The setting was a class of 38 seniors in the business school at Toledo University; they were scheduled to graduate in the spring, and many had jobs waiting for them. The challenge was to show them how essential integrity and trust would be in those new jobs.
Everyone knows what integrity and trust are, and everyone knows that they are important in managing a business. However, integrity and trust are elusive concepts; they’re hard to define, and even more difficult to teach.
Understanding trust starts with understanding what it feels like to trust someone. Every student has had that feeling, but operationalizing trust—incorporating a feeling into an organization’s everyday processes—is another story. Definitions, discussions, and assessments are good for tapping into the intellectual meaning of trust; however, they do not tap into the feeling, sensation, and intuition of trusting and being trusted.
Prisoner’s Dilemma
To start the conversation in this course, I like to use assessments, simulations, and games that have trust built into them. For example, I use the prisoner’s dilemma, in which two groups make decisions, the outcomes of which are dependent on the other group’s decisions. The game is an excellent way to highlight the notions of integrity, honesty, and trust. It poses two questions: How much do you trust others and how trustworthy are you? The game is structured such that paired groups almost never trust each other and seldom select a win-win strategy. Afterward, the discussions are lively, with accusations flying back and forth, and at times can even get hostile.
Competing Values Framework
Less confrontational is the Competing Values Framework. I use the competing values card game, which separates people into four categories of core work-related values—collaborate, create, compete, and control—that drive people at work. I give students a set of color-coded cards (yellow, green, blue, and red) and tell them to negotiate with others to acquire cards with phrases that best describe them in class. For example:
- yellow—build teams, resolve conflict, glue the place together
- green—envision the future, create new systems, do away with old ways
- red—comply with regulations, adhere to standards, make work routine
- blue—meet objectives, focus on performance, focus on ROI
Students who have the same color are assigned to the four corners of the room. The groups often have differing points of view, so the discussion is filled with divergent ideas about running a business. With each color group giving the others feedback, comments become very real, very fast. It quickly becomes clear that each set of values, while different, is important to business operations and requires some level of working together—some level of trust. The discussion highlights these important differences and how they can lead to conflict and affect trust. This exercise only begins to address how much you trust others and how trustworthy others find you.
Examining Trust Issues
After this initial exercise, students with differing values (colors) are assigned to permanent work teams. Each team has at least one student from each color group, leading to an underlying current of trust (or not) throughout the remainder of the 16-week term. Every exercise becomes a platform for examining trust issues and feelings that either get in the way or help the outcome of the exercise.
As the instructor, I continually point out the necessity of confronting trust issues in order to achieve goals, whether in simulations or real work settings. Trust issues are examined again and again after each exercise, including three textbook assessments, a consensus exercise on the moon landing, team case studies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jeff Bezos, and a five-page paper on a personal leadership development plan. All have an element of trust and integrity connected to them, and I ask students to highlight those issues.
I don’t know how well integrity and trust transfer into the students’ work after they leave the classroom and go out into the real world. What I do know is that they have discussed trust and integrity for 16 weeks. I never tire of talking about it, and I hope they never stop thinking about it.
Given the immense need for business integrity in the workplace today, what can instructors do? My suggestion is to adopt a teaching framework that includes integrity and trust in everything you present and discuss. That way, the concepts are there all the time. And as instructors, you can highlight them.
