No one wants to be the boy in a leader’s clothes crying change in place of wolf.  Obviously, there’s no better way to lose the respect of your team than to make promises you never fulfill.  And while being a leader sometimes requires making unpopular decisions, you’re going to lose your following if you fail to listen to what your people have to say.

In response to this, many organizations go ahead and ask their people, “What do you want?” Most often in the form of employee surveys that ask direct questions like, “Do you have a friend at work?” or “Do you trust your boss?”  Here’s the thing, every survey question asked implies a promise that something positive will be done with the answer given.   

Granted, you may get some responses like, “Everything’s fine, I just want a new coffee pot in the break room.”  That’s the easy stuff.  But it gets more difficult when you’re told, “No, I don’t have any friends here.  What are you going to do about it?” or, “No, I don’t trust my boss one bit. In fact, I’ve already got one foot out the door because of it.”  That’s heavy stuff that can’t be ignored.  Bottom line; if you don’t know how to fix a situation, don’t risk destroying employee trust by asking about it until you do. 

We conducted a survey on what influences employees to trust the boss (one of the largest studies on this ever done).  Honesty and truthfulness, while important, did not top the list on what drives employee trust.  Rather, it was the extent to which leaders respond constructively to employees who bring them work-related problems. 

And yet, in many organizations, a solo ground rule exists: Trust is the result of honesty.  Not that’s there’s anything wrong with honesty.  I’m personally a big fan of it.  But it’s going to take affirmative action—as well as honesty—in order for your team to keep believing you’ll make good on your promises.  Then, even in situations where a promise does take a little longer than expected to materialize, your support system will remain strong against the resistance of the few folks who still might try to bring you down.

Where to start?  Look at each of your current employee survey questions and ask yourself:  Can I absolutely fix this if someone says, “I’m unhappy with this.  Do something”?  And, it’s not okay to sorta know what you might do or to take a guess.  I’m talking definitive fix here.  The step after that is to replace faulty employee survey questions with questions that relate to what it takes to feel passionate about giving 100 % in your organization.  And that’s fodder for a whole other blog.