The Conditions for Trusting Your Team

Last Friday I presented a webinar on the role of trust in leading teams (see link below), where I focused on the idea that “The Goal of Leadership is to create the conditions where you can trust the team to function at a high-level when you aren’t there.” So the question is what are those conditions?

Understanding Your Role: The first condition is that you, as a leader, truly understand that you are not just accountable for your team’s performance, you are also accountable for their training, engagement and growth. Without accepting these responsibilities, leaders often find themselves frustrated with their team for “not knowing how to do their job.” The remedy is to stop pointing fingers at them as the problem and focus on you as the solution.

Accepting Reality: There is probably no bigger roadblock to our success and our teams’ success than our unwillingness to accept the way things are. If you want your team to perform better, telling them they “should” be better will not improve the situation. And yet, this seems to be the “go to” approach for many leaders, in my experience. Instead, you have to accept reality and analyze it - find the gaps and address them through coaching, training, and reinforcing.

Being for Them, Not Against Them: The easy thing to do is blame the team for not being good enough. The harder path is to always be “in it” to serve them. It’s a mindset shift from “I command you to make me successful” to “I am here to help you be successful.” Their success is aligned with yours and the organization’s either way, so there is no harm in this mindset shift – but there is a huge upside if you can help them see that there’s something in it for them beyond a paycheck.

Eliminating Confusion & Chaos: So much of what goes wrong out in the world of work boils down to “chaos masked as urgency and importance.” Without processes and a continuous critical assessment of “what did not work” or “where could we do better,” chaos always seems to take over. Everything ends up being last minute firefighting. The team ends up producing subpar work because they never have enough time. You can’t delegate fixing the problem to a team that is busy fighting a fire - they are too overwhelmed and burnt out to come up with a solution. Your instinct, to jump in and help, is noble, but it never works – you have to resist the urge to jump in and focus instead on how to address the process gaps that are causing the chaos.

Giving Them the Tools for Success: If the team isn’t performing at the required level, the question you should be asking yourself is “why?” Where are the gaps - in process, in training, in understanding - that are causing the outage. Then it is your job to fix those problems systematically, even if the team resists . The team, by the way, always believes they don’t have enough people. Occasionally, that is the problem. Generally, though, there are root causes that need to be fixed first. Adding people without addressing process, training, and understanding gaps, is as likely to make the problem worse as it is to help - more people equals more chaos if you don’t fix the problems first.

Creating Space for Learning: If the goal is getting the team to the point where you can trust them even when you’re not there, but they aren’t ready yet, then they’re going to need to learn. Which means, they’re going to make mistakes. So you need to create situations where they have the opportunity to make those mistakes and learn from them. This might mean building extra time into a timeline. It definitely means carving out time to coach them, in one-on-one meetings for a start, on how you think about the problems they face. They will become increasingly independent and free up your time if you help them. If not, you will always get pulled into chaos and crisis.

Allowing Them to Grow: This might be the hardest part. Once they have demonstrated mastery whether on part or all of their role, let them do whatever it is they can on their own. Focus your efforts on helping them learn to do what they can’t do independently. In other words, get out of their way as soon as possible. And, with each task they master, give them the opportunity to grow into new tasks. Don’t ask “If they are independent, then what do I do?” ask “What is it that I wasn’t able to do that I now have time for?” They level up. You level up.

All of this, though, has to start with you, the leader. You have to get out of the mindset that your job is to “get others to do work” and into the mindset that your job is to “create the conditions where you trust them to get the work done.”

Follow me here on LinkedIn to connect and get more news, posts, and articles. Learn more about my book here at JeffSigel.com or on Amazon (The Middle Matters: A Toolkit for Middle Managers) Or reach out to me at [email protected] if you’re interested in training for your middle leaders or coaching for yourself. Cross-posted on my blog.