T is for Trust – building trust in your Team

Trust in a Team is potentially the most paramount of all factors that can have an impact on your Team members (we referred to it in our post about building a Team).

It is also one of the most difficult aspects to have in place, and maintain.

So how do you do it? Before we go through how to build trust in your Team, let’s go through a few reasons why it is absolutely necessary to dedicate time and effort on making it happen.

Why you need trust in your Team

You may have already though “Isn’t it obvious why a Team needs to trust each other?” Hopefully it is. And yet, there are so many teams where trust is non-existent.

Why do you need to invest time, effort, energy and patience in building trust in your Team – and this list is non-exhaustive:

• Trusting Team has each other’s back when things go sideways, there is a crisis, or an emergency
• Trusting Teams support each other in reaching their goals
• Members of a trusting Team are focused on fostering collaboration, they shout out about each other’s contributions, give credit, and cheer each other on
• There is a healthy competition in a trusting Team
• Trusting Team means a more relaxed Team; or to put it in a different way – it’s a less anxious or nervous team
• Trusting Team is more likely to pick up new challenges with a curious mindset
• People external to a Team that exhibits trust feel more at ease in the presence of such a Team, which leads to better collaboration and outcomes

And ultimately, a Team that trusts each other creates good, predictable and sustainable outcomes.

Have you been in such a Team? Or maybe you’ve worked with such a Team and thought ‘I wish I was part of them’.

It’s this kind of a feeling that we are aiming at.

So how do we get there? How do you as a Team Leader build trust in your Team?

How about we first go through some elements that hinder building trust in your Team.

What makes trust crumble

The old adage is that it takes ages to build trust, and a second to break it. Here are a couple of factors that break the trust, and can also be a hindrance to building it altogether.

• Gossiping. All types of it. I’ve heard someone say that there is good and bad gossiping – I disagree. Talking about people behind their back is the pure definition of distrust. Sharing information without a person’s consent is disrespectful.
• Back-stabbing is an immediate ‘friend’ of gossiping.
• Information hoarding by one or more team members. It leads to unhealthy competition, and an uneven playing-field. It creates dishonesty.
• Pitting team members against each other. This creates conflict, and – again – an unhealthy competition.
• Spying on team members. This can stem from the action of pitting people against each other. People start feeling unsafe, being watched and scrutinised all the time. And in the end stop trusting everyone around them.
• Micromanaging. Unless there is a performance issue, micromanaging breeds distrust, anxiety, and self-doubt among other things.

So how do you build trust in your Team?

1. However cliched it sounds, you start by leading by example. Your Team members won’t trust anyone if they can’t trust you. This in turn starts with you having self-awareness and situational awareness to work out what is impacting the levels of trust around you.

2. If there is one individual who is the main source of distrust, you will need to address it with that individual. No volume of messages to Everyone will fix the situation caused and sustained by one person. This may require a difficult conversation. More on that in another post.

3. One of the reasons people are not trusting is because they are afraid of consequences – of making a mistake, forgetting about something, of not knowing ‘everything’. Your task as a leader is to set an example that it is ok not to be perfect. At the same time, you need to be clear that not being perfect is not an excuse for acting in a disrepectful or dishonest way. What you create is psychological safety – we will write about in a different post, but for now here’s a handy Harvard Business Review article about it.

4. If you spotted any of the factors that destroy trust – as we listed them above – work out a way to eliminate them.

I can’t encourage you enough to bring another leader into your thinking. If need be, liaise with an HR person to help you work out an approach and execute it.

The thing that you do not asbolutely want to do is turn a blind eye to situations that breed distrust. This brings no benefit to anyone.

Building trust is not easy. But every moment you spend on working on with your Team will bring dividends long term. The time, effort, energy and patience dedicate to this aim will be worth it.

For more tips about trust in a Team, I encourage you to read an article from Simon Sinek on How to Build a Team Trust.

Feature image by Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash