Honesty and Trust: The Keys to Motivation and Leadership at Work

Let me start at the beginning… from the end.

After years at the same company, with good times and bad, joy, sadness, stress, I feel attached to the project. I’ve developed all kinds of skills, grown professionally and personally, and I still want more and want to keep evolving.

In short, I’m a motivated employee.

How to achieve that motivation is something I’d like to cover in other articles. Today, let me talk to you about the opposite: how to destroy that treasure in one stroke, the holy grail of team management, motivation.

Pay cuts? Mobbing? Dull projects? Not feeling valued? Well, the key word is precisely one that rarely comes up in the business world. Let’s talk about honesty and trust.

Imagine that suddenly 20% of the workforce is laid off (covid, a change of strategy, the company being bought, etc.). Your protective bubble against discouragement and routine starts to weaken, but it survives that first blow. It’s fine, tomorrow is another day, we’ll get this back on its feet and come out stronger. The problem comes when, at the next All Hands, it’s all smiles, and management keeps repeating an optimistic message with a grin on their faces. What’s going on? Why are they smiling? You have to be positive, but bad news is delivered with a straight face, and those people were my colleagues.

And… why have underperformers been kept while key employees were let go? Maybe there’s a good reason for it, but what happened is that they didn’t treat me like a person (smiles?) and the explanations were non-existent or plainly false.

If performance doesn’t matter, will I be next? Can I trust what my managers tell me? I don’t live in a fantasy world, life is hard for everyone, and I was aware of the bias in how strategic decisions get communicated to employees, but at the next All Hands I don’t even bother asking questions, because I no longer trust the answers or the people giving them. My bubble is broken, and I start dusting off my CV. My performance drops.

You’ll think: sure, but the reason was the layoffs. Only partly. Empathizing with the feelings the rest of the staff were going through, and giving a credible, adult and professional explanation, would not have caused this disconnection from the company. Maybe we would have mourned the fallen and kept fighting to refloat the ship. My trust in the company’s leadership was completely destroyed because they hid information from me, lied to me, and ignored the human side when handling the situation.

Talking about honesty, integrity and emotional intelligence is not fashionable in the business world. Maybe that’s why good leaders are so scarce.

Note: All of the above is pure fiction, and no animals were harmed in the writing of this article.