At the beginning of Shang Yang's political reform, he found that Qin people never believed in government decrees, so he put a piece of wood outside the city gate and posted a notice. Whoever can move this piece of wood to another designated place will be rewarded, but the people don't believe that such a light contribution will be rewarded so much, so no one dares to stand up. It was not until a reckless man couldn't resist the temptation to move wood and accepted Shang Yang in full, that Qin believed that the government would let this happen.

This is a familiar history. Shang Yang knows the truth that people can't stand without faith, so building people's trust in the government before the reform has become one of the few successful examples in the history of China. Governing the country, the people must not be untrustworthy. Similarly, the management of enterprises, employees can not manage without trust. How to establish mutual trust within the enterprise is the biggest challenge that every manager faces.

The first principle of trust is that you can't manage trust, only the behavior of "trust value".

Trust is a psychological prejudice. When faced with an uncertain environment, one expects the other person to be kind, but he does not hesitate to put himself in danger of being cheated and still takes cooperative action. Therefore, cooperation without uncertainty is not a sign of trust. For example, a strict contract can be traded in a mountainous environment of law enforcement without trust. For example, a clear system and process, coupled with the incentive of heavy rewards and heavy penalties, will make employees' behavior conform to the company's expectations, but will not make employees trust the company. Trust theory also points out that power and trust are contradictory. Power can make people's behavior meet the requirements, and there is no danger of uncertainty at all, but power will not enhance trust, but will hurt it. Managers certainly want employees to trust other employees completely and unconditionally, just like the "stupid root" in the movie world without thieves, but this is impossible. Managers are also afraid that employees will be so stupid in the business battlefield outside the enterprise, so they will not recruit so many "stupid roots". Trust is like happiness in hawthorn mouth. "Happiness is a butterfly. When you chase it, it is always out of your reach, but if you sit down quietly, it may fall on you. " Similarly, trust cannot be forced. You can't ask others to trust you, you can only do it yourself, and you can't order employees to trust each other. You can only manage the trustworthy behavior of employees.

What is trustworthy behavior? Management scholar Mishira divides reliability into four dimensions, namely honesty and openness, ability and effectiveness, fairness and consistency, reciprocity and loyalty. To show trustworthiness, four behaviors are indispensable. Of course, people who are dishonest and full of secrets are not trustworthy, but if an honest person keeps doing things badly, we will appreciate his/her honesty, but we will not entrust things to him/her. Honest and capable people, if they are immature, do whatever they like and do whatever they don't want to do, which is not in conformity. We also don't trust such people who are lax in self-discipline and can do things. In China society, reciprocity and loyalty may be an exception. Sometimes, as long as you have this trait, you can gain the trust of the loyal object. Even if the ability and character are flawed, it will not reduce their trust. This special phenomenon in "human society" will be discussed later.

Another feature of trustworthiness is that trust takes a long time to cultivate, but it is very easy to destroy. As long as you show untrustworthy behavior once or twice, others will no longer trust, and rebuilding trust is more difficult than building trust in the first place. Therefore, trustworthy behavior should be persistent and always vigilant, in other words, it is necessary to form a habit to show such behavior, otherwise a lazy or negligent person may show his "nature" and give up all previous efforts.

In the second half of the 20th century, Welch, a great American business god, immediately set off a corporate culture change movement after he took over from General Electric (GE), the core of which was "innocence test". Welch asked employees to accept a questionnaire to check whether they love themselves. The required standard is not only legal, but also legal but immoral. He also asked employees to save themselves one day, pointing to his conscience and asking me if I was honest today. As you can imagine, employees perfunctory about this request, but Welch bravely took responsibility and seriously asked himself to thoroughly investigate the fraud cases that broke out in foreign companies, such as 1985 national defense contract "missile reentry system" working time card fraud case, Kidder Bank insider trading case, etc., and fully pleaded guilty and paid 100% compensation. In addition, he spends half a day every six months discussing the company's innocence and corporate ethics policies with senior executives, persevering and sticking to the end.

Welch wants to create an honest environment in the corporate culture, so that everyone can show honest behavior, and he personally takes responsibility and shows strong determination to demand results. He does not hesitate to adhere to the principle of innocence when formulating policies and handling fraud cases, and perseveres, and finally makes employees believe that the company is "playing for real". Why does Welch insist on the "innocence test" so much? Because he knows that the information age is coming, if he wants to connect workflow on the Internet, he must have open and transparent information. If employees don't trust the company, the information will not be made public, and the information on the Internet will not be trusted. He is more aware that the era of knowledge economy and service economy has come, and business process reengineering will re-integrate the process and be implemented by the team. Without employees who trust each other, there will be no excellent team with sincere cooperation. Therefore, Welch will launch corporate culture transformation before launching the world's first business reengineering project.

Welch's actions let us see the broad vision of building a century-old enterprise and the ambition of building an A+ excellent enterprise. When our society entered the information age from the industrial age and our economy changed from the manufacturing economy to the knowledge economy and service economy, did the managers in China get some inspiration from Welch's actions?