In recent discussions with some incredible CEOs for The Amazing Leader Series, it helped me to look at trust from another perspective. Let me give you a little background first. Over the years of working with companies globally on their culture, we at Evoloshen have defined the three building blocks that are needed to create an amazing culture that tie into our basic human needs.

The first are the 5 Culture Keys of Collaboration, Creativity, Connection, Celebration, and Contribution. These address the issue of getting the workforce more engaged. When all five are activated on a high level, there seems to be some magic that happens within the organization. There are activities that you can systematize into your culture to make this happen and increase the employee engagement.

Underlying these cultural keys we have Purpose—having that bigger purpose, your WHY you do what you do—that is well defined and integrated into the companies’ DNA. Over 200 CEOs from Fortune 500 companies declared in August 2019 that creating shareholder value is no longer their main objective but that they are choosing to be purpose-driven instead. This is a huge step in the right direction, especially when we look at companies from an organizational perspective.

Working with companies on both engagement and purpose, we discovered that if there isn’t an underlying trust throughout the organization, it took longer to make the culture work stick. People who were taking our International Cultural Engagement Specialist Certification training specifically asked us to develop a leadership training based on the Neuroscience of Engagement and Trust, which we did.

For several years now, we’ve been teaching leaders about neuroscience and how our conversations impact both relationships and the culture. It’s probably one of the most immediately impactful trainings we do because once you learn the neuroscience, you can’t unlearn it, you just have to practice the tools that we teach. We consistently get messages from participants of how much better their relationships are with their employees and even at home! I believe this was the foundational block most needed in companies to help in the culture work.

But it was Bob Chapman, CEO for Barry-Wehmiller, who said to me, trust is a result of caring. So really what we need to be doing is focusing on creating leaders who CARE, who genuinely want to serve and help others reach their full potential. I’ve already seen that the HR function is definitely moving more towards coaching….and so is leadership. Most employees come to a company for their culture and leave because of poor management.

I’ve come up with a framework to go deeper into what caring means:

• C = Compassion & Connection
  • Have a deeper level of compassion and empathy to others
  • Create a strong emotional connection with a person
• A = Authenticity & Accountability
  • Be genuine and vulnerable with your people
  • Hold both yourself and other accountable to what you’ve promised
• R = Recognition & Respect
  • Giving recognition to others, especially publicly, is vital to increasing engagement and reinforcing behaviours
  • When you give respect to others, you will receive it as well
• E = Engage & Enthusiasm
  • Be engaged yourself and inspire others to be engaged
  • Your enthusiasm goes a long way, especially since emotions are contagious

It seems the best place to start with culture work then is to create more caring, empathetic leaders and managers in an organization. In a business environment that has been built on the survival of the fittest and a dog-eat-dog world, we are starting to see a big shift towards caring, towards building trust, becoming purpose-driven, and living in integrity and kindness. Now that’s a business world I can buy into, what about you?