Again about Trust

Trust is part of any relationship where more than one individual involved. Trust is the base for motivation in team, for productive cooperation, and effective performance. Trust is a phenomenon that takes time to build and requires efforts to sustain. The parties involved in building of trust are investing time, efforts, resources, different tools, approaches to achieve a certain level of trust.

Trust “maintenance” is an endless process and it needs strategies. Accountability is a tool that is contributing in the trust building efforts and insuring the increase of the trust level.

The choice of strategy for accountability for each project can and should be different. In this week reading Ebrahim (2003) is mentioning 5 mechanisms: reports and disclosure statements, evaluation and performance assessments, industry self –regulations, participation and adaptive learning. This approaches caught my attention and while analyzing them I could see how the combination of each can help me to be accountable to all three actors and build the trust: donors, clients and to my organization. These tools will give flexibility to managers to choose the most suitable mechanisms for each project that would base on the strength of each project.

I think being accountable is not an additional thing that organizations should do, it is a part of the day to day work and a part of the organizational strategy.