Lingerie Leadership: Women Only!

What do your drawers say about you?
Source: goodhousekeeping.com

If you haven’t already done it, sister, it’s time to spring clean your skivies drawer.

Just as warriors put on their armour before a great battle, you may want to pay attention to the first signals you give yourself in the morning.  “I’m totally worth it!” or “I’ve got it going on” kicks your day off so much better than “Well, the elastic’s not quite gone” or “I might get away with that run in my stocking.”

Women are notorious for putting themselves last so revamping your drawers is an easy way to put a little pep in your day and to boost your confidence.

All it takes is one shopping trip then no additional time required – you were going to get dressed anyway.

  • Add a little colour under that endless sea of black and navy blazers.
  • Put a little extra zip in your attire (that only you know about) for a bit more omph, a little more swagger.
  • Chose your mood: daring, all business, playful, colourful,… You’re the only one who’ll know you’re wearing a tiger-print or a wonder woman combo to the job interview.
  • Show yourself you’re worth it.

Any age, any body type we all deserve a beautiful camisole or great foundation garments. It doesn’t have to be expensive.

What does lingerie have to do with leadership?

John McCallum wrote a great article titled Tennyson on Leadership ((Ivey Business Journal, May/June 2000) where he suggests that self-mastery in the realm of leadership lies in in “Tennyson’s Trinity of Excellences” : self-reverence, self-knowledge and self-control. I suggest that taking care of little luxuries for yourself, like lingerie that makes you smile or feel fierce, speaks to this self-reverence more than something that came eight to a package.

It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with self-reverence and confidence.

Isn’t it worth kicking off your day with something better than bran?

You’ll be more comfortable. Your clothes will look better and you’ll appear more fit. You won’t be distracted by the bra strap that won’t stay in place during your Board presentation.

… and it sure beats washing windows!

PS. Fellas… if you read this despite the warning, this works for a great tie, beautiful shirt or cuflinks too 😉

22 Benefits of Inter-Organizational Trust Week 4 of Twelve Weeks to Trust

Welcome to Week 4 of the Twelve Weeks to Trust Series. In the past few weeks we’ve covered the declining state of trust globally, core concepts and types of trust, and why inter-organizational trust is key to partnership success. While week 3 provided high-level findings on the macro-level benefits of inter-organizational trust, this week shares insights from academic research on how building inter-organizational trust benefits your organization and your alliances.

The benefits of inter-organizational trust fall into two broad categories: (1) cost & performance and (2) relational benefits.

Cost & performance benefits of inter-organizational trust include:

1. Lower negotiation costs and less conflict (Zaheer, McEvily & Perrone, 1998)

2. Lower transaction costs (Dyer & Chu, 2003; Zaheer, McEvily & Perrone, 1998)

  • including search costs for partners (Gulati, 1995); and,
  • lower legal and contracting costs

3. Better use of internal resources (McEvily et al., 2003)

  • including less time required to manage relationships (Claro et al., 2003; Girmscheid & Brockmann, 2010)

4. Better exchange performance = Better RESULTS! (Dyer & Chu, 1993; Gulati & Nickerson, 2008; Palmatier et al., 2007; Zaheer, McEvily & Perrone, 1998) Remember Week 3 stats on the dismal success rate of joint ventures and KPMG Global’s conclusion on the role of trust? Trust = Results.

5. Improved sales growth and perceived satisfaction defined by economic and non-economic factors (Claro, Hagelaar & Omta, 2003; Geyskens, Steenkamp & Kumar,1999)

6. Improved product innovation performance. This is an important indicator for evaluating a firm’s research and development and is based on both design and market performance (Lai et al.,2011)

7. Greater collective opportunity between partners (Jap, 1999). Trusting partners see the collaboration as creating a bigger pie rather than a zero-sum-game.

8. A broader scope of available opportunities (Barney& Hansen, 1994; Fichman, 2003; Gulati, 1995; McEvily et al., 2003). While partners may start a relationship in one area, greater trust opens up further business opportunities. When I worked as a government relations consultant, “growing the client” meant finding other opportunities where we could work together and expand our partnership for joint gain. If they trusted us on one file, often that trust would transfer to a broader relationship.

9. Value creation and additional trust creation. Dyer & Chu (2003) proposed that:

“trust is a “unique governance mechanism because the investments that trading partners make to build trust often simultaneously create economic value (beyond minimizing transaction costs) in the exchange relationship” (p.66).

