Transform Leadership with Key Trust-Building Strategies
Unlock the power of trust to transform your leadership & enhance team performance. Discover key strategies to build trust & drive success today!
The following is an excerpt from our August 2024 issue of Hey Leader.
Hey Leader, crafted with thought & care by The Perk, is a monthly email series all with the intention to help you lead better. You belong here!
Hey, Leader —
First, let’s start off by congratulating ourselves for surviving all 365 days of January! 🎉🎉🎉
It felt like a long runway for 2024 to take off, right? But we made it! Now, it’s time to get down to business and do the work that’s going to truly transform your organization. 👏
What’s it going to take?
Trust.
Yep, just one little word is the key to transforming your leadership this year.
Trust comes before:
Performance
Productivity
Employee wellbeing
Engagement
Growth & scaling
A strong culture
Great leadership
Organizational success
When we say we want all the things on this list, what we’re really saying is that we want trust.
Don’t believe me? Research shows that a lack of trust affects your bottom line more than anything else. And it affects every area of your organization. The numbers don’t lie:
Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report:
74% less stress
106% more energy at work
50% higher productivity
76% more engagement
29% more satisfaction with their lives
40% less burnout
Yep, trust is absolutely the catalyst to a thriving culture & organizational success (& honestly, it just makes for a happy, connected team, & I really like working alongside people who really enjoy each other).
But trust isn’t something that just magically appears & remains until, one day, it mysteriously vanishes. Trust doesn’t happen by default. It happens by design. So, you have to be intentional about building trust on your team!
1. Connect:
Why It’s Important: We trust people we feel connected to.
What It Looks Like: Getting curious and asking powerful questions that help you get to know your team’s perspectives, values, goals, and aspirations. 1:1 meetings can help—they build trust faster than any other action!
2. Create safety:
Why It’s Important We trust people we feel emotionally & psychologically safe with.
What It Looks Like: Modeling safety by being vulnerable, and always assuming positive intent––that people are kind, fair & trying their best with the available information.
3. Commit:
Why It’s Important: We trust people when they do what they say they will do.
What It Looks Like: Doing the things you say you’ll do, not setting unrealistic expectations for yourself or demanding them from your team.
4. Be Clear:
Why It’s Important: We trust people we feel connected to.
What It Looks Like: Providing direct, clear feedback with kindness & respect
5. Celebrate:
Why It’s Important: We trust people who believe in us & our abilities, & want us to be successful.
What It Looks Like: Asking our team to create personal goals in addition to professional ones & show your support for all of them.
Trust can feel like a given, especially if you have a culture where people seemingly get along. But, you start to get into the danger zone when you stop trying to cultivate trust in your team proactively.
Remember, trust comes down to action. Behaviors build trust. Behaviors break trust. Trust is a set of learned behaviors.
Keep reading for more insightful information and resources to help you work on trust throughout the month! And if you want to really take a deep dive into trust, be sure to register for this month’s Culture Community on Thursday, February 22. I’ll be talking all about scaling trust (but no trust falls. I promise!).
Create a Trust Plan!
What happens when trust is broken? Inevitably, it will break at some point. Teams are made up of people & people are human.
It’s how you respond to broken trust that separates good culture from great culture.
Just like building trust, behaviors are what break trust. And most of the time, it’s unintentional. It’s rarely those big trigger moments that crush trust. Instead, it’s typically microaggressions, empty promises & careless disregard that erode trust over time.
Don’t want your team’s trust to erode? Of course not—nobody does! That’s why it’s so important to talk openly about trust with your team—knowing and communicating what behaviors build or break trust.
Then as a team, commit to behaviors that will build trust. For example, maybe you uncover that lack of commitment or follow-through is a total trust-breaker. You might decide to create a rule: when something won’t get done on time, you proactively communicate and have an alternate due date in mind. Then, talk about what you as a team will do when trust is broken. How will you handle it when someone doesn’t communicate the delay?
When you have a “Trust Plan,” everyone has a say in how trust is collectively built—and is accountable for what happens when it breaks.
What's The Perk saying?
We’ve curated this month’s resources to include a deeper dive with our founder, Leah, on all things related to building, strengthening & repairing trust-filled connections among your team.
5 min read
51 min listen
49 min watch
What's our community saying?
We live & breathe the latest news & insights on culture, organizational development, & leadership. This month’s resources focus on the daily behaviors & actions that leaders can do to build trust along the way..
3 min watch
Simon Sinek
5 min read
Harvard Business Review
15 min watch
Francis Frei, TED
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