TRUSTING YOUR CEO: A BOOK REVIEW

Your CEO treats you like dirt, downsizes and outsources the company. He gets a raise. You get laid off. Welcome to the American experience, now moving to other countries. Can you trust your CEO?

Cangemi et. al (2005) in Developing Trust in Organizations Boston: McGraw Hill  have created an exhaustive and comprehensive talk-walk book. Years in the making, the authors ask do you do the talk and the walk to developed trust and respect. The book is a compendium of the literature on formal organizations and the development of trust over the last two decades.

The most important feature to this reviewer if the exhaustive number of different kinds of authorities who have made a contribution. This includes CEO's, middle managers, academics, think tank observers, consultants, union officials, workers, minorities, and women. Further the business or contractual organization cover the gamut of goods and services along with educational and medical organizations like hospitals. Additionally, the continuum of experience includes international corporations, national business, local but sizable retail outlets and small businesses.

The bottom line is the bully top-down "X" management does not generate trust or respect. The workers are involved in rapid turn over, numerous call- ins for illness and other strategies to get back at management.

Various sources uses numerous paradigms to suggest that a new management can encourage trust and some can even recreate it if they have lost the bond. Whatever the strategy nearly every essay is written in plain readable language. There is little number crunching and multi-syllaballic pop management jargon.

As an example as the leader of an organization, do you lie? How's that for simplicity! Although the book could be read in a short period, don't do that. Let it settle in.The authors won't let you sit still if you run things from the top .Further, fairness and trust do not mean that you can allow workers to go slack or cheat. Trust and respect go both ways. If you allow workers to cheat others lose your respect.

Dynamic in conception and comprehensive in delivery this is a little book that grows much bigger as pages go by. Numerous strategies are illustrated, so you can take the material and apply it to your own personal experience. Or, you can contact the first author who consults in this field. All have the education and most have the practical experience with practical advice.

Prof. Joel Snell

Cangemi, Joseph,  Kolwalski, Casimir,  Miller, Richard & Hollopeter, Thomas (2005) Developing Trust in Organizations  Boston: McGraw Hill