How You Communicate Builds Trust

Effective communication begins with trust and a trusted leader and team leads to accelerated results, longer term retention, and employees feeling like what they do makes a positive difference. The challenge is trust is hard to understand in one-on-one work relationships and it seems to ebb and flow as you work with different people. The key is to be intentional about how you build, sustain, and assess trust within your team. Watch the video below to learn some practical tips in each of these phases and learn a few other ideas in the section below. Keep at it - trust is a foundational ingredient in strong team culture.?

Key Ways to Build Trust

Building trust is one of the most fundamental skills of great leadership, and it's a process that takes time. It's not something you can do overnight or even in a month or two. Trust is built by showing vulnerability, authenticity and integrity; giving your team members opportunities to learn from mistakes; being consistent in your approach; and being open with them about goals and challenges.

It's important not to rush this process because if you do, people will catch on--and they'll start viewing everything you say as just another sales pitch or marketing ploy rather than something they can count on as genuine advice from someone who cares about them personally (and professionally). But if you're ready to take on growing your personal brand of leadership and increasing your level of trust within your company, here are some ways to get started today:

Be vulnerable.

• Be open and honest about your own strengths and weaknesses.
• Share your own experiences, failures, and lessons learned.
• Let others know that you are human by being transparent about your flaws and mistakes.

Speak with authenticity and integrity.

• Speak with authenticity and integrity.
• Be yourself, not a version of yourself that you think the world wants or needs to see. You don't have to go around sharing every detail of your life with others, but if they sense that they can't trust what you say because it doesn't seem genuine, then they won't be able to trust you at all.

Be Consistent.

• Consistency is also an essential component of effective leadership; when people see that their expectations for how things should work out are met consistently over time, this builds confidence in both the organization and its leaders (including yourself). If there is anything about which someone needs clarification or resolution, make sure those questions are answered promptly so no one has reason not to trust what has been said thus far during this process.