Kelly talks to professor Paul Zak about his new book “Trust Factor” which looks at the science of creating high performance companies.
Read further for this week’s Rule of Three.
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- In your book, you note that trust within companies doesn’t just come in the employee handbook, you have to constantly be sending out trust signals.
“It’s got to be something that you constantly nurture and reinforce because our brain is a very lazy organ in a metabolic sense. It doesn’t want to have to set up new pathways. If I’m a high trust organization and I experienced that trust, I practiced that trust all the time that\n my brain defaults into being a trusting person. Again, if you come at me with a knife, I’m definitely going to behave differently. But what I like is when we create a culture of high trust in which people can really depend on each other and can trust each other. Now the other people around them are reliable and in that case I can take a lot more risk and if we’re really into improvisation, which is your bailiwick, you will have practiced that stuff. You learned how to play off the other people. You realize that they are the safety net, that you can take incredible risks and also have incredible wins.”
- You talk a bout a program that the Cleveland Clinic started called “Code Lavender,” tell us about that.
“So cold blue, as most people know, is an alarm in the hospitals that goes off when someone is in need of life-saving medicine in a situation such as a heart attack, So we call it code blue. Yet individuals at work are often dying emotionally and they’re dying in a way that is difficult to tell coworkers. It’s like,
I’ve just had two very rough weeks and my mother just moved into Alzheimer’s care and my kid is sick and I didn’t have capacity to do 100 % like we all think we do all the time. And so we have code lavender. This is a system that Cleveland Clinic has developed and now other hospitals use that just allows you to put on a little lavender ribbon that tells your coworkers that you are having a tough time today and could use a little extra care. There is a great depth of insight here. If we really want people to perform at their best, we need to see individuals as full human beings with emotions, with personal lives. They’re not a piece of human capital, as economists say, they’re human beings and that means that they’re going to be inconsistent and flawed and beautiful and imperfect. And we should embrace all of that.”
- Here’s my favorite line from your book, “If leaders want to show respect for their colleagues, start and stop meetings on time.”
“I’m a big believer in that it’s respectful. So yeah, I think it’s really important and it’s a level of integrity if you want to live your life with integrity at work, outside of work, then starting to show up on time. I think it’s very important.”
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