Canadian HR Reporter is the national journal of human resource management. It features the latest workplace news, HR best practices, employment law commentary and tools and tips for employers to get the most out of their workforce.
Issue link: https://digital.hrreporter.com/i/1212438
40 www.hrreporter.com trust, comes up frequently in conversation." Noel and past IRC director Paul Juniper found that, in all the courses and conversations at the IRC, it was challenging to bring people around to a shared definition of trust. The IRC saw a chance to research, define and teach trust — helping to bring the organizations they serve to a shared idea of trust, allowing HR leaders to better build it into their workplace culture. The team at Queen's IRC, initially led by Juniper, dove into background research around trust and started asking how it could be measured. What they found was that despite trust's somewhat amorphous definition, it's driven by relationships. "Over the past decade, there's been an acknowledgement that the organization as a whole is relationship driven," Noel said. "Trust fits into the emotional intelligence that leaders need. Building trust takes empathy, creativity and authentic conversations, traits by which we define great leaders." As a two-day offering, the Queen's course will explore how trust is formed at personal, organizational and societal levels. Attendees will reflect on their own emotional intelligence and learn how that feeds into trust. They'll be given the tools to leverage trust to improve overall job performance and build a trust plan that will last in the fast- changing world of work. There's an urgency to building these skills. If HR leaders don't start working on trust, they could lose it. "Trust really needs to stay top of mind because it's easily lost," said leadership coach Linda Allen- Hardisty, the facilitator for this year's course. "Employees are getting new and sometimes difficult IRC's 'practitioner orientated' approach. Since its founding in the '30s, the IRC has sought to bridge the gap between academic research and organizational practice. The Building Trust course takes Allen-Hardisty's experience and practical knowledge and passes it on in a classroom setting through case studies and hands-on skill building. Attendees at the course will leave with a "trust fitness" framework. They'll learn what to look for and what questions to ask to assess where their organization is at with respect to their employees' trust in them. Through that framework they can narrow Allen-Hardisty's broad definition of trust to suit their organization. Assessing trust is one thing, but the course was expanded to help with the skills training Allen- Hardisty thinks HR leaders need to be trust leaders. "Attendees will be able to identify their own level of emotional intelligence, which will help them understand how that may impact trust issues," Allen-Hardisty explained. "They'll be able to leverage trust to assess and improve field job performance and commitment. They'll learn more about behaviour change and how to use research to really test what's going on in the workplace and how to really take some of those real-life stories and understand how that may be applicable back to them. "They'll learn how to sustain trust. In these times of societal, economic and technological change, I doubt that need is going to lessen." Allen-Hardisty will lead conversations around media stories, widely covered and lesser known, to show where organizations have earned trust and broken it, both among their employees and in the wider public. She cited the example of Boeing, which may have eroded both public and internal trust by failing to replace its CEO quickly enough in the wake of the 737 MAX scandal. She says she'll bring much of what she learned as a student at Queen's IRC to teaching the course. "I use the tools all the time from the program that I took in 2006," Allen-Hardisty explained. "One of the things that really shines is that the IRC can really customize an approach based on good research and practicality to make it a really great learning opportunity for any organization. "I'm really excited to be a part of this new program with Queen's and really help people take their understanding of trust to get to the next level of opportunity." CHRR news, be it local or global, all the time. Often, employers are looking more and more to their employees to help them make sense of that and understand where they fit into the greater picture. I think the expectations of how people earn trust on a personal level is shifting." If an organization loses trust, productivity and staff retention will often follow. On the other hand, an organization that maintains the trust of its employees will see improved productivity, greater retention rates and a greater degree of creativity from its people. "Building trust begins with leaders creating a safe environment for employees to put ideas forward and receive respectful feedback to build on their contributions," Noel explained. Allen-Hardisty has a simple definition of trust: People think that you will do the right thing for them. Her instruction is built out from that simple, broad definition. This newly expanded program maintains the "Over the past decade, there's been an acknowledgement that the organization as a whole is relationship driven." Stephanie Noel, director of Queen's IRC "They'll learn how to sustain trust. In these times of societal, economic and technological change, I doubt that need is going to lessen." Linda Allen-Hardisty, course facilitator and leadership coach EDUCATION LEADERSHIP SERIES