MANAGING PEOPLE
Here’s How To Trust Your Team
Trusting Your Team Is Important for Any Organization Today-but How Can Leaders Actually Start Doing it?
Today’s era of workplace culture has placed empowerment, engagement, and culture on a pedestal—rightly so, but companies are still twisting themselves into knots as they figure out the appropriate ways to do so. This generally welcome shift in their focus is not one without benefits: as Gallup’s recent meta-analysis shows, high employee engagement consistently leads to positive outcomes for everyone in the business. For instance, substantially lower absenteeism, higher productivity and even increased profitability.
It is clear that an employee-centric culture begets business benefits. Unfortunately, there are still companies wrongly believing that money can buy culture, which leads to more disgruntled and disengaged employees overall. Sure, gourmet meals, foosball tables and game nights are great events, but these are often looked down on since they fail to have any lasting effect on talent retention or performance.
The key is to have a culture of trust.
Surprisingly, leaders do understand the stakes. PwC’s 2016 global CEO survey revealed that more than half of CEOs think a lack of trust threatens their organization’s growth. Yet, many are still stuck in a rut, unsure of what to do and where to address lack of trust issues.
It is understandable: trust is difficult to understand. It is tough to pinpoint why we trust one person more than another. It is a fragile thing too—one wrong move can lead to distrust. For the most part, trust is a gut feeling rather than a concrete choice.
Leaders need to understand that trust is not entirely dependent on the behavior of other people: in fact, it is predicated on mostly our own responses and interactions with those behaviors.
As such, leaders need to create work environments where trust can flourish. Instead of being passive and waiting for an employee to build trust, leaders need to know how to act even in the most challenging situations.
Trust in Performance
“I don’t trust them to do their job well” is a common saying—though often in micromanagers—but that should not be holding employees back from performing in their roles. At its most basic level, it is about trusting the employee to do their job well, within their own capabilities. Hence, leaders need to create environments where this is consistently possible by committing to a few things.
- Constantly hold regular one-on-one meetings with employees. One-on-one meetings can be pressurizing on employees but it is always possible to hold a great one that actually gives you more insight, deepen your understanding of their challenges and creates more awareness about your own expectations. The key is to always make it about open communication—they need to give you honest feedback rather than wait till things fall apart. People need to feel safe telling you about their problems or it will become unresolved.
- Ensure that you are fair and objective when giving feedback. You need to set clear standards on what is considered good performance for every individual project. The important thing is to ensure that everyone knows what is expected of them and thus, allow everyone to hold one another accountable for their actions.
- Look for silent signals. Not everyone will comfortable opening up about their problems to you. Be on the lookout for signs: prolonged demotivation, lack of productivity or even absenteeism.
Besides ensuring that everyone knows what good performance is all about in an individual project, leaders also need to ensure that they don’t get their hands too deep into their work unless necessary. Over-involvement by chronic operators—also a micromanagement trait—can cause tensions and stress. For leaders, it’s a surefire way to burn out quickly.
Rather than trying to approve every decision and forcing everyone to go through the leader first, trusting the team’s judgment is a much more efficient way:
- Build your team’s judgment muscle. Rather than wait for mistakes to occur, setting the benchmark is a much safer way. For instance, after making an important decision, tell the team why you did so, based on subjective and objective factors. What risks did you consider? What trade-offs did you have? Teach the team on what they need to consider when making choices and judgment calls. The best way is to ensure that everyone is aligned.
- Failure can happen and that’s okay—tell that to the team. Everyone makes mistakes and sometimes we miss our judgment calls. When you can bear a little risk, wean yourself out and allow your team to make bigger or harder decisions from time to time without your involvement.
- Be curious about poor judgment calls, not dismissive. Mistakes have been made and that is that. Instead, you need to start being the coach. Why did they make this decision? What risk framework did they use? What criteria did they have? Ask guiding questions to find out their ‘why’ and if that is impossible at the moment, give the decision-makers an opportunity to find data and information to back their argument. Ultimately, it is about accurately assessing how good your team is at making their own decisions.
Trust in Principles
If performance is the harder aspect of trust, then principle-based factors belong to the softer aspect of trust. This is beyond capabilities and proficiencies: it is about intentions, motivations and all things psychological. For leaders, the aim is to steer the team’s culture towards something desirable for themselves, the team and the organization.
- Model healthy conflict. We often become crippled when we perceive a “threat” (in this case, an argument); we lose access to important skills such as listening and questioning skills. We may even keep our ideas to ourselves. As such, it is important to create healthy, positive conflict by acknowledging differences and welcoming them. The key is to always hold a civil debate, rather than an argument across the meeting table.
- Appreciate and reward employees regularly, at important times. While they are both inherently different, the intention is still the same. Let your employees know that their contributions are being recognized and they are making a real impact on the company. Call out achievements and focus on improvements. Though constructive criticism is always welcome, it is always ideal to steer away from negative feedback.
- Don’t tolerate bullying. Stamp out such behavior as quickly as possible. While we may accidentally slip up from time to time, there are toxic employees that are constantly rude to others. For instance, disrespecting a team member, being condescending or even interrupting someone consistently. As a leader, you must hold them accountable for their actions even if they are superstars.
It is difficult to understand a human being but ultimately, the team has to be aligned to work towards what’s best for the organization. A leader can only do so much: personal motivations will definitely come to play in every work situation.
Rather than control someone’s intentions, the focus must be on team play. For instance, breaking down silos, finding out flaws in the systems and having direct conversations. These are all great starts to encourage a culture of teamwork.
Leaders need to give trust to start empowering others—giving power away is a hallmark trait of great leaders and such leaders ‘lead from the back’. It goes a long way: when others are empowered, they become stronger contributors. As they grow in the company and gel better with one another, the leader will become empowered as a result.
There are times where it can be difficult to trust a team, especially if they are already deep in internal conflict. For leaders, the key is to still choose trust and address any issue along the way. Be it through open communication or one-to-ones, a positive, transparent culture is one that will create an even better business.
