9 Ways to Rebuild Trust and Why It’s Critical to Your Business’ Success

“Trust is critical for businesses to thrive, but it’s easy to lose without even realizing it,” explains David Olk in his latest column for Inc. Read on for tips on how to spot when this happens and, most importantly, how to re-build.

Trust is an underrated lubricant for success in any organization.

It’s the critical key component of healthy relationships. Because businesses are built on the relationships between team members, trust will be what powers you through every phase of your company. It will lead to your team’s mutual success (however you define it).

Or trust will be what sinks you.

Losing Trust

Most of the time, people lose trust without realizing it. Here are two things that you can do to have people stop believing in you and what you say:

• Be overly political. While espousing views on the latest political debate might annoy your coworkers, you’ll upset them more by playing office politics.
• Being an appeaser. Don’t tell people what they want to hear. Stop pandering. It’s insulting.

But there’s good news! Trust doesn’t only collapse. It can be built.

Rebuilding Trust

It doesn’t matter if you’re repairing a problem or want to build a strong foundation, here’s how to get people to believe in you, your company, and each other.

Here is one of two things that you must pay special attention to:

• Culture. Specifically, a culture of openness and transparency. People need to be unafraid to say what’s necessary and feel that you heard them. Once you destroy culture, you can’t fix it. Remember, people will work long and hard to solve problems. But they will kill themselves to solve problems they care about.

For the full article and extensive tips, find it here as originally published in Inc.