Wayne is an accomplished and overburdened senior executive who hates dealing with his direct reports’ conflicts. He once told me that he’d rather have a spike driven into his eye than listen to them complain about each other. But leaders like Wayne often fail to realize that what appear to be interpersonal conflicts are often just the visible symptoms of deeper, more strategic problems. After all, people generally want to get along with each other. And most of us don’t go to bed plotting how to annoy our colleagues.
As the saying goes, ‘trust is earned by the penny, but spent by the dollar.’ In other words, while trust is constructed through countless transactions, it can be shattered with only one negative interaction. Even an inadvertent betrayal of trust can wipe out an entire account. While it is easy to understand why organizations require high levels of trust to operate effectively (imagine trying to delegate or collaborate without it!) it’s less clear how to re-establish trust when it has been violated.