Closing the Trust Gap - Strengthening Workplace Culture with Cory Scheer

Seeking to build a culture rooted in Trust that delivers positive outcomes at all levels of your organization - from employee well being to customer loyalty?

Trust is a valuable organizational commodity - tune in for a conversation that may redefine how you lead and build trust in your organization. Cory Scheer, CEO & Founder of TrustCentric Consulting and author of Closing the Trust Gap, joins us for this episode.   

Cory unpacks the core principles of nurturing trust within all levels of an organization - drawing on insights from his book. By understanding the 'structure of trust'—which includes competency, problem-solving, communication and care—leaders can begin to bridge the gap between internal and external customer & employee satisfaction.

Cory points out it is not about maintaining the status quo; it's about propelling your organization forward with strategic planning and a keen understanding of the frameworks that foster growth - including regular 'check-ins' with employees vs the 'standard yearly engagement survey'.

Whether you're steering a new venture or looking to re-engage your current team, this episode provides a handful of strategies leaders can implement to create a Trust environment where employees flourish, the company reaps the benefits.

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Find out more about Cory's Book - Closing the Trust Gap: Taking Action on What Matters Most for Leaders, Teams, and Organizations

Seeking to discover additional insights on how to strengthen your company culture, improve performance & impact your company's bottom line? Book a time to chat with us.
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Transcript

William Gladhart: 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Levers podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladhart, CMO at The Culture Think Tank. Our Culture Think Tank Community is committed to advancing workplace culture and well-being. We're a virtual hub for authors, investors, leaders, managers and employees worldwide to connect, engage in candid discussions, share ideas and explore resources for cultivating a healthy work environment. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address cultural change. Our guest today is Corey Scheer, the CEO and founder of TrustCentric Consulting. Thanks so much for taking time to join us today.

Cory Scheer: 0:40

Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you.

William Gladhart: 0:42

I thought I would have you share a little bit with our audience about yourself and your background or your particular organization or specialty.

Cory Scheer: 0:50

Thank you again. I'm happy to share a bit about myself. I'm the founder and CEO of an organization called TrustCentric, and we are an organizational and leadership development firm that really zeroes in on helping leaders and teams and organizations measure the current level of trust within their teams and their employees, and then we introduce and train them in a very specific framework and methodology and then walk alongside them to help them strengthen their current level of trust wherever it's currently at, and we do that through various workshops, speaking engagements, retreats, various things like that. But at the end of the day, our ultimate goal is to help improve work-wise culture by really focusing in on the dynamics that occur within organizational trust.

William Gladhart: 1:39

Well, thank you for sharing that. You also have some exciting news to share on the publishing side of the house, so would you share a little bit about that.

Cory Scheer: 1:48

Yeah, thank you for that.

Cory Scheer: 1:50

It has been a great couple of weeks and something that it's surreal right now, but we do have good news in that our book the book that I wrote over the last several months is now finally published. It's on Amazon and the book is called Closing the Trust Gap and give full credit to where credit is due. My wife is the person that actually coined the title for the book and I'm so thankful for that because it's really resonated with people and it's invited people into some of the challenges that our data shows is really prevalent across multiple industries and these gaps in trust that can occur are significant and they're costly and they're challenging, and in the book we try to present it just a framework and a way of some of the things that we do in order to help organizations and then some of the results that we've been able to see. So, yep, it's on Amazon, closing the trust gap, and it's been really fun to watch people read it and then provide reviews and hopefully take action on really implementing it for their own workplace.

William Gladhart: 2:54

That's really exciting. Well, you definitely sit in a unique area, because we always kind of say that trust is key in culture and also communication. But once trust is lost, as you noted, it's very expensive and time-consuming to get back in an organization, and that could be at a personal level, that could be at a community level, that could be at an organizational level.

Cory Scheer: 3:17

Absolutely, and one of the things that I know that you and I we've already talked about this before about very few leaders of organizations are incredibly intentional about actually measuring trust as a standalone KPI, and we both know that it actually can be measured and when it is measured, it really does have a direct effect. It correlates directly to things like employee retention, employee advocacy, employee satisfaction, employee productivity and then maybe the less quantitative measure, which is just the overall ethos and quality of the workplace culture. But what would it look like if we were to think about trust as actually a standalone KPI? And we can do that. We can measure the factors that go into that and as we measure that over the course of time, we're then able to begin to take action on very specific ways to strengthen that, which will then have a significant effect on some of the other key performance indicators that make a workplace healthy.

