Guest Post from Suzi McAlpine of The Leader's Digest, an award-winning leadership blog.
Building trust is now one of the major concerns keeping CEOs awake at night. That’s according to the recently released World Economic Forum 20th annual CEO survey.
“As we become more interconnected and interdependent, concern about a business trust gap has grown: 58% of CEOs worry that lack of trust in business could harm their company’s growth, up significantly from 37% in 2013.”
CEO’s are worrying, and with good reason. If you don’t have trust – with your team, your customers and other stakeholders – you’re in for a very bumpy ride.
Despite this ‘burning platform’ around the power of trust, I’m often surprised at how many leaders are coming unstuck when it comes to building trust – especially with the team they lead.
Here are five ways you could be BREAKING TRUST with your team as quickly as you can say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” These pointers will allow you to recognise these faults in yourself, and hopefully help you remedy them.
One of the quickest ways you’ll erode trust is to NOT model what you expect from your team. If you stridently pronounce that everyone’s got to be on time - and then always turn up late to meetings yourself, your people will doubt your sincerity (as well as think you’re a bit of a plonker). Ditto with more important things like ethics and company values. If the thought of anything you’ve said or done being made public makes you squirmy, then take the hint and shift your behaviour in the right direction. The best leaders don’t expect anything from their own team that they’re not willing to do themselves.
What is one specific way you can model what you want within your team, starting today?
‘Transparency is the new black’. Some things need to remain confidential of course, but always be as transparent and upfront as you can. This transparency applies to information, your intent, performance and the challenges facing the team. Things can change in a nanosecond, so let your team know as much as you can, as soon as you can.
What information are you not currently sharing with your team which you can be more transparent about? (It’s always smart to check what’s confidential first, so share your ideas with your boss first)
This behaviour not only erodes trust, it builds apathy and a lack of confidence in your team. Be careful about what you promise – people have memories like elephants when it comes to what you say you’ll do, especially in times of strife or change. If you don’t know, say so. If you’re not sure, fess up. As with customers, you’re better to under promise and over deliver than go back on your word.
Where are you currently delivering on your promises to your direct reports? Where are you delivering on your promises to your direct manager or peers? Where might you be overpromising? Take a nonjudgmental but honest look at your own practice around delivering on your promises in your work environment.
Want a surefire way to botch people’s trust in yourself? See any of your team member’s vulnerabilities or weaknesses as career ending. As Patrick Lencioni says in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, “trust is all about vulnerability.” Research shows us that expressing vulnerability in an appropriate manner is an important leadership component when it comes to connecting with others at a basic human level. Leaders who show a bit of vulnerability can build trust with their teams far more quickly than those who don’t.
Often the best and most useful areas that a leader can show vulnerability are if they are in the context of lessons learnt. Where have you struggled before in the areas that your current team members are also struggling? What did you learn? What were your insights? Where have you made mistakes in your career and what did they teach you? What are your current weaknesses that you are working on? Can you share some of these with your team members?
A charge in and task mode approach towards ‘doing the work’ will guarantee poor results. Instead a ‘how we are going to work together’ attitude will ensure success. Building a high-performing team means making group dynamics and team creation a priority. People have questions that need to be answered before they can turn their attention to the work at hand. Questions such as:
How would you rate yourself currently on the balance of building trust and focusing on the task at hand? What steps could you take to ensure that these questions are sufficiently answered for all the members of your team?
Think this blog has some useful tips for building trust within your team? Then check out The Leader’s Map, an online accelerator programme for emerging leaders. In it you’ll find many more video lessons, exercises, resources and tools to build trust and a high performing team.
I recently read a book called The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age. ( Available on Amazon HERE )
It raises the question over the type of relationships managers need to have with future generations of employees and suggests we form a new type of relationship called an alliance.
It talks of the notion of moving away from treating the people inside the organisation as a “family” but to one of an alliance, like allies on a Tour of Duty
Companies are not inherently a 'family'. The network structure and emotional relationship on which families are based are different. Yet, at the same time, companies can't innovate if everyone acts like a free agent.
This rang true to me as it related to a couple of scenario’s you may have witnessed as HR professionals or Managers.
Scenario 1
You work long and hard on a recruitment and selection process – you place an amazing candidate in the role and see them flourish over the next year. Then bam just before the two year mark they leave and go and work for your competitor on double the pay.
It’s not until the exit interview you realise that they were bored and ready for the next move.
Scenario 2
You have been in the job for over 10 years, your immediate boss moves on and you know the role is yours.
You go through the selection process to be overlooked for someone younger, less experienced and disliked by the whole of the wider team.
These examples outline communication breakdowns and incorrect assumptions.
A business without communication, trust and loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. And a business that isn't investing in tomorrow is a company already in the process of dying.
Which brings us back to thinking of relationships with your staff as alliances.
The rules for recruiting, managing and retaining amazing people have changed, because the world has changed.
Employers and employees need to develop a relationship based on how they add value to each other. If you like a shared destiny relationship where both partners have different investment in the outcome. Employees invest in the company's success, the company invests in the employees' market value. The result is a mutually beneficial alliance where the partners enter the relationship knowing full well the outcomes they want are different.
The underlying message is that if either party in the relationship get lazy and the outcome is not achieved there will be a parting of the ways.
In our view employers are often more guilty of this than their employees. If the investment is not made by providing good feedback and doing the little things to keep people energised in their job, engaged and feeling they are adding value to their careers they will leave. Employers taking their good people for granted should not be surprised when they up and leave.
Food for thought… We welcome yours.
Elements of this blog were first published on businessinsider.com.au
