Building Trust With Your Team
Building trust is hard and easy. We all like to be trusted and work with people we trust. The simplest and easiest way to do this is by:
Keep the promises you make and do the stuff you said you would do without making excuses.
That’s it. It’s that simple, and yet it’s tough to do.
This translates to all roles.
Getting the opportunity to work on more significant projects requires earning trust by delivering successfully on smaller projects.
Getting the opportunity to lead bigger teams requires earning trust by leading smaller teams to success.
Getting the opportunity to step to the next level requires earning trust by successfully delivering at the current level.
It’s that simple. There is no magic bullet and bureaucracy that can short-circuit building trust.
On Making Excuses
The only thing worse than breaking trust or failing to keep your promise is to make an excuse for why you failed and blame it on someone else.
There will be failures on the way but don’t use failures as an excuse for why you couldn’t deliver.
If you fail to keep a promise, accept the failure, learn from it and make a plan for that to not happen again. This also builds trust.
Over time, we all learn what promises we can make and keep because we don’t want to lose trust. And once we get there, building trust becomes easy because we take full ownership of our failures, and all excuses go out the window.