Leadership Article:
Trust, The One Thing That Changes Everything

(Originally written October 2008 as election debates and financial turmoil were heating up and boiling over!)

Have you been glued to the t.v. this week, like we have? Watching in dismay as our political ‘leaders’ position and place blame on each other?

Wouldn’t it be awful if you had this type of contention on your team? If you did you couldn’t get your team to agree on where to go to lunch, much less get their buy-in on key decisions and initiatives.

When people don’t trust each other, this is what happens – low trust equals slow/no progress. (Think of airport security, Sarbanes Oxley and in this political situation – all of these situations represent low trust, making movement forward slow and costly.)

“Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.”

Here are four things you can do to improve trust (and therefore speed) on your team:

1. Develop team norms and standards for all meetings, communication and interactions. Have the entire team develop and create their norms- in-bounds and out-of-bounds behavior. Post and review the norms often. (If the team creates the norms, they will be much more likely to self-regulate during all meetings.)

Sample norms can include:

• Always look up when responding to others ideas by 1) say what you like about the idea and 2) how the idea can be made better
• Soft on people, hard in ideas
• One speaker a t a time
2. Clarify the roles and expectationsof each team member – who’s in charge of what by when. The leader should ask and answer this question for each position on the team , “What must happen in this position, in order for this position to be successful?”
3. Conduct a confidential online team assessment that measures the team’s effectiveness. Make sure the assessment includes questions about their degree of trust, how conflict is handled and how focused the team is on getting results. Have the team review, discuss and define team strengths and development areas.
4. Make building team trust a high priority, discuss and work on weekly. Focus on building team trust as much as you focus on solving business issues. The higher the trust, the greater the speed.

Any time you spend introducing tools that reduce friction and increase trust, will improve the strength and ability of your team to perform. Indeed...with trust...all teams can excel and outperform their competition.

Thank you for reading. For more articles, click here.

Every month I write new articles and provide leadership development resources and tools in my e-newsletter. Subscribe here:

Join Our Email Newsletter List Email: