Trust: Can You Teach It?

Trust is one of those nebulous concepts essential for business success, but we are incapable of putting a firm finger on when it comes to enterprise learning. Can you teach trust? Kevin Wilde, vice president and CLO, General Mills Inc. and Jane Hutcheson, vice president, learning and development, Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group, think not, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to build it into the fabric of a company’s culture.

“I equate trust with commitment,” said Wilde, who is responsible for training and developing more than 27,000 employees worldwide for one of the most recognized food brands on shelves today. “A couple of years ago we reinvented our leadership model of what we expect and what it’s going to take to win and fulfill our strategy, and integrity is at the heart of it. No one is going to follow you or join your team if you’re not trusted. Trust equates to an internal guide that you know you’re going to do the right thing. From an employee and a peer perspective, you’re going to do the right thing for their situation—not just for your own. At General Mills, there is a culture where we expect everyone to understand that it’s important to do the right thing. It’s really a sense that that’s the only way we want to run as a shop here. That attracts great people, and it’s that talent that wins in the marketplace.”

Trust is directly connected to employee satisfaction, productivity and commitment, not to mention a host of other metrics that ascertain levels of on-the-job intensity and participation. General Mills does an employee climate survey that asks: In the employees who are really committed, what do we see? “Number one, we see highly committed employees here believe in leadership, and they have a great relationship with their current boss,” Wilde said. “They can see they’re being developed, and they feel they’re being empowered. All those things have a theme behind it: ‘I want to hang around with these people, and I want to contribute here because there’s that underlying connection of trust.’ We also see it on our 360s where we’ll do leadership training. We do coaching, and at the heart of it all is, ‘Do you build and energize others based on who you are and how you act?’”