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Organizational Learning

March 22, 1999

"The most successful firms learn quickly both about changing customer needs and about their mistakes in meeting those needs.  To be efficient in this way - that is, to be learning organizations - they must rely in large measure on trust.  In particular, trust is necessary if people are to be open and candid about the things that have gone wrong - and accurate about what is going right.

A high level of trust allows people to say what is on their minds and not feel that will come back to hurt them.   A sufficient level of trust ensures that lines of communication are open and that no one is hiding information or wasting time trying to decide the political implications of his or her views.  A team that is comfortable with direct and honest communication is more likely to consider various alternatives to the problems it faces.  Open lines of communication also result in better and more timely decisions.  In this way, trust allows leaders to use the talents of the people on the team to their full extent, producing superior outcomes on whatever the team is trying to accomplish.  In contrast, in a low-trust organization, mistakes are viewed as an embarrassment that must be hidden from public scrutiny.  Unless people can trust that they will not be harmed, the "postmortem" sessions needed to extract valuable lessons from failures either do not occur or become shallow exercises with little long-term value (Shaw, 1997, pp. 13-14)."

Reference:  Shaw, R.B. (1997).  Trust in the balance.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Do you instill trust in your organization?

* Trust in the Balance is available on loan at the OSU Leadership Center.  A listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~leaders

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Created: 2009-01-06, Updated: 2009-01-18