A common statement made about trust is that you need vulnerability. Building trust requires team members to be vulnerable with one another. That means confess to mistakes, talk about their fears, share authentic personal stories and ask for help.
One of the most common complaints from employees about leadership is that leaders don't 'walk the talk.' It creates a lack of trust - spurring resistance to goals and negative employee interactions. Making it hard to generate cultural change longer term.
And while everyone likes to blame leaders for this perceived lack of integrity, aligning our intentions with our actions is difficult. Sometimes people misread our actions because they don't understand the context driving our behaviours. While other times, we are not aware that there is a disconnect.
Over the last few months, many leaders have quickly learnt to lead a remote team while working from home.
Over the last two articles, we have covered how to foster psychological safety and create meaning for your team to improve performance. In the final of this three-part series, we will now cover improving connection. If you want to learn more about this, check out my book TRUSTED to THRIVE: How leaders create connected and accountable teams that unpacks it all in more detail.
A few years ago, I remember reading a glowing interview with the CEO of a large Australian firm about the organisation’s sharemarket success and his new strategic plan. Everywhere you turned there was a business magazine promoting the words of the CEO and his ambitious Asian Pacific focused strategy, while he mocked other Australian companies for not following suit.
Over the years, I have worked with many low trust teams to improve their performance. Repeatedly, I still see well-meaning leaders inadvertently destroy trust in their teams.
Trust is the cornerstone of business. It’s the basis of every human relationship, every interaction, every communication, every initiative, every work project and even any strategic imperative you need to accomplish.
When it comes to helping companies build trust internally, one of the things I learnt pretty quickly is that if 1-2 members of the executive team do not support any initiatives to improve trust then all subsequent efforts will fail.