgements of one another by giving them a unifying common enemy: the ineffective process.

• You advance team maturity by inviting all to take responsibility for inventing a more effective process.

Be careful not to shame anyone for their role in the confusion. Lay out what appears to be happening, without assigning blame, and the consequences of continuation on the current path.

Once you’ve described the obvious, ask the group to confirm your observation. This is a critical psychological step. When they explicitly acknowledge the process problem, they become committed to supporting the solution.

For example, you might continue with, “We’ve been at this conversation for about 25 minutes now. In my view we are repeating a lot of the same arguments, but getting nowhere. I suspect we could go another three hours and be in the same place. Do others see this the same way?”

3. Propose a structure

Offer a process that ensures all will be heard and slows the pace in order to quell the emotions. Then ask for commitment to it.

For example, you might say, “Mark, I don’t think we’re giving you a chance to lay out your arguments for the office remodel. How about if we hear you out first. The rest of us will attempt to restate your arguments until you feel we understand them to your satisfaction. Crystal, then I suggest we do the same with your view of why we should put it off for three more years. Will that work?”

4. Honour the agreement

Odds are that even with the new structure, lingering emotions will incite a few attempts to breach the boundaries. When this happens, you need not become punitive. All you have to do is point out the discrepancy, and ask if they want to continue with their commitment.

For example, “Crystal, you are beginning to explain why remodelling now is a bad idea. I think our agreement was to allow Mark to continue until he has been well heard. Do you want to continue with that process or propose something different?”

Given that the team bought into the structure, Crystal is likely to conform to the healthier structure – or the others in the room will encourage her to.

Granted, there are times when foes are so entrenched in their positions that simple interventions like this will be inadequate. But for the vast majority of workplace group tiffs, this works.

Next time conflict starts to boil up in your meeting, try focusing on the process rather than the content, and chances are that you’ll be able to defuse the anger and frustration long enough to move forward.

Conclusion

If meetings become tense, try this: Lower the emotional temperature by speaking slower, softer, and by smiling while you talk, invite the group to focus on the process not the content, and by encouraging those present to follow the agreed process.

What Event Technology Platform Should You Choose?

Event and meeting planners typically end up choosing between two tech platforms. What are their pros and cons? Today’s event planners can choose from a host of technology platforms to manage nearly every aspect of the meeting planning process and benefit attendees.

With so many choices, how can they make the correct choices in deciding which platform to use?

Many event planners end up choosing between two major options, the Classic Event Platform and the Event Tech Desk.

Each solution has potential strengths and challenges, as meeting technology consultant Corbin Ball explains.

The Classic Event Platform

Companies that supply a classic event platform provide comprehensive technology solutions to address many aspects of the meeting planning process. This includes registration, event website, marketing, scheduling, logistics management, content management, speaker management, and more.

These platforms aim to be a one-stop shop that allows event planners to meet most or all of their event tech needs.

Benefits

• Planners can decide on the vendor and can typically choose from a broad menu of technology offerings. With fewer vendors, there is less negotiation time needed.

• Comprehensive platforms aim to provide seamless data integration among all the technology products within the company.

• In an ideal world, the user interface should feel the same among all the varied technology products therefore requiring less training. The look and feel should be the same among the various product subsets.

Challenges

• It is a huge technology task for a company to cover all aspects of the needs of all types of meetings. This is an enormously complex challenge!

• Historically, data integration has been a harder task, especially for older, legacy systems.

• For some meetings, dealing with these mega companies with thousands of employees may be more than is needed for small, simple events in terms of cost and complexity.

The Event Tech Deck

The other main option is to choose a variety of different vendors, based on the specific technology needs of the event—to create a “deck” of different vendors.



Benefits

• Planners can choose the “best of breed” specific tech solution to meet their exact needs. This can be less expensive and more targeted to the specific planning needs.

• Technology innovation is flourishing with new ideas popping up frequently. They are often start-up ventures. This option does not lock planners into one big system that may be slower to respond to new developments.

• There is significant progress being made in terms of data integration among smaller, independent meeting tech vendors.

Challenges

• Multiple vendors require separate discovery, vetting, negotiations and more time.

• The user interface among varied tech products can be different requiring separate training.

• Historically, one of the biggest challenges is that there has been a lack of easy data integration among the different products – leading to a failure to easily collect data from multiple sources about specific attendee journeys (to better customise marketing and communication to that individual for future contact) and collectively to improve the overall event. This, however, is changing.

Moves toward event deck data integration

Data management systems are maturing to where integration is a much simpler task making the concept of an integrated event tech deck more feasible.

With state-of-the-art cloud-based event technology systems and advanced application programming interfaces (APIs), it is now possible to collect and analyse onsite data and connect them with popular CRM tools—closing the loop from a marketing standpoint. Interoperability is at the centre with much of the change that is happening.

The benefit for meeting planners is that they can choose an assortment of specialised event software products work together easily—an event tech deck.

Meeting planners are be able to find highly customised solutions using multiple technology products with the ability to extract valuable marketing data is if they were a single platform.

This rich interoperability makes it much easier to analyse the data and bring it back to CRM systems. Customer behaviour and interests expressed at meetings can, therefore, be tied to customer profiles allowing for much better marketing intelligence and more customised sales communication as well as general, overall data insights to improve events.

Conclusion

So, which planner to choose: the platform or the deck?

Both paths have their strengths and challenges. The good news is both paths are providing much better data integration and analytics options to broaden the options and improve events.

The two major event tech options—the Classic Event Platform and the Event Tech Desk—both have advantages and disadvantage, but both are big improvements on previous options.