10. A positive impact on a partner’s long term orientation (Doney & Cannon, 1997; Ganesan, 1994). As we will see in Week 6, a long-term orientation is essential for inviting investments in the partnership, joint marketing, training, etc. that are the basis of ongoing success. A long-term orientation reduces search costs for new partners, negotiation and contracting costs, and resources required for ramping up in a working relationship. Imagine a couple who are looking forward to their wedding, their children, their retirement – longevity and happiness in their relationship is based on what they see as opportunity in the future.

11. Lower communication costs. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, “skepticism requires repetition” conversely, trust reduces the frequency with which a message must be repeated, reinforced and therefore less time, effort and cost are required for communication.

Relational benefits of inter-organizational trust include:

12. Increased  joint action and commitment (Hausman & Johnston, 2010). Both of these are a result and also a mechanism to build trust. Remember, “Trust is generative and builds on itself” from Week 2? We’ll spend quite a bit more time on these relational mechanisms for trust in Week 7.

13. Development of flexible arrangements and sharing of strategic plans and scheduling information (Johnston et al., 2004, p. 35)

14. Improved scale and scope of communication among alliance partners  (Dyer & Chu, 2003; Gargiulo & Ertug, 2006; McEvily et al., 2003)

15. Increased joint problem solving which, in-turn, also fosters greater trust (Claro et al., 2003)

16. Continuous improvement and learning (Sako,1998) which is critical for the transfer of tacit, or informal, learning (Janowicz-Panjaitan & Nooderhaven, 2009). This tacit learning, that McKinsey Quarterly explains is “based on knowledge, judgment, experience, and instinct”, is necessary to navigate increasingly complex business, industry and social challenges.

“During the past six years, the number of US jobs that include tacit interactions as an essential component has been growing two and a half times faster than the number of transactional jobs and three times faster than employment in the entire national economy.” – McKinsey Quarterly

17. Greater ability to obtain information from a partner’s network that would not otherwise be available (Osarenkhoe, 2010)

18. Greater involvement of third parties i.e., universities/research institutions which contribute to innovation(Lai et al.,2011)

19. Increased likelihood of being given the benefit of the doubt when “one party engages in an act that its partner considers destructive” (Kumar, 1996 , p. 97)

Mark Twain wrote: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Inter-organizational trust at least gives you a chance to catch up.

20. Provides a qualifier, a basic requirement to compete. While an organization’s reputation for trustworthiness may not always provide a measurable benefit or provide a competitive advantage, Doney & Cannon (1997) suggest that

trust between organizations is a fundamental requirement to even be considered as an exchange partner.

Finally, while scholars (and I, and maybe by now you too) bemoan the complexity of trust…

21. The complexity of high-trust relationships constitute a competitive advantage. The goodwill, shared norms, joint investments, increasing identification between partners, etc. all reflect an exchange partner’s unique path through history. This stronger type of trust, as seen in Week 2, was called “strong-form trustworthiness” by Barney & Hansen (1994). This complex relationship and unique journey is impossible for competitors to imitate and therefore immune from rapid diffusion.

Finally, my research  – and thankfully, this blog post – is not exhaustive so I’m sure there are many more proven benefits (and please feel free to cite them below) but I’ll add a final one.

22. People, by far, prefer to work in an environment of trust. Therefore trust in inter-organizational collaboration creates higher engagement. Psychologically, it’s simply feels better. Biologically, neuroeconomist Paul Zak, has shown that a feeling of connection – through shared experience, hugs, weddings, social media, etc. releases oxycontin in the body which, in turn, creates greater trust. [You can check out his Ted Talk: Trust, morality — and oxytocin.]

There is a significant benefit for leaders to foster feelings of connection between their organizational representatives: increase trust & boost results.

Similarly, social psychologist Roderick Kramer, writes:

“Indeed, much of what makes life pleasant and efficient comes from the salutary effects of trust… When we start fearing and avoiding (rather than trusting and cooperating with) people we work and compete with, we enter a world of impoverished zero-sum games and escalating arms races.” (Kramer, 2002)

Generally, people prefer not to work in environments like these. What are your work environments like? Your partnerships? What benefits have you experienced from greater inter-organizational trust?

