Everything at work revolves around trust. It is difficult growing your organization without mutual trust.

Photo credit: Pablo by Buffer

Customers trusts you not only for you honoring your deliverables, but most of all so that they will not jeopardize their own jobs by having chosen you to be their vendor. In turn your team must have enough trust in your internal teams and team members. With a lack of trust friction, cost, and time will increase. Employees will start actively disengaging and this typically marks the beginning of a downward spiral. Around that time management will typically engage consultants to help figure out what the root cause problem is and how to fix it.

There are five key elements to trust: They are sincerity, authenticity, competence, reliability, and timely communication at eye level. Without trust there cannot be any leadership. Trust can only occur when a relationship has been slowly nurtured into existence by long term planning. “Trust is not deserved, it is earned” is what sales consultant and expert Jeffrey Gitomer wrote about trust in his book “Little Teal Book of Trust”. No leader can expect to be trusted just based on a title alone. On the other hand, the leader must learn trusting his employees first – only then direct reports will show an effort to also trust a manager.

This process of learning to let go of trying to control direct reports takes time and most of all active planning on the side of the leader-manager. The vast amount of employees want to do a great job. Well, let them do and support them doin so. It is a recurring theme that runs through leadership like a fine red thread: If you want to see a change in others, you must first be willing to change yourself. This is especially true when a micro manager wants for his employees to achieve and learn new skills. It takes ample time to change people and first the manager must first make the commitment to learning just as much and to be patient with his people who probably need some time to achieve these goals. Impatience kills trust in an instant.

One certain way to gain trust is to focus on becoming a master communicator. Mistrust leads to issues in the flow of information, because most managers with trust issues would rather keep the information to themselves and not delegate any work either. Information hoarding is often seen as job security. This is all poison to any organization. It takes a great sense of organizing skills for a leader to find a way out of the downward micro management spiral. Get rid of unnecessary staff meetings right away. Are you not sick of “informational” meetings? These exist to merely “bring you up to speed”. Yeah, right. Organizing information should automatically trigger the thought of delegating as many day-to-day tasks to employees who either have the skill set or the responsibility to doing them anyway. Organize report outs such that they can be expressed in KPIs that are meaningful to the organization and its people. This shows trust to the employees and you, the leader, will be able to tend to more managerial tasks – imagine that, more time for organizing things.

Being able to lead people may be something that comes easy to some people. That does not mean average managers or even micro managers cannot improve because they were not born with these skills. Leadership is self leadership. Feel confident enough to genuinely apologize for any bad decisions you may have made. This provides the necessary feedback to the employees that it is ok to make mistakes. Businesses need to take calculated risks. When you take risks, mistakes will happen. Chastising your team for having made a mistake is a major trust buster. Your only question should be: “What have you/ we learned?” You push candor into the background when you yell at folks for having made a mistake. By not including team members in the cause and effect cycle, the managers will most likely promote long term distrust and thus disengage them from team and company goals. After a while it is getting difficult for top leadership to gain any insight into issues as there are too many variables that no one can seem to untangle. The reversal of this issue is just as easy: When making the mistake of not having involved the team in the process, apologize genuinely and timely. It will re-engage people in the short and long term.

Finally there is a solid case for developing a sense and company culture of trust. It comes down to the almighty financial rock bottom Dollar. In a recent Gallup poll the cost for lost productivity and employee disengagement has been around $300 billion in the United States of America alone.   Controlling people is all but impossible, but that is not true for controlling the cost and reviewing and managing the engagement and communication with them.

So the simplest way in which to create a trusting work environment is making a difference with yourself. Start to trust your people and make a plan how you will demonstrate this to your people. You have to keep your ego in check though 🙂

Ralf