Trust in Leadership

I’ve got a long journey home today after a mad dash to Glasgow to get my daughters passport sorted prior to a trip to Sweden. I’ve been enjoying some time to just be – this has been most welcome. After an hour or so of blissful nothingness taking in some beautiful scenery as Scotland meets the North of England I started to listen to an old Joe Rogan podcast where Joe talks to Simon Sinek.

In the podcast Simon talks about the importance of trust in creating a positive work environment. Simon communicates that leaders that prioritise the well being of their teams and strive to create a culture of trust often get better results and build sustainable success for the organisations they represent.

This is certainly something I subscribe to and would credit the bulk of my success on establishing trust with my teams. This approach based on caring about my people, has then manifested into great results and successful teams.

I would say that mutual trust between the leader and team equates to great results but the questions to ask are why is trust such a driver towards winning culture and how can leaders create trust in the workplace?

I believe that trust is essential for successful relationships and in this case a fundamental factor between a leader and team. For leadership trust in the leader is an endorsement on capability, reliability, honesty and above all else an understanding that the leader has the best intentions for the team.

Trust builds and develops relationships, increases productivity, harnesses motivation and discipline towards goals and positive habits. Trust opens the door for great communication fostering environments where people can make mistakes, learn, grow, develop, improve and achieve bigger things. Trust creates loyalty and, in my experience, brings a team closer to a brand – this is a key way to retain top talent.

"Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people." - Stephen Covey

A lack of trust can do the opposite draining productivity, losing great people, increasing conflict and creating a terrible environment for people to work in – the list of negatives is endless.

Building trust can be complex however the methods are very straightforward and are mostly an extension of decent values with ‘treat others how you would like to be treated’ serving as a bit of a blueprint.

My first foundation of trust is to chuck out the view of ‘you have to earn my trust’, I’ve seen this a lot and the result is never good. If you start with a guard up immediately I believe that you are limiting potential and just slowing down progress.

??"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." - Ernest Hemingway

Why not start at 100% trust, encouraging your team to interact with you and share experience. This is where collaboration can create success.

My second foundation is consistency. Be consistent in both actions and communication and let your people know where they stand, there is nothing worse than the anxiety of wondering what the boss will do or how communication my change in times of stress etc. so be consistent.

The third fundamental is listening, listening to the good the bad and the ugly will help you build quality relationships, people have to feel a part of the journey and you must involve them to build consistent success.

Next come Autonomy, support your team members to thrive and give them opportunity to contribute at the highest level. I’m lucky to work in an organisation where the CEO values interaction at all levels but its important to me to encourage my team to have engagement at this level.

I could go on and list many elements but the last foundation or fundamental I will highlight is accountability. You must take responsibility for the decisions that you make both good and bad. You should also take responsibility for the results of your team. I have seen many great leaders miss this and get into the blame game. ‘It’s the market’, ‘It’s another department’, ‘My team let me down’. In my opinion you must share the success with your team and highlight and elevate where possible but be the most accountable person for misses.

There are more Empathy, support, transparency, recognition the list goes on.

Trust between the leader and teams isn’t the only factor for success and great culture but it’s a great place to start.?

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#leadership #trust #people