You Have to Do Something AND Be Someone

 “It used to be that you wanted to do something. Now you want to be someone.”- The Iron Lady

The Margaret Thatcher character in the movie is trying to point out that people used to be driven by conviction and now they are driven by a desire for fame. Certainly, our reality TV culture supports that notion. However, I’d like to broaden the definition of ‘Being someone” because it’s not helpful to frame today’s leaders in such an either-or paradigm. We can’t really say the former is “better” than the latter. The answer for today’s leaders is BOTH. That’s integrative thinking.

Even today, most people are drawn to public or corporate leadership because they want to do something in their community or their organization. Perhaps once they are there they become the “icon”, the “business person of the year” etc. That’s the “Great Man” approach to leadership that is perpetuated in the press but discarded by leadership scholars as not being particularly effective. It stands to reason that you have to do something to be someone.

Our assumptions of the traits of leaders colours how we see the “be someone” piece. Initially I was thinking, as you might be, that the be is about importance, status, fame… It is about what you achieve when you are a leader. However, today’s leaders need to be someone who empowers others, who is caring, who listens deeply. Above all, this “Level 5 Leader“, as described by Jim Collins, must be humble. (Perhaps, Lady Thatcher would have prevented the overthrow of her leadership if she had followed more of these practices.) Nonetheless, we must also acknowledge that when you “are someone” you have more power to accomplish your objectives because of your reputation, your resources, your team etc. and because people want to be associated with you.

This flips the assumption upside down: Sometimes, you need to be in order to do.

Just try to remember that fame can be fleeting so “be” in such a way that others still want to be with you when, once again, you are a regular person buying milk at the grocery store. To quote Einstein “Try not to become a man of success, but rather a man of value.”

Five reasons inter-organizational trust is key to partnership success – Week 3 of Twelve Weeks to Trust

Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed Week 1 & Week 2 of this Twelve Weeks to Trust series.

In the past twenty years, all types of hybrid business partnerships – joint ventures, alliances, etc. – are on the rise because they permit access to new markets, reduce costs and share risks – particularly in uncertain economic times. Imagine all the time, energy and resources that go into these local, national and global collaborations.

Yet only 50% of joint ventures will succeed, according to a thought leadership round-table at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University.

So what’s the secret ingredient to inter-organizational collaboration? How can leaders maximize the benefits and outcomes of their partnerships?

A 2009 study by KPMG Global found: Trust between partners emerged as the #1 success factor in joint ventures.

Critical in any type of business alliance – inter-departmental projects, joint ventures, partnerships, hybrid arrangements, supply chain relationships, corporate-NGO initiatives, etc.  – trust has been called the lubricant, the glue, the oxygen of business collaboration partnerships. What if you didn’t trust your engineering firm, your contractor, your construction crews, your suppliers? You would spend a ton of time and money selecting, contracting, supervising and second-guessing your partners when that time could be better spent maximising the outcomes of your partnership. In order to know how to build this inter-organizational trust; as we say in Week 2, we need more clarity around the term trust, particularly in a business context.

In the KPMG statement above, are they referring to trust between the people involved or between the organizations? Do they trust individuals’ personal traits or their accreditations and organizational processes? How do all these factors differ?

When you ask people about trust, they immediately describe interpersonal trust – “live your values”, “follow-through on promises”, etc.  I believe that we need much more than that and I’m not alone.  Attention to inter-organizational trust has exploded in the last two decades.  A search for “inter-organizational trust” in the ProQuest database of published journal articles yielded 8,885 results – 65% of these were published between 2000-2009 and 98% since 1990. I’m sure that number is climbing as we speak! (Psst …. you can find a selection of these in My Trust Bibliography.)

Why so much attention?

First, businesses want to maximize their partnerships but also because

1. Inter-organizational trust is the greatest hope to restore macro-level trust to institutions in this post-Enron, post financial collapse era.

“As we are moving out of the global financial crisis into a new era of post-liberal capitalism, this will be one of the most important fields in management research” (Bachmann & Inkpen, 2011, p.297).

2. Inter-organizational trust is a completely separate construct from interpersonal trust and has a greater impact on results. In their ground-breaking research, Zaheer, McEvily & Perrone (1998) found no direct impact of interpersonal relations on organizational performance while higher inter-organizational trust reduced negotiation costs, improved coordination, reduced conflict and increased performance.

