As a leader, if it seems you are constantly putting out fires and distracted from your priorities, evaluating the current level of trust amongst your team would be a worthwhile exercise. While you’re thinking about this, it may also behoove you to assess your relationships with your peers, boss and other executives. If you are having trust issues with any of them, you are probably personally experiencing some of the symptoms you are seeing with your team.

Signs of distrust include:

  • Time-sucking-people-issues (conflict, gossip, complaining, drama)
  • Lagging productivity
  • MIA staff members (sick time, personal appointments)
  • Resignation or requests to transfer of key personnel
  • Missing deadlines
  • Ineffective communication lines / Confusion around expectations and roles

Teams that consistently produce great results have high levels of trust. They experience less stress and more effective communication, and quickly turn problems into solutions. Teams that turn problems into solutions consistently produce great results.

Trust is the foundation for successful human interaction and business transaction. Without it, life gets stressful and distractions are plentiful. The fall-out of distrust can cripple an organization, and end a leader’s career, but high-trust teams have each other’s backs, assume the best in others, and are mission focused.

Harvard Business Review research has shown trusting workgroups compared to distrustful workgroups experience*:

  • 106% more energetic at work
  • 76% more engaged with their jobs
  • 74% less stress
  • 13% fewer days off for illness
  • 40% less burnout
  • 29% more satisfaction with life in general

Fortunately, with a little patience, commitment, and perseverance, trust can be built more quickly than most realize. The keys to success are authenticity and consistency, as you practice the following three tips:

Three tips:

  1. Be collaborative:Look for opportunities to ask others for help, feedback, and expertise. We naturally trust those who value our input.
  2. Be reliable:Do what you say you are going to do. This includes seemingly insignificant little comments like “I’ll call you this afternoon”, as much as it does executing action plans and meeting deadlines.
  3. Be accountable:Get absolute clarity around your role (with whatever), expectations, stakeholders, and deadlines – then own them. This takes effective communication and planning, a dose of vulnerability, sometimes broad shoulders, and no finger-pointing or blaming.

The “economy of trust” within an organization is real, and a leader’s ability to instill it up-down-sideways exponentially adds to his or her personal value. So, do you want less stress, higher productivity, and better results? Make building a foundation of trust your top priority.

Contact us today for your free strategy session and learn how strategic leadership will help you build trust.

*Harvard Business Review, The Neuroscience of Trust, Jan-Feb Issue, 2017

Similar Posts

Authentic Leadership

Authentic Leadership. The next-best version of you?

Authentic leadership. What does it really mean and why should you, as a business leader, care? Let’s start literally: According to my Webster’s dictionary, ‘authentic’ means genuine, credible, real. My favorite applicable definition of ‘leadership’ is guiding by influence. Put them together and we get guiding with genuine, credible, real, influence. These days we are bombarded by falsehoods, half-truths,…

Internal Struggles: A method for making good decisions

Internal struggles are tough because of the push and pull between intellectual, emotional, moral, and ethical considerations.  Inside those are financial, relational, and even physical elements. They aren’t easy, that’s way we call them “struggles”, but dealing with them effectively, and sooner than later, usually saves us from unnecessary drama and negative consequences. I’m suffering with an…

WHAT COMPETING PRIORITY IS HOLDING YOU BACK?

I learned something new recently, regarding why we (humans in general) make commitments to ourselves, and then don’t keep too many of them. New year’s resolutions are obvious examples, but I’m thinking more about work-life or career-oriented commitments. Turns out there is a reason beyond “change is hard”.  That’s true too, but my new information…