How to Build Trust in Leadership – Seven Ways To Strengthen the Cornerstone

Learning how to build trust in leadership should be at the top of your agenda, especially if you’re ambitious for growth. If your people are your building blocks, then trust is your cornerstone.

But the reality is sobering: only 29% of employees think their leader demonstrates genuine human leadership, while over a third cite their boss as being the source of workplace stress.

We know that good leadership leads to greater creativity, employee engagement, natural innovation and strong decision-making. You attract and keep your A-team, who do their best work because they can see what you’re trying to achieve together.

With this in mind, we’ve put together 7 actionable ways to build trust in leadership from our podcast conversations with Urs Koenig. An international speaker, author, and peacekeeping commander, he shared his experiences across two Sparks by Ignium episodes, and this is what we loved most about what he had to say.

(Access episode one here and episode two here – or search for Sparks by Ignium on your favourite podcast player.)

Seven ways to build trust in leadership

1. Listen at the highest personal level possible. Do this not to respond with your own agenda or tell the other person what to do but with an open mind. It’s the kind of listening which picks up on the wider context of the conversation, what’s going on behind them and what’s not being said.

2. Create psychological safety. Don’t allow this term’s common use to water down its importance. ‘All the research shows psychological safety is the best predictor of a team’s performance, over team size, tenure and talent.’ Urs says. Encourage speaking up, reframe failure and own fallibility by creating golden rules everyone understands and lives by.

3. Leverage vulnerability. ‘Vulnerability is the quickest way to build trust,’ Urs says ‘we all admire perfection from a distance but nobody can relate to it.’ It’s not just about sharing, it’s about modelling awareness and strategic modes of improvement along with dispelling unrealistic beliefs about ourselves and others.

4. Reframe failure. Briefly touched on above, it deserves its own highlight. Mistakes happen all the time but when they’re caught by the collective we’ve a greater opportunity to mitigate their effects, learn for the future and pull together as a team.

5. The time to get to know everyone is now, not during a crisis. Make the time to build solid relationships now – find out about what makes people tick and what drives them. What do they hope to achieve in their role? ‘Not just with the intention to be nice or liked: it’s a proactive way of building trust, driving engagement and embedding commitment that runs both ways.

6. Lead with humility. Our blind spots are just that – the things we cannot see. We’re all a work in progress and there may be things everyone else knows about us that we’re blissfully unaware of. Proactively encourage feedback on what you’re doing well and what you can do better. For the best team performance, surround yourself with people potentially smarter than you, able to take care of your weaknesses and complement your strengths.?

7. Remember it’s not a popularity contest. You may welcome feedback, for example, but you get to decide what to work on.

Together, we learn how to build trust in leadership by being genuine, proactive and, as Urs puts it, ‘Tender on people, tough on results.’ It’s not about dropping standards or allowing vulnerability to take the place of competence but by intentionally moving from a me to a we mindset we’re able to build trust in leadership in a powerful way.

Would you like a little hands-on practical help in growing your business? We’re delivering our session on the 7 Keys to Successfully Growing on Purpose on the 13th of November at 2 pm.

This live event is online so you can join from anywhere.

Reserve your place now.

For further reading, check out Urs’ book: Radical Humility: be a badass leader and a good human.