Trust is essential in effective teams.
As one study put it:
‘When trust is present, people step forward and do their best work, together, efficiently. They align around a common purpose, take risks, think out of the box, have each other’s backs, and communicate openly and honestly. When trust is absent, people jockey for position, hoard information, play it safe, and talk about—rather than to—one another.’
It’s also incredibly inefficient. We spoke earlier this year about the cost of mistrust on our teams. We’ll take any excuse to reproduce this graphic which illustrates it perfectly.
So trust is important, cool, but you probably knew that already. The harder part is increasing the level of trust on your team, and particularly your team’s trust in you as a manager.
It’s why we really like the framework put forward by Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta in their new book The Power of Trust.
They identify four things that matter for creating trust in a relationship. By assessing our own performance as managers against these points, we can identify areas to improve, or better demonstrate these qualities to our teams.
- Competence: do we have the skills and ability to deliver what’s expected of us and excel in the role? If not, do we need to take some training to improve and evidence those skills?
- Motives: our teams don’t just care about what we do, but the reasons why we do it. Do they understand and trust our motivations? Do they think we have their interests at heart?
- Fairness: if motives are the ‘why’, then fairness is the ‘how’ - do we demonstrably treat others fairly?
- Impact: do our actions have impact? Do we actually deliver for our teams, and also when we don’t, do we take responsibility for that?
Become a Better Manager
Work more effectively with your team, track goals and objectives,
organize more productive 1:1s, and get peer feedback to help your team grow.
