Trust is crucial to ensure both team productivity and a functional workplace environment. Here’s what these business leaders recommend.
“What strategies do you use to build and maintain trust within your team?”
Building trust within a team is crucial for fostering a productive and positive work environment.
So when we posed this question to our leadership community, we got a heap of valuable insights. Transparent communication, empathetic leadership and creating a psychologically safe environment were just some of the strategies.
Take a look and discover what helps these leaders build and maintain strong, trusting teams.
Do any of their strategies align with yours?
Gavin Neville
QLD State Manager: Oz Airports
Building and maintaining trust within your team as a manager is crucial for fostering a productive and positive work environment. Three key actions to achieve this are:
- Transparent Communication: Be open and honest in your communications. Share information freely, especially about decisions that affect the team. Transparency builds credibility and demonstrates respect for your team members.
- Consistency: Consistency in your actions and decisions helps establish predictability and reliability. When team members know what to expect from you, they feel more secure and are likely to trust your leadership.
- Empathy and Support: Show genuine care for your team members’ well-being and professional growth. Listen actively to their concerns, provide support when needed, and advocate for their success. Empathy builds strong connections and reinforces trust in your leadership.
By consistently practicing transparent communication, demonstrating empathy, and maintaining consistency, you can cultivate a trusting relationship with your team, leading to improved collaboration, morale, and overall performance.
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Craig Pickering
Founder: 3Cs Coaching and Mentoring
Building and maintaining trust within a team is vital for any organisation’s success. The cornerstone of trust is open communication; ensuring transparency in decisions and encouraging feedback, prior to decisions being made, fosters a culture of inclusivity. Active listening is equally important, as it shows team members their opinions are valued.
As a leader, instead of asking people what they think of your idea, ask for their ideas first.
Leading by example is another key strategy; displaying integrity and consistency in actions inspires others to follow suit. Providing support and recognising individual contributions also enhances trust.
Lastly, addressing conflicts promptly and fairly helps maintain a cohesive and trusting environment. By implementing these strategies, trust becomes an integral part of the team’s fabric, driving productivity and job satisfaction.
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Peter Larsen
Joint Managing Director: Optometrist Warehouse
Trust within a team hinges on clear purpose and well-defined missions. These strategies are pivotal for success in any transformative endeavour. To build and maintain trust, leaders must live and breathe their objectives. By consistently aligning their actions with their words, they demonstrate genuine commitment to the team’s goals. This authenticity fosters an environment where team members feel valued and understood.
Caring about the success of your team is equally essential. Leaders should actively support their team’s growth, creating a culture where achievements are celebrated, and failures are embraced as learning opportunities. Encouraging appropriate risks ensures continuous innovation and development.
Furthermore, a purposeful work environment is crucial. Teams thrive when they understand the broader impact of their work, motivating them to contribute meaningfully. Clear objectives and transparent communication are the bedrock of this environment, enabling everyone to stay focused and engaged. Ultimately, trust is the foundation of any successful team. By leading with integrity, supporting your team, and fostering a purposeful work environment, you create a robust framework for sustained trust and innovation.
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Dr Arti Agrawal
CEO and Founder: Vividhata
The best workplaces are where individuals and teams thrive, and often the x factor is trust.
Why, trust, you may ask? Its presence is the key factor in the team’s success: members feel secure in taking appropriate risk, leading to higher innovation; they commit to everyone’s success not just individual gain, so overall performance is better; and they support each other, lowering attrition and leading to happier people.
There are two ingredients that are simple and yet effective for trust building.
One is honest yet sensitive conversation. This is so everyone in the team understands the team’s values, objectives, ways of working, and their part. Disagreements and difficult decisions (which are normal) should be dealt with through this way to clarify, re-energise and strengthen the team.
The second is giving responsibility to team members. When people feel trusted to lead a piece of work and that their ideas are valued, and see growth possibilities, they feel trusted. This engenders their own trust in the leader.
The combination of these two strategies builds and maintains trust in teams.
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Elan Yang
Co-Founder: Saltus Group
If I learned one thing from pretending to read Lord of the Flies in Year 10 English, it was this: people are the products of their environment.
Before you go booking any escape rooms, understand that trust is the result of an environment where people feel psychologically safe*. What’s the difference? Trust is personal, and psychological safety is a group phenomenon.
Consider the following:
“Bernie’s wrong about this and I should let him know, but he lashed out at me last time I disagreed” hints at a lack of trust.
“My team expects me to speak up even when it’s uncomfortable” hints at a psychologically safe environment in which you can start to build trust.
How you go ahead and tell Bernie is another matter entirely, but the important takeaway is that a psychologically safe environment leads to interactions that build trust.
Trust takes time to build, but here’s how you can start:
- Set expectations with actions. Rather than “we are accountable,” “we hold each other accountable by owning our actions and their results.
- Measure how well your team are meeting these expectations and publicly reward those who do.
*Look into Google’s Project Aristotle if you want more reading on why psychological safety is so important to a high functioning team.
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Patricia Haueiss
Metaverse, Web3 & AI Consultant and Advisor: Patricia Haueiss
As someone who’s had the opportunity to advise many emerging tech companies in AI and the Metaverse industry, I’ve found that trust is one of the foundational skills of high-performing teams. Here’s my formula for building and maintaining trust:
Trust = Reliability + Competence + Communication
Reliability: Be the person who always shows up when you say you will. If you’re reliable, people know they can count on you. Establish regular meetings to keep everyone aligned and informed. Continuous feedback loops and open communication channels increase the likelihood of project success and ensure everyone feels heard.
Competence: Always be improving. Read, take courses, experiment. Competence is a moving target; keep aiming higher. Clearly communicate team members’ strengths and roles. This helps leverage each member’s unique capabilities and fosters mutual respect. Share your knowledge. Help your team grow by teaching them what you know. This builds your credibility and strengthens the team’s overall competence.
Communication: Clear, honest, and frequent communication helps preempt problems and builds a cohesive team environment. Create a safe space for giving and receiving feedback. Constructive criticism should be welcomed and viewed as a tool for growth.
The post Expert opinion: Building and maintaining trust within your team appeared first on The Big Smoke.