Building trustMotivational Keynote Speaker Leadership Coaching Training
Hugh D. Culver, Marathon Communications Inc.
Trust is the essential building block of successful teams. When you invest in creating trusting relationships you have fewer misunderstandings, decisions are easier to reach, you have more open and honest communications and people are much more likely to want to stay on the team.
Ron Zemke, senior editor of Training Magazine, emphasizes the need for trust: “The cost of low trust within an organization is both obvious and subtle. A number of studies performed over the past decade have found that when employees distrust the organization they work for they contribute less effort to the job, take fewer risks, are more cynical about the company’s plans and promises, are absent more often and are more likely to leave when the opportunity arises.”
Building trust doesn’t happen all at once; we need to invest in what leadership guru Stephen Covey calls the Emotional bank account. As Covey explains: “It is like a financial bank account into which you make deposits and take out withdrawals – only in this case, you make emotional deposits and withdrawals in your relationships that either build or destroy them.”
When you make these deposits you are leading the relationship to be a trusting one that will work with harmony and few disruptions. Here are some suggestions on how to make those critical deposits:
- Keep promises – think of all commitments (even a promise to meet at a certain time) as a contract; break it and you are defining the relationship.
- Trust them – exhibit a trusting nature and look for opportunities to let them take more responsibility to learn, grow and maybe even fail.
- Clarify expectations – finish each delegation by getting them to confirm what the expectations are – don’t set them up to fail with unclear, ambiguous or even conflicting expectations.
- Listen 4 times more than you speak – prove that you are genuinely interested in their opinion and ideas.
- Loyalty to the absent – remember that talking about people behind their back sends a poor message to those who you are talking to!
- Apologize often and quickly – enough said.
- Receive feedback openly – prove that when you said: “My door is always open and I really want to know what you think” it included the bad news as well.
- Forgive freely – separate behaviour from the person and look for opportunities to forgive behaviour and save the relationship.