3. Perceptions of trust or distrust in the initial stages of cooperation impact (1) formal coordination and control; (2) interorganizational performance, and (3) the favorability with which managers interpret the behavior of their partners [Basically, the entire set of assumptions that underlie the relationship]. These effects increase the likelihood that existing expectations are reinforced and that trust, distrust and formalization develop along vicious or virtuous cycles (Vlaar, Van den Bosch, & Volberta, 2007).

4. Inter-organizational trust provides mechanisms for building a common vision, joint-problem solving, bilateral communication and … more on those mechanisms in Week 6 &7.

5. Inter-organizational trust can “survive a breakdown of inter-personal relationships due to labour turnover or personality clash, and provides the stability necessary for firms to pursue innovative and competitive activities” (Sako & Helper, 1998, p.389).

Without trust there is little information sharing, there is no ability to go beyond the tightly defined parameters of the contract, there is increased monitoring and suspicion.

Interpersonal Trust

True, the interpersonal relationships are important but the people involved – the boundary spanners- are acting as agents or ambassadors of their organization, not necessarily as individuals that you might want to befriend. One case study by Gerhard Grimscheid & Christian Brockmann (2010) looked at large scale construction projects and found that,

…in the absence of preexisting institutions or history, joint venture partners trusted the people and groups based on their expertise and how they signaled, or communicated, their intentions.

Remember Trust= ability +benevolence in Week 2?

And when Stephen Currall & Timothy Judge measured trust between boundary spanners in 1995 they found

“no significant relationships…between the trust scales and the length of time they had known each other in any personal or work related capacity. Apparently trust was impacted mainly by the interactions they had in the context of their roles…” (1995, p.165).

The research suggests that inter-organizational trust between boundary-spanners may stem primarily from institutional factors such as roles, rules, standards and procedures, counterpart’s skills, trust in the partner organization, communication practices, etc.

Not only does the focus of inter-organizational trust need to be on structural aspects of the role; but, Marketing Management & Business Ethics professor, Amit Saini, actually cautions that it is possible that interpersonal factors i.e., friendships and social ties, may blur the lines of professional conduct and contribute to ethically questionable behaviour (2010, p.449). We’ll look at boundary spanners, characteristics that build trust and potential pitfalls more closely in Week 9.

Despite any misgivings, we saw in Week 2 that boundary-spanners have a critical role since the dynamic nature of trust means that it can transfer or move from the individual to the organization.

“The more one trusts the supplier representative with whom one deals, the more one’s organization trusts the supplier organization…suggesting mutually reinforcing effects of trust at the two levels” (Zaheer et al., 1998, p.154). Similarly, Patricia Doney & Joseph Cannon (1997) found: “the interpersonal trust engendered by salespeople and transferred to the supplier firm plays a key role in the developing and maintaining enduring buyer-seller relationships” (p.46). This suggests that hiring the right people is a key factor in building trust between organizations.

Does trust within OrgA impact trust with its partners?

In the interest of brevity, we’ll look at the linkages between intra-organizational trust and inter-organizational trust in Week 11. To give you a sneak peek though: the economics, strategy and ethics literature finds that an organization’s culture, structure, processes and incentives must foster trustworthy behaviours internally in order to maximize trust in inter-organizational relationships.

“Organizations must first ensure that trust permeates their own corporate culture before shifting their focus outward to their relationships with other firms” (Drake & Schlachter, 2008, p.852).

Leadership’s attention to trustworthiness, incentives and performance measurement all provide clear signals to boundary-spanners on the type of behaviour that is expected from them and help to channel behaviours appropriately. In addition to applauding and incenting trustworthy behaviour, organizations must also actively denounce and punish those who act opportunistically to demonstrate that it will not be tolerated, to protect their reputation, and to avoid damaging inter-organizational relations.

Just as the type of trust and trust determinants are different at various organizational levels, so too are the trust building roles and mechanisms. Notice here that we’re still talking about structures within an organization? We’re talking about policies, practices and incentives not having an open door policy, not staff to supervisor interpersonal trust, creating opportunities for face-to-face, “saying we”. While these all fit into the greater organizational culture, trust has to be manifested and encouraged beyond the interpersonal and be entrenched in the entire organization.

Yes, you have to hire, train and support the right “ambassadors” but leaders must also provide a culture and a structure that supports them.

It seems like building trust within and between organizations is a big investment, is it really worth it? Aha! We’ll talk about benefits on Week 4. In the interim, I’d love to know what struck you about this post or if you disagree. [Hint: open bilateral communication builds trust ;)]