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CIVILITY
AND TRUST
George L.
Smith
As
organizations around the world undertake large-scale productivity
transformation, they are experiencing a qualitatively different
and unanticipated outcome. Once the "usual" productivity barriers
are removed, a new barrier surfaces. This barrier has as its genesis
a felt violation of the core human values of ethics, civility, and
trust. Executives and scholars, theorists and practitioners in increasing
numbers are voicing concern over perceived violations of these values
in the context of organizational change.
In
Civility, Stephen Carter develops 15 rules to guide
the "reconstruction of civility" that I believe can guide our tactics
to combat these violations. A few examples:
"Civility requires that we sacrifice for strangers, not just people
we happen to know;"
"Civility has two parts: generosity, even when it is costly, and
trust, even when there is risk;"
"Civility creates not merely a negative duty not to do harm, but
an affirmative duty to do good;"
"Civility assumes that we will disagree; it requires us not to mask
our differences but to resolve them respectfully;" and
"Civility requires that we listen to others with knowledge of the
possibility that they are right and we are wrong."
I
believe that empowered workers and trusted organizational partnerships
are essential to creating double-digit increases in productivity.
However, empowerment and partnership cannot be realized unless there
is a relationship of civility and trust between leaders and they
propose to lead and manage; and workers will not accept empowerment
unless they believe they can trust their leaders. Furthermore, effective
customer and supplier partnerships cannot exist without civility
and trust. Terms such as ethical action, civil discourse, mutual
trust, and moral courage are becoming part of the vocabulary of
productivity.
Influential
Readings
- Blanchard,
Ken and Michael O'Connor, Managing by Values, Berrett-Koehler,
1997.
- Block,
Peter, Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest, Berrett-Koehler,
1996.
- Carter,
Stephen L., Civility, Basic Books, 1998
- His
Holiness the Dalai Lama and H. C. Cutler, The Art of Happiness,
Riverhead Books, 1998
- Lewis,
Jordan D., Trusted Partners, Free Press, 1999
- Morris,
Tom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Henry Holt and Co., 1997
- Secretan,
Lawrence, Reclaiming Higher Ground, McGraw-Hill, 1997
- Smith,
G. L., and D. Scott Sink, The Role of Trust, Responsibility, and
Accountability in an "Empowering" Organization, SEMS Newsletter,
Society for Engineering and Management Systems, Institute of Industrial
Engineers, Spring 1999.
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George
is a Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering
at The Ohio State University. He is active as a teacher, a consultant,
and an arbitrator of labor-management disputes for the U. S.
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. His consulting specializes
in mentoring corporate leaders and their staff members in organizations
that have already made a commitment to large-scale change and
gotten "stuck" in the process. He is a Fellow of the Institute
of Industrial Engineers, The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society,
and The World Academy of Productivity Science, and is Past President
of the Society for Engineering and Management Systems of IIE.
e-mail: smith.14@osu.edu |
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