Building Trust Across Cultures

Effective Communication for Leaders and Teams

Continuing in our Amazon Leadership Series, Amazon looks to hire people who build relationships of trust.

Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best. — Amazon Leadership Principles

Robert’s Three T’s

A former manager of mine named Robert Noakes introduced me to a great way to express a value that I’ve always promoted within my teams, that if a team is given the ability to make business decisions to impact their customer, they need to have accurate and complete information about the environment they’re operating in.

This, Robert said, is the core principle behind the three T’s -

• Truth
• Transparency
• Trust

Truth

The information provided needs to be accurate.

Transparency

The team needs to understand the complete picture, understanding anything that could serve as a risk to…