Professional Resource Center

Organizational Trust Index™ (OTI™)

Trust is the foundation of all human interactions, and the cornerstone upon which high-performing organizations are built. For more than four decades experts like W. Edwards Deming and Abraham Maslow have warned against the debilitating effect that fear can have on an organization’s performance. The Organizational Trust Index™ (OTI™) measures the degree to which your organization is either motivated by trust or driven by fear. It also measures what fear may be costing you in terms of rework, poor or inconsistent quality, work-arounds, and downtime because people are afraid to admit mistakes or share their best ideas about improving operations. The degree to which your managers and staff members either trust your organization’s structures, systems, and culture (or fear them) is a tangible indicator of how difficult it is to make sustainable change in how you structure, organize, and use your human, material, and financial resources to create value for customers. It will also help you more effectively manage the change and transition associated with organizational transformation.

Researchers from Abraham Maslow to W. Edwards Deming have described the subtle, but profound, effects that fear can have on establishing or maintaining a high-performing organizational culture. Deming argues that fear makes people afraid to share their best ideas; expand their capabilities and skills; admit mistakes; suggest process improvements; question the underlying purpose and reasoning of decisions or procedures; or even to act in the best interest of the company. Managers and staff members fear: a) being the object of real or perceived retribution, b) being passed over for promotion, c) receiving lower performance ratings, d) looking uninformed or like a trouble-maker, e) being assigned to “grunt” work, rather than the more visible projects, and f) being seen as not having sufficient intellectual horsepower to advance beyond one’s current position. Fear ultimately leads to padded figures, distorted measures of performance, and the tendency to sanitize, spin, and reinterpret what’s really going on in an organization as information moves up through organizational levels to top management.

The Organizational Trust Index™ (OTI™) helps managers identify the extent to which their organization is either motivated by trust, or driven by fear. The OTI™ identifies tangible issues within an organization’s structures, systems, and culture that have the cumulative effect of either building organizational trust, or creating organizational fear. The OTI™ also quantifies what a lack of organizational trust may be costing you in squandered time and energy – hidden costs that don’t appear in traditional financial accounting systems. The OTI™ is an on-line assessment that can be completed by managers and staff members in 3-4 minutes and administered in organizations of up to 5,000 people.

Business Applications – The OTI™ can be used with an entire organization or in work-groups and functional units in the following situations.

• Organizational Transformation – The OTI™ helps leaders and managers more effectively manage both the change and transition elements of organizational transformation.
• Changes in Management – The OTI™ gives new managers the operational and cultural information needed to get “up to speed” quickly.
• Mergers and Acquisitions – When two companies are merged, or when one company purchases another, the OTI™ helps quantify the level of organizational trust in both entities, thus facilitating the integration process.
• Organizational Alignment – The OTI™ helps quantify destructive conflict between work-groups headed by “Border Guards” who: a) have conflicting or competing interests and ways of working, b) create sub-cultures that are misaligned with (or in opposition to) each other and the organization’s overall direction, and c) seal-off their work-group from effective interaction with the overall organization.
• Business Process Improvement – The OTI™ helps quantify the degree to which managers and staff members are afraid to suggest process improvements, admit mistakes, and share their best ideas about improving operations in areas like rework, poor or inconsistent quality and service, work-arounds, timeliness, downtime, and ineffective processes.
• 360 Degree Reviews – The OTI™ is used by managers and supervisors as a more effective alternative to traditional 360 degree reviews because it provides feedback within the context of the organization’s structures and systems.
• Organizational Climate – The OTI™ helps quantify the degree to which managers and staff members are afraid to openly discuss (and try to resolve) interpersonal issues that frustrate and undermine organizational and individual performance in areas like interpersonal conflict, poor or ineffective communication, and power struggles between managers and coworkers.

For more information on aligning your organization to get the results you want and build a culture of organizational trust, contact the Breckenridge Institute® today at info@breckenridgeinstitute.com or 1-800-303-2554 to schedule a free consultation about how you can best use the Organizational Trust Index™ to improve your organization’s performance and to more effectively manage the change and transition elements of organizational transformation.

Personality in Context^®