4 steps to build trust in your team (immediately)
We’ve explored how organizations that focus on their people — we’ve been calling them people-centric organizations — create more gratifying workplaces. Take for example Spotify, FAVI, Patagonia, and Semco.
While these companies have different practices, the common foundation on which they’ve built their people-centric organizations is trust.
We sometimes think that trust-building is a long process, requiring persistence, time and many actions. And yes, that is partially true — trust can take years to build, and an instant to evaporate.
However, there are things you can do to start building trust right now. Here are some of them:
1. Freely give trust away
Immediately assume that the people you’re working with are trustworthy, and treat them as such. Normally when we don’t know someone, we don’t immediately trust them — we want them to prove their trustworthiness to us.
However, just as with the proverbial glass half empty/half full, your initial frame of mind is what determines how you view and act in the situation.
Decide to start from a place of trust. It is as simple, and as complicated as that.
2. Focus on “what do we really want?”
Many friction-causing rules in organizations today exist because of a lack of trust — “boarding school” rules that are meant to control but in reality have nothing to do with what’s achieved.
Our co-founder Ricardo Semler suggests that we need to ask “what do we really want?” Focus on the goals. If your department’s goal is to build 56 widgets this week, do you really care how it’s done? You should focus on that important metric and let people figure out the best way to achieve that.
Once the team figures out what it really wants to achieve, it can set about removing demotivating “boarding school” rules that don’t actually help in achieving the goal.
3. Self-lead
It’s important to note that actions speak louder than words — things that seem simple are actually really just elegant distillations of what’s really difficult to execute. What if leaders says they don’t care when the work is done but at the same time they give employees who arrive “late” dirty looks? Letting go of control is hard — and you really have to watch yourself and what you’re signaling and let go of control.
I’m thankful that our colleague Mieke Byerley always reminds us that self-leadership is crucial for any real transformation. Self-leadership, as I understand it, involves being aware of your behaviors and making sure they’re aligned with the goals your team is trying to achieve.
Humans, creatures of habit that we are, internalize the rules and games that we’ve been taught explicitly and observed being followed. If we’ve always been rewarded for coming in at a certain time, for facetime, for self-martyrization, for withholding information from others, it will take some time and effort to unwind these learned behaviors.
You really have to walk the talk — as a leader, you have to make sure that your actions are syncing up with what you’re communicating. People are smart. They sense and comply with unwritten rules, written and unwritten, said and unsaid. Make sure you’re walking the talk to avoid mixed signals.
4. Don’t let one person ruin it for everyone
It is easy to overact and revert to boarding school rules when one person betrays your trust. However — and this is the hardest part of the process — you need to stick with it.
Remember the part about “walking the talk?” This means that even if one person screws you over, you must stay strong in your conviction that people are generally trustworthy.
Punishing others for what one person did is another boarding school control tactic — resist every temptation to fall for it.
Keep your trust glass at least half full — always.
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