How to Build Trust and Foster Psychological Safety within a Team

(c) Patrick Flesner, 2024.

The ability to build trust and foster psychological safety emerged as a key capability of effective leaders . In the last newsletter edition of "Leadership Shots," we explored why trust and psychological safety drive team performance.

Let's discuss how you can build trusting relationships with your team members and foster a culture of psychological safety.

HOW TO BUILD TRUST

In order to cultivate trusting relationships and foster a culture of psychological safety, I have devised a systematic framework for leaders - 'The RESPECT Framework for Building Trust'. This comprehensive framework is founded on seven key factors and behaviors that I have identified as instrumental in both establishing and sustaining trust. Each letter in RESPECT represents a specific factor or behavior that contributes to this crucial endeavor. You can find an infographic of this framework here .

Let's explore the factors and behaviors behind all letters in RESPECT.

THE RESPECT FRAMEWORK FOR BUILDING TRUST

RELATIONSHIP

R stands for relationship—the creation of trusting, reciprocal relationships between a leader and his or her team members. If you’re asking yourself why, just think about the people you trust in your life. Have you ever trusted someone you didn’t know? Probably not. You may be the kind of person who, by default, wants to trust people. And this is definitely not a bad attitude to have. But this kind of trust is rather a “the benefit of the doubt” kind. You cannot actually know whether the other person is trustworthy or not. Only when you genuinely know someone can you assess if that person is trustworthy. It is therefore a genuine relationship that you must build with your team members. You build genuine relationships by getting to know your team members, understanding their values and beliefs, understanding what motivates them professionally and personally, and being authentic with them. This creates a sense of familiarity and closeness that is crucial in building trust. And as a leader, it is your responsibility to initiate and cultivate these relationships. This requires you to prioritize your team members and make an effort to connect with them on a personal level as often as possible. Being emotionally intelligent will help you in this regard.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Emotional intelligence has two major components:

First, emotional intelligence includes empathy. Empathy is defined as the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. If you are empathetic, you try to emotionally understand what your team members feel. You try to look at topics from their perspectives. You envision understanding their points of view by imagining yourself in their shoes. If you are empathetic, you put your ego aside and fully concentrate on your team members’ thoughts and feelings. I have recently published an Inc. Magazine article about this topic. This article is titled, "5 Ways to Practice Distanced Empathy--a Cornerstone of Effective Leadership - Leading effectively with both heart and mind. " You can find and download the article here .

Second, being emotionally intelligent means that you must also translate your deep understanding of your counterpart into actions. If you know what motivates your team members, you use this knowledge exactly for this—to motivate them in a way that truly encourages the right action. If you understand your team members’ pains and struggles, you can maximize your leadership impact by enabling them and helping them solve their pains.

SKILLS

People don’t automatically trust you just because you have outstanding knowledge, expertise, and professional competence. But the skills you may or may not have play an important role in this regard. If you’ve ever had a boss who didn’t have a solid or at a least a basic understanding of what you were supposed to do, you understand what I’m referring to. It is very difficult to trust someone and their judgment if you don’t have any trust in their skills. The skills you need to have or develop are subject matter skills and leadership skills. As to the subject matter, you must not be the expert. Rather, you hire these experts to build a strong team. But you should have an understanding of the subject matter so that you can ask good questions, questions that guide your experts and team members. In other words, you should assemble team members that are better than you and, at the same time, you should have a basic understanding of their areas of expertise.

The second skill relevant for creating trust is your leadership skills. If you demonstrate strong leadership skills and lead your teams successfully and with ease, your team members will more likely trust your judgments than if you demonstrate poor leadership skills. I argue that the better your leadership skills are, the less relevant your subject matter expertise must be.?As you read these lines, you are already working on developing your leadership skills, which is great.

PROFESSIONALISM

To generate trust, you must build an authentic relationship with your team members. Your emotional intelligence and your skillset help you in this regard. There is, however, one challenge in this context. Many leaders confuse building an authentic relationship with making friends. Building an authentic relationship and being empathetic are not about making friends. While all humans share a natural desire for making friends and being liked, these things should not be your goal. They may be an added advantage of you being a strong leader and leading based on trust and with emotional intelligence, but never your goal.? You can strike the right balance between being liked and keeping enough distance by always focusing on being professional. If you act professionally at all times, this becomes a strong personality trait of yours.

As a leader, you will encounter a plentitude of opportunities to choose between acting professionally or unprofessionally. Just ask yourself, "Will this be right or wrong?" and you will get close to knowing what is right and professional. I trust you will make the right decisions (and this newsletter can help you with that).?For further information on this topic, you may also read my Inc. Magazine article "7 Professionality Traits of Highly Effective Leaders - Take them to your heart and become a highly professional and effective leader yourself. " You can download the article here .

