The second element in our Trellis for human organizations is trustworthy. It’s unfortunately not a word we associate with organizations too frequently. Over the years, I think we’ve given up. We expect organizations to spin us, to withhold information, to be fake–whatever it takes to get a sale. This is really too bad, because trust has enormous power in organizations. It helps you get things done more easily and more quickly. So how do you become trustworthy?

For culture, trustworthy is about transparency. I actually talk about that in a video shot at the American Society of Association Executives. It’s only three minutes. Check it out.

At the level of process and structure, trustworthy organizations are all about supporting more truth. I’ve been writing about truth for a few years now, and if  you want more truth, then you need to pay attention to process. Pay attention to how your processes enable healthy conflict. Build in structures that give voice to people who would not speak up and actually work to allow people outside your system to speak their truth to you.

At the behavior level, trustworthy organizations have people that can handle authenticity. It’s about knowing yourself (and really knowing your organization). It’s about knowing yourself and even trying to understand your destiny. Yes. Destiny. (Marcus Buckingham from Gallup suggested this a decade ago, by the way, so it’s not like we’re really “out there” with this one!) Organizations can become trustworthy a lot faster when they have truly authentic human beings working there.

All the details, of course, are in the book. Tomorrow: we’ll talk about being generative.