How Do We Overcome Mistrust Among Managers?

Q: The members of our management team are not trusting of each other. Hence they often fail todelegate tasks to their subordinates. How do we overcome this mind-set? A: You identify trust and not delegating as cause and effect. That may turn out to be the case, or they may be somewhat separate issues.

Although it is tempting to offer one-line solutions, I suggest that you probe deeper. Do a bit more work and develop a behaviour-based problem statement. Your observation is a good start, but at this moment it is too general to be used as a diagnosis that guides further action.

Are the subordinates in the work group employees, students or a mix? Are the non-trusting supervisors "permanent" supervisors of regular employees, or are they training supervisors who aren't delegating to their students, who need this to grow and learn? Do the managers share a country of origin that is different from that of subordinates or students?

The trust and delegation issues may have some links to cultural norms, especially if the subordinates have one culture in common and the supervisors share a different culture. With a few offhand discussions, plus questions like these (which you can answer yourself) you can make factual observations about behaviours and develop a problem statement that is almost a mirror image of the action plan you need to develop.

This situation will challenge your skill at influencing, versus directly intervening, especially if you are in human resources and don't have direct authority in the situation.

It's important to stay engaged with all the parties while you work through, rather than portraying one side as victims and the other as villains. If you keep working at it, the people who are contributing to the problem will likely begin to see:

1. You are not giving up easily.

2. All they are being asked to do is participate in a business-process improvement, which is hard to refuse.

3. The next step, which if they don't cooperate could be more unpleasant - and may not be good for their performance appraisals.

[SOURCE: Harold Fethe, organisational consultant, St. Augustine, Florida, October 31, 2007]