Developing High Levels of Trust Within Your Team

Morning Leaders,

Developing trust within your team will expand and elevate your people to an unreal level. When your team trusts you and the environment they’ll bring their whole effort, their whole creativity, and their whole self to the party. Imagine the buzz of the environment and the great things that will be achieved when everyone is absorbed, engaged, and trusts one another? That’s the special sauce right there.

Trust takes a long time to establish and can quickly erode with the wrong behaviours though.

Here are 8 Best Practices I can think of to develop more trust with your team and the people you work with.

1) Lead by Example - goes without saying. There needs to be a congruency between what you say and how you behave. How can people trust you if you don’t set the benchmark and follow it? Be the gold standard.

2) Purpose - ensure each and everyone in your team has a purpose and understands why the work they’re doing is important. Help them find meaning in what they’re doing.

3) Feedback - whether it’s positive news or critical news. You as the leader need to deliver direct and caring feedback. You will erode any trust you have established if you hold off from telling people what they need to know.

4) Transparency - apart from confidential or sensitive subjects there is not a lot you can’t share with the team. Context adds a lot of colour. Continue to communicate to your people and be transparent about what is happening, otherwise, they’ll make their own conclusions.

5) Servent’s Mindset - as a self-less Leader, you are here to serve. Whether that’s to help your people reach their potential, whether it’s to help people achieve their goals or whether it’s to develop self-belief. Whatever it is, you’re are here to serve and help people achieve success. It’s no longer about you.

6) High Hope - regardless of their previous experience, shortcomings, or failures. Instill hope in the person that they can achieve great things and continue to bat for them.

7) Vulnerable - be vulnerable with your people and your team. You build trust and credibility exceptionally fast by owning up when you don’t know something, when you made a mistake or you don’t have all the answers. Great leaders are humble, they’re first to admit they’re constantly learning like the rest of us.

8) Relationships - don’t build relationships to get stuff done, these are transactional relationships. Build transformational relationships where there is mutual respect and mutual focus on common goals. How can you help this person achieve what they are after? The truth is you will be most engaging if people feel valued in their relationship with you. If people feel listened to by you, feel that their opinion matters to you, believe that you actively want them involved, and get acknowledged by you, then you’ll be going a long way to engaging them. Treat your relationship with your direct reports as partnerships, remove the sense of hierarchy.

Hopefully, some of these ideas will help you establish huge levels of trust with your team so you can work together to achieve great things.

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• Speed Reading Training - I came across this platform that is offering free speed reading training. There are a number of great benefits of improving your reading speed including comprehension and improved memory. As leaders if we can absorb and grow our knowledge quicker we’re going to be more effective and competent. Take a look at ReadSpeeder.com.

• Book - Hello Stay Interviews by Beverly Kaye. We conduct exit interviews once people have decided to leave to find out what we could improve on or avoid for other employees, but why don’t we have candid conversations with people while they’re still working for us? Why wait until they hand in their notice to find out they’re not happy with their pay, their leader, or the environment. Asking candid questions to your employees such as “What would keep you here?” Will help you build out plans and safeguard your most important asset, your people.

• Organisation - Toastmasters - Toastmasters is a global education company promoting communication, public speaking and leadership. There are clubs you can join all over the world to improve your confidence and Public Speaking skills.

Quote of the Week

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