Bob Lee’s expertise lies in how and why the world’s best employers use great workplace cultures to drive competitive advantage. Utilising his knowledge and harnessing it as a facilitator for HPC adds great strength and impact to our client relationships. In light of this accolade, we wanted to focus on the work that has helped Bob achieve this recognition.
At the heart of Bob’s knowledge lies the subject of trust; a complex area that is easy to get wrong and sometimes very hard to get right. To many it is a behaviour, a belief, a feeling or an attitude, but for people who know more that most, it represents a complex neural process that binds relationships together.
This year marks the 9th annual ‘Trust Across America Top Thought Leaders in Trust’ to celebrate those whose work helps foster organisational trust, a key driver of long-term success. The honour has been extended to global professionals from a broad functional base including integrity and trust, leadership, culture, employee engagement, sales and customer service.
Prior to joining HPC, Bob founded the Great Place to Work Institute in UK and Ireland and held senior leadership positions with the Institute from 2002 to 2017, including four years as chair of its Worldwide Advisory Board. He continues to support global multinational clients in his role as a senior consultant with Great Place to Work USA.
“I am a business performance specialist. I show clients how the world’s best companies use workplace culture to achieve their market-leading business results, and I help them to do the same”, says Bob.
“My work with some of the world’s best-run businesses led me to a simple question: why and how do some managers build high-achieving teams of highly-engaged individuals, while so many others struggle to inspire their people to achieve even average performance and results?”
His analysis of the Great Place to Work Institute’s database of two million employees in 80 countries revealed a surprisingly simple truth: the best managers do the same things as all other managers – but they do them more thoughtfully, more sincerely, and more consistently than everyone else.
His quest to understand what separates great managers from the rest and what one factor dictates great team results points quite simply towards: how much the manager and their employees trust each other.
He is the author of Amazon #1 Best-seller ‘Trust Rules: How the World’s Best Managers Create Great Places to Work’, based on this extensive research and published in May 2017. It is a manager’s guide to the actions and attitudes that have the greatest impact on trust in workplace relationships and through that, on organisational performance.
“Culture drives performance, and managers drive culture. So, the key to creating a high-performance culture is to create high-trust relationships, particularly between managers and their teams. Building high-trust is mostly about getting the basics right – keeping promises, really listening, living with integrity.
It’s not complicated – most of us have been doing it effortlessly since birth…my role is to help people unleash that natural expertise”, he says.
The message of Trust Rules is both simple and inspiring. Simple, because small margins drive big results – the world’s best companies achieve their superior results because of only minor differences in how they manage their people. And inspiring because the rules show that every manager can be a great manager if they just choose the right attitude and consistently back it up with the right behaviour.
So, trust is a big deal to Bob. He has experienced it, encouraged it and helps it evolve through the work he delivers for clients. The recognition from ‘Trust Across America’ is testament to this work when they openly say that;
“Each year for the past nine years, hundreds of hours are spent reviewing potential honourees, and compiling a list of global professionals who ‘walk their talk.’”
A well-deserved achievement for Bob whose work in this area is inspirational in outlook and practical in approach.