Chapter 1: Trust-The Thing That Went Away

Overview

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.

Casey Stengel

This is a book about trust. Or rather, this is a book about why many employers and employees feel that trust has gone: packed its bags one day and left town for good. If that's true - and many think it is - then what's in the gaping chasm trust left behind when it walked out the door? Is there something else in this post-industrial, knowledge-driven age that is a superior product to trust that can keep us in mindless corporate ecstasy forever?

The simple, short answer to that is No. No, there isn't a modern-day alternative to trust. True there are hundreds if not thousands of would-be management gurus talking about employee engagement and commitment and new social contracts. But these are just, at best, ephemeral concepts to fill the vacuum trust left behind when it flounced - completely frustrated - out of our lives, somewhere around 5 June 2002 (I can't, of course, be sure of the exact date, but it was somewhere around then). And I, in the course of the research for this book, haven't seen it appear anywhere since.

So what happened ? Why did trust pack its bags and leave corporate life forever? And, most importantly perhaps, is there anything we can do about it as far as getting employees to at least take an interest in their organisations again?

Trust's absence from the public and private workplace these last years was not brought about by any single event; it was a gradual process that slowly asphyxiated the foundations of trust that some believe had been with us for generations. In truth, if you talk to any senior (in age) managers you won't find much belief in employee/employer trust. They'll just talk of the bitter times of poor or non-existent industrial relations, when ˜us' was the union and ˜them' was the management. You didn't hear a lot about trust in the 1960s.

Go back further into any nation's employment history, and you'll soon realise that we may be looking at an imaginary world of kind bosses and cheerful, whistle -while-you-work employees that never really existed. When times were hard people were glad of a job, a living wage. Doing the job had little to do with trust and a great deal to do with fear. Fear of losing that job. Losing the ability to earn and support a family.