Executives: Untaint yourself and really talk with your employees

Trust in corporate leaders is at an all time low. The legacy of the Madoff scandal, the bank failures and the Big Three auto CEOs stumbling over themselves begging for money, as well as this administrations bull's eye on executive off-site meetings, have caused the masses to be convinced corporate leadership is tainted and the enemy.
Those of us who are either in those executive positions or serve those executives knows the vast majority of business owners, CEOs and presidents are great people who truly are good leaders and can be totally trusted.

As a business leader how do you prevent being painted with the broad brush of cynicism? Transparency.

1. Regularly call a full staff meetings or if you organization is too large for that; create a video for them to watch on your website. In this meeting or video come clean with all information; the positive and the not so great. Make sure your presentation is low on BS spin control, (that is what created the distrust in the first place) and high on genuine content and commitment.

2. Focus your information on how you are working to grow the company and how you are creating the plans to make it happen. Sure things change and executives are used to plenty of wiggle room but not is the time for executives to be spot on with their actions because there isn't time nor room for too many wiggle mistakes. Step up and take the pressure -- that is how you should operate at your best anyhow.

3. Conclude the information session be answering employee questions. Give your employees the opportunity to submit questions to you. Sure you get to pick and choose and you can avoid the lunatic ones, such as, "Tell me why you can't give every employee bailout packages so we can be happy?" But don't avoid the hard questions. If you only answer the softball questions you will only fuel the cynicism. Take the tough questions and give tough answers. By doing this as frequently as you see necessary (minimum once a month) you build your credibility in the workforce, you continue the growth culture and you prove that you are not one of the bad guys.

Sure, this will take some time, but your consistency of honesty and sincerity along with important information will keep your employees listening, and if they are listening, they are giving you the benefit of the doubt. In these critical economic times you want to be able to be heard and trusted. This will be a great step in making that happen.