or, How to finish the job of being a manager
It can be tough being a manager and leader in your organisation. A group of humans looking to you and relying on you. Asking you questions! All because you've built trust with them, getting them to buy into your vision and strategy, and giving them a space to be heard. And now, you have to keep doing it. Nudging your team in the right direction, following through on commitments, and helping them grow.
Shouldn't there be an easier way? Isn't there a way to complete the job of manager?
There is! And it is the Trust Erosion system.
The funny thing about the Trust Erosion system is that its always been there, a tool waiting to be used. You may already be implementing some of its strategies unknowingly. There are several different ways to Trust Erosion and the brilliant thing about the system is that you don't need to use all of them, you can just implement a small handful of them for most of the results.
There are things you can do to remove trust quickly, but these generally take specific circumstances or obvious action. What we focus on in Trust Erosion are more lightweight actions that anyone can take which help to slowly undermine the team's trust in you over time. Transitioning their reliance from you onto either another manager (perhaps at another company), or onto disenfranchisement in their current role.
We divide the Trust Erosion into three areas, each with a number of actions you can take.
The first area for eroding trust is around time. Being difficult to reach undermines the subordinate's ability to rely and trust you. So cancelling or misusing 1:1 time and being unapproachable for issues will push the team member to make decisions themselves, remove their reliance on feedback from you, and prevent them from getting richer information about strategy or plans.
The second area is reliability. Frequent changes to team priorities with only superficial details is great for seeming unreliable with your planning and strategy. This synergises well with the Trust Erosion time actions by providing minimal information and no channel for the team to gain the depth of information they may desire. Another action here is not following through with what you say you will do. You can very effectively remove trust by your team not believing that you'll take the actions you're saying you will.
And the third area is confidence. For those times that a team member does catch you to talk through an issue: push back on it being issue and question why their colleagues haven't also raised the issue. Over time this will give them the message that coming to you with issues is not the right move and will reduce their dependency on you.
There is an additional action that works on confidence, though this does require additional effort, mis-actioning a team members suggestion. This will require you to do something, but reduces the need to listen to your report as you can quickly agree but act on it in a way that does not aid their suggestion. While extra effort is required here, there are few more efficient ways to erode trust than misinterpreting what your report has spoken about.
Hopefully the Trust Erosion system will help you as a manager complete the work of management. Removing those never ending tasks that come about from having a team that trusts you.
Do you have other suggestions for areas and actions to expand the Trust Erosion system? Let us know in the comments.