EMPOWERMENT

The “command & control” times—in which you could lead using your title, position, and power—are over. If you lead?your teams by giving orders and controlling whether they follow through, you will either not attract strong talent, or you will experience high employee turnover in your leadership team and the whole organization. In order to lead effectively, you need to lift your team members to new heights. You must trust in them and enable them to do their jobs. You must empower them.?

With regard to empowerment, I said the following in my TEDx talk : "The little detail that makes empowerment so powerful is not that we provide our team members with the tools and resources they need. The little powerful detail is that we enable them to make important decisions themselves. Allowing our team members to make important decisions themselves may make us feel as if we were losing control, but, in fact, empowerment is not about losing control. Empowerment is about motivating and giving control… giving control to those who are best equipped to handle it… to our strong teams."

CONSISTENCY

Various studies show that team members rate their leader high in terms of trust if that leader is consistent, walks the talk, honors commitments, and keeps their word. Breaking even the smallest promises can seriously harm a leader’s reputation as a trusting leader.

Famous leadership consultant and author Simon Sinek compared leadership in this interview with falling in love and going to the gym:“It is not that your wife loves you because you brought her flowers once. It is not that your husband loves you because you were attentive one day. It is almost impossible to state the day love happened. The same is true for working out. You do not get in shape because you work out once. You do not see progress after having gone to the gym once again. But you can see the progress over time. All that is required is consistent behavior. Over time, you will see results.”?

I agree that this is true also for trust and leadership. If you want to be trusted, you must be consistent day in and day out. There is no exact point in time when your team members decide to trust you. But gradually being consistent will change something in them. And at that point, your team members will stop following you simply because of your role, position, or title. They will start following you because they trust you and want to follow you. Suddenly, you become a trustworthy leader, but no one can tell you exactly when that transition will happen.

TRANSPARENCY

Transparency helps team members understand why a leader has certain expectations, what the team members can do about it, and how the team can meet the leader’s expectations.?If leaders are not transparent with regard to matters the team members can reasonably expect the leader to be transparent about, this can demoralize the whole team. They ask themselves questions like, “Why is she not sharing this information?”, “If he isn’t being transparent in this regard, what does he have to hide?”, “If she isn’t transparent, why should I be?”, or “Why isn’t he transparent with me? Doesn’t he trust me?”

In order to be transparent, you communicate the reasoning behind business decisions and measures taken. You embrace effective communication and involve the team in major developments. You share organizational objectives. You help team members understand what they can contribute and why you have certain expectations. I will shortly publish an article about this topic together with famous leadership expert and host of the "Leaders of Transformation Podcast ", Nicole Jansen . Stay tuned and click the bell on my profile to get notified about the respective post.

A Balanced Combination of all Elements Matters

Each element of the RESPECT framework may be more or less important in specific situations. And every leader may be stronger or weaker when it comes to the RESPECT elements. This is natural, and it is also ok. It is a balanced combination of all the RESPECT elements that fosters trust and effective leadership.?

Can Workplaces Have Too Much Psychological Safety?

Let me conclude by sharing a link to an intriguing article I recently read in the Harvard Business Review . Authored by Peter Cappelli and Liat Eldor , the article emphasizes that psychological safety is not a binary outcome, but rather a matter of degrees. Surprisingly, the authors discovered that as psychological safety in the workplace increases from average to high levels, performance - at least in routine jobs - can actually decline.

This discovery is absolutely captivating, and I strongly urge you to read the article. The authors have also addressed a potential resolution to this issue of decline. According to them, "...collective accountability can serve as a safeguard against the dangers from very high levels of psychological safety...". I wholeheartedly concur with their perspective.

As we have identified in a previous newsletter edition that highly effective leaders have the capability of creating high levels of collective accountability, and since subscribing to this newsletter will help you become such a highly effective leader, you are on track. Accountability is what we will focus on in the next edition of this Leadership Shots newsletter. I will also explain the notion of "collective accountability".

APPLYING THE FRAMEWORK

I hope that you will apply my "RESPECT Framework for Building Trust" this week and become a more effective leader by building trusting relationships with your team members and encouraging them to do the same among each other. Consider printing out the infographic and sharing it with your team and network - it may prove beneficial.

If you find value in 'Leadership Shots,' please subscribe and share it with your network. Thanks!

Here's to taking another leadership shot.

Patrick Flesner

ABOUT PATRICK FLESNER

Dr. Patrick Flesner is a leadership and executive coach, a former professional handball player in the 1st German League, a recognized bestselling author, a TEDx and Keynote Speaker, and a renowned expert in the field of leadership. His diverse background, which includes experiences in top-level sports, roles as a partner in prestigious German law firms, a leadership position in a publicly traded company, and as a partner in a venture capital fund, has endowed him with a comprehensive and multifaceted perspective on leadership. If you are interested in leadership coaching or engaging Patrick as a keynote speaker, please connect and send a message. You can also find more information here .

THE LEADERSHIP HOUSE

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