Trust is the multiplier

Two weeks after I turned in a paper about chaos, I started a course called Managing the Contemporary Organization. The first assignment asked us to pick a theory of motivation and take it apart. I picked the one that reads like math, because I like things I can check.

It is called expectancy theory, and the plain version is three questions a person asks before they put real effort into something. Can I actually do this? If I do it well, will it lead to anything? Do I care about what it leads to? The theory says motivation is those three answers multiplied together, not added. That one word matters. If any answer is zero, the whole thing is zero. You can love the outcome and believe you can do the work, and if you don’t think the work will lead anywhere, you won’t start.

I have watched teachers run those three questions in the back of a training room for most of my career. Can I learn this platform in the time I have? If I use it, will it actually help my students, or will it just generate another report? Do I care about what it measures? Most rollout plans are built to answer the first question. That is what training is for. The other two usually get one slide.

The variable the theory assumes

My paper argued something a little different from the textbook. The three questions are only as good as the answers people are given, and people judge the answers by who is giving them. If a teacher doesn’t trust the person telling her the new platform will save time, she discounts the promise before she ever logs in. The second question quietly goes to zero, and so does the multiplication.

I wrote that the theory assumes employees trust their manager, the organization, and where the organization says it is going. It never says so out loud. And I wrote that a foundation of trust amplifies everything else a manager does to raise motivation. Better training, clearer goals, a good reason why. All of it gets multiplied by how much people believe you. When trust is low, you can do all three of those well and still get very little.

By the end of that course I had written a second paper, on managing diverse teams, and landed on the same word. The thing a manager most needs to build is trust.

Where trust actually comes from

Three years later my dissertation showed me what builds that trust in a school, and it was not charisma. Teachers talked about follow-through more than almost anything else. They wanted to know why a decision was made, they wanted to be asked before it was made, and they wanted to see that what they said changed something. Trust was built in small, visible loops. Somebody asked. Somebody listened. Something changed, and somebody said so.

That is also where most rollouts lose it. Every district I have worked with collects feedback after a launch. Surveys go out, notes get taken at the debrief, and then the run-rate work of the year takes over. Nobody has time to read 200 open comments, find the five things everyone is asking about, and write back to say what will change. So the loop never closes. Teachers notice. The next time someone stands at the front of the room and promises the new thing will help, the answer to that second question starts a little lower.

In that same course I asked my classmates how a manager could keep a feedback loop going without pulling everyone into another meeting. I didn’t have a good answer in 2023. I think there is one now. Reading every comment, sorting them into the handful of real themes, and drafting the note that says here is what you told us and here is what we changed is exactly the kind of work AI tools now do well. That doesn’t make anyone trustworthy. It just removes the excuse for never closing the loop, which is where trust was leaking out.

So here is what I would add to my 2023 paper. Trust is not a soft extra you hope for after the real work of a rollout is done. It is the multiplier on the real work. Can I do it, will it lead anywhere, do I care: every one of those answers gets weighed by whether people believe the person giving it. You build that belief the slow way, by closing loops, and you can now afford to close a lot more of them.

Next week: Leading Organizational Change, the course with my whole subject in its title.