William Gladhart: 4:17

Cory, we'll be discussing three questions today as a warm-up to our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Cory Scheer: 4:25

What's it's critical on on so many levels?

Cory Scheer: 4:30

Number one it makes the best business sense to have a strong workplace culture, because the data over and over and over shows that when you have trust within an organization, when there is strength within a team, strength from the leader all the way to the front line employee, and that gap in trust that can actually occur just due to the hierarchical nature of organizations, but when there is an intentional closing of that gap, it affects these critical indicators that are employee related, like retention, like productivity, but then how that translates to creativity and through innovation and customer service and the delivery of those solutions to your customers, it has a direct effect On those as well.

Cory Scheer: 5:16

And so it doesn't just make sense internally for the organization, it makes sense externally for the customer experience as well. And we all know that when you have An incredible customer experience, that's going to increase the value of the services that you provide and also the loyalty of those customers and their willingness to refer you to other soon to be customers. And so that sequence of events, moving from the inside of the organization and the health to the the external, the customer experience, it is all founded upon this relational dynamic that is called trust.

William Gladhart: 5:52

I love that you tie that not only the internal, the bottom line, financials, the experience within the organization to the outside, because one dynamically impacts the other. So what do you see is the biggest challenge leaders face when addressing cultural change within an organization, or what have you specifically faced in your own organization?

Cory Scheer: 6:11

Well, the data, the data shows us that the we could, we introduce a framework that we call the structure of trust, and there are three building blocks in the structure of trust.

Cory Scheer: 6:21

The first one is competency, whether technical or communication or leadership or project management or financial competency.

Cory Scheer: 6:28

The second building block is problem solving, so not only the process of solving problems, but also the ability to identify the correct problems to solve.

Cory Scheer: 6:36

And then the third vital building block that the research shows has to do with demonstrating care for other people Within the organization, and that is from what our research shows and from our client experiences. The care for others building block is is traditionally the lowest ranking of the three building blocks. And so then the next question is what is the number one way in order to strengthen that building block of caring for others with trust? And our research shows that by by six percentage points, more than any other way to improve that building block the number one way to do that is through listening actively, through listening through taking time, through getting feedback that is actionable and then doing something with that and ensuring that the communication is ongoing, that it's iterative, that it's ultimately helpful, moving forward and that response to that communication and those intentional, open dialogue feedback loops that are helpful for the organization. Interestingly, you found that is the number one way to strengthen trust in that building block that is traditionally the weakest of the three.

William Gladhart: 7:42

I really appreciate that you address that, because you know that empathy piece and you know many employees simply want to be heard and listen to, not that necessarily there is a direct action taken, but I think from your research, but also from research on our side of the houses, that next step truly is, you know, sharing into the organization what next steps are, what the actual action is, what the intent is, and then continuously following up on that, as you mentioned, in that feedback loop cycle of Providing that constant feed to every level of the organization, because when it stops, well then nobody knows what's going on, no one's comfortable in their role, they don't know what they're doing, from management up into the C suite, and it makes it really really challenging to kind of readdress that. And you've probably heard this as well as we have of. Well, you know, I'm not a therapist. How do I do? I I'm empathetic, but how do I fix this? And we're not given a roadmap as leaders of how to address that specific challenge.

Cory Scheer: 8:45

We're not, and you know better than anyone that if you have solid data, if you have a basis by which you can understand and interpret the current condition of the workplace culture, that becomes both helpful and ultimately hopeful for the organization, because now you're expending energy towards things that is the truth of what is occurring within the organization.

Cory Scheer: 9:09

And that's where I kind of delineate in the book the difference between the value proposition, which is taking action on the worth of something, which of course we want to build, the value proposition. But there's no way that we can maximize value if we don't have a strong foundation of trust. And so in the book I introduced this concept of the trust proposition, so different than value proposition, where it's taking action on the worth of something. The trust proposition is about taking action on the truth of something. And when you have data that is sound, that is consistent and even perhaps longitudinal to show a trend, you are now looking at and in some cases facing and grappling with the truth. But as a leader, that is one of the key roles of our responsibility, which is to understand the truth and then do something with the truth that will ultimately help that long term outcomes of the organization. But if we are operating in a vacuum and the truth is only the narrative that we are telling ourselves, without sound data, then of course we're going to struggle both internally and externally.

William Gladhart: 10:14

You definitely touched on this in what you just mentioned, but what do you think the leaders can do to address the challenges that they are facing, or what have you done to help them?

Cory Scheer: 10:25

The key is you have to create some form of an assessment, and that could be through qualitative measures. Maybe you need to kind of weighed into some of the feedback loops through just conversations. You may want to go more of an evaluative or a quantitative. Or if you're doing something that is currently quantitative, then evaluate is that effective? Are you doing something with the data?

Cory Scheer: 10:49

I would say the number one thing that I hear organizations kind of struggle with is well, we already deploy an employee satisfaction survey every year. So then I have two questions - Number one, how's that working for you? And then, number two, what is your response rate? And they typically say, well, it's only 25 to 35% and we really don't do anything with the data, but we're just - This is kind of what we do every year. Well, the reality is is that satisfaction is more of a measure of advocacy and loyalty. But maybe a more important measure to look at is further upstream, where you're looking at some of the dynamics of trust that ultimately lead to your satisfaction measures. But employee satisfaction and employee trust are actually two very different metrics. Both are important to look at, but if you're only looking at satisfaction and, even worse, only looking at satisfaction and doing nothing with it, you're missing a huge opportunity to improve the culture within your organization.

William Gladhart: 11:47

It comes up frequently that people are not tired of pressing the button. They're tired of pressing the button and hearing no response, no action from leaders and or anyone in the organization about goes back to your point of empathy and being listened and heard to, because they're asked for their opinion and when they receive no information, well, that's why you get a 25% participation rate. Engagement isn't, like you said, an outcome of something within the organization. When you talk about those pieces around satisfaction, it's how connected to the organization are they. Do they understand their role? Do they trust their manager and their leader to help them understand those roles and be clear about where they sit in the organization. So I love that you address that, because it's such a critical element. But also you will probably be the one of hundreds of people that chime in on oh hey, we do a satisfaction survey or we do an engagement survey every year, but we do nothing with it. I mean, it's just, it's repetitive, I'm just going well, so there's got to be a better way.

Cory Scheer: 12:54

There, and the good news is there is, there are.

William Gladhart: 12:58

Excellent, so you've shared a lot of really, really great nuggets around empathy, around trust, around satisfaction, around taking next steps in an organization. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with the leaders that are listening?

Cory Scheer: 13:13

My biggest encouragement is especially for leaders who find themselves in maybe a new season of leadership, where perhaps they're a brand new leader, or they're a leader in a new organization, or maybe their team that is, that they are surrounded with, they are new, or Maybe there is even something within the organization that is changing that current reality of fast growth, or maybe there's a stall in growth, or perhaps there's been a merger and acquisition Anything that constitutes a new season of leadership.

Cory Scheer: 13:44

This is the opportunity to seize for a leader to level, set on the culture, on the, on the ability to say let's look at ourselves in the mirror, let's not do this in a way that is an indictment or a negative, but let's let's do this in a way that it is generative, it's moving the organization forward, it's honest and it's helpful, and so that we can begin to take action on what matters most within our organization, which is first Ensuring that the people of the organization that are working are flourishing, so that the employee, the employees, can then share that with the customers and then the customers are going to have the best possible experience. But my encouragement to every leader, especially leaders in a new season, is to take action, assess, apply a proven framework, create a blueprint and move the organization forward.

William Gladhart: 14:34

Great advice. So, Cory, thank you so much. I've enjoyed having you on as a guest today and I very much appreciate your insights.

Cory Scheer: 14:42

Thank you truly, my privilege to be with you today thank you for joining us on the leadership lovers podcast.

William Gladhart: 14:48

You may find all our leadership lovers episodes in our Culture Think Tank Community at www. Culture think tank. ai. Join the community at no charge and tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture, one action at a time.