Building Trust
I was recently talking to one of my mentees. She started a new role with a new team. I told her about my view of the key pillars of trust: Integrity, Competence, Reliability, Communication, and Vulnerability. Building trust takes time, often years. When you are rapidly building a team or assuming leadership of a new team you don’t have years to build this trust so you have to find ways to exhibit all of this quickly and repeatedly. Much like leadership ethos, this is not something to follow blindly but to internalize and believe. Pretense will backfire and the team will distrust all that follows.
What follows is my recommendation to my mentee to build and sustain trust. Note this list is NOT sequential.
Team meetings (leader meeting, team-level meetings, all hands meetings, etc.) are vital to communicate across the layers. This is the time to share status, reinforce messages, highlight successes at a team level as well as at individual level, communicate executive messages, reinforce the one-team mentality, address concerns, have both scripted and unscripted Q&A with the team, and visit every item in this list.
Tell your story. Share your story not just history. Include both personal and work beliefs and experiences. Never say cliché things like “I’m a workaholic” (unless you actually are and recognize you need help), “I don’t have an ounce of BS in me” (because everybody has some), and so forth. Clichés ring hollow and untruths are worse; both will undermine your attempts to connect. Identify your successes and what went into them. This is not to gloat but to communicate your experience and expertise. Explain your non-successes / “learning opportunities” and weaknesses; openly acknowledge and admit them. This is not to apologize for them but to show your frailties and that these two have added to your experience and expertise. This is a time to humanize yourself. What are your interests, what gets you passionate, what drives and motivates you, what do you do all this work for?
Frequently communicate the Mission and Vision (in every team meeting remind the team); it will feel repetitive, but it reinforces the core of team identity and soon you will find your team explaining it to others (new staff, other teams, etc.) as well if not better than you. Never stop repeating the Mission and Vision.
Meet with the team individually, talk to each team member (depending on the size of the team this may not be possible) or in small group settings and without the management layers. Listen to their story, listen to their ideas and their concerns. Ask for their perspective. Give them guidance and feedback. Follow up on the information (questions, complaints, concerns, etc.) you’ve received. Relate to their story, give them more windows into your story, do not forget their story!
Travel to the locations of your team to connect in person, connect with the team members you don’t see daily, understand that site’s idiosyncrasies, etc. Likewise seek to have team members travel to other sites so they too can increase understanding and improve relationships across geographies and time zones. I know, in the days of pandemics this seems an odd item. It is odd, but it is also true: in-person communication is profoundly more impactful than a video or phone conference.
Participate in designs, discussions, meetings, work activities regardless of who is in attendance. Get out of your leadership circle so you can engage at all levels. Admit your ignorance, your limitations, prove your competence, increase the team’s understanding of you and improve their view of you as a contributor.
Take action items and complete them. Doing this shows your reliability, whether the action item is in follow up to an employee engagement survey, a request for help, or a task item from a meeting. This shows that you consider yourself accountable for work as well, and that by delivering that work back to the team you likewise view them as holding you accountable for your work. This effort improves your reliability but also improves the team’s feeling of ownership and mutual accountability.
Ask for help. This shows your vulnerability, your trust in them, you recognize your own limitations (reinforcing your honesty and limits of concrete competence). This is a critical step in the vital management skill of delegation. Delegation is, in essence, asking for help. People will execute commands from bad leaders, but they will want to help good leaders. I think you can guess which one will produce greater results with higher value. Show your trust in the team and they will show their trust in you.
Communicate progress. Communicate non-successes as learning opportunities (they are only failures if you do not learn from them). Communicate expectations (yours, executives, clients, etc.). Share information freely and openly (Wiki, persistent chats, internal blogs, team meetings, etc.). There is always the caveat with communication: sometimes you will be restricted from sharing and thus your silence is of utmost importance (sometimes your silence or restricted communication is going to be difficult but being a leader is difficult and there are times you must adhere to greater communication strictures).
Don’t be the only person to communicate, have leaders throughout the team (whether managers or non-managerial leaders) take ownership and communicate their own assignments (in team meetings, in e-mails, etc.). The value of Wikis, micro sites, etc., is that documenting and communicating becomes an accountability of the whole team. Reinforce the openness and the value of each person’s contribution to communication (from a software engineering point of view you may point out that documenting architecture, expected results, API usage, etc. is all applicable for production support, for the next developer to take up, etc.).
Communicate changes as quickly as possible, even if you don’t have a solution. I can never emphasize enough the importance of communication. Showing that a change is coming and you don’t have the answers reinforces your vulnerability and your trust in the team, which produces the rebound effect of them trusting you for trusting them. As a bonus you might find team members coming to you with an answer for the problem or a way to enact the change with reduced impact. Being able to communicate and have the answer is wonderful and provides confidence in the leadership for future changes; however, withholding information until a full plan is devised robs you of the opportunity to build trust and likely breeds negativity as the team loses its vision.
Have an open door policy (if possible). Being available helps the rapport and will accelerate trust throughout the team. You must always actively listen. Sometimes you just need to listen, sometimes you have the answer, sometimes you need to ask them questions to help them understand they have the answer already, and sometimes you need to listen as they are telling you something that is wrong within the team or with you. Having an open door policy isn’t just the fun part of chatting with people, but actively listening, contemplating, and mentoring team members of all levels and at all locations.
Challenge the team to innovate. Ask them to identify opportunities for improvement, challenge the status quo, think up new ways to solve problems, make innovation challenges (which can include non-technical components), have hackathons, etc. Doing this shows you are open to growth, recognize there’s always room for improvement, and that “your way” (the established norms) is not the only way. Like other steps, this shows your vulnerability and transparency while also showing your trust in them to excel and be better than you. You will be amazed at the increased engagement and the number of improvement ideas that come about from these efforts.
Absolutely do not work on vacation. Stop checking e-mail, project status, etc. while you are on vacation. Do not let others work on their vacations. Do not call or text someone on their vacation. Publicly communicate this viewpoint and hold to it. Not working exhibits your trust in the team to execute while you are away, your trust in your leadership team to address challenges while you’re away, your understanding and belief that rest and recovery is vital to healthy work and healthy life. Taking the cue from you, when your directs step away they are likewise exhibiting their trust in your competence and reliability to assist in taking up the gaps while they are away. The inverse is true and sadly too common: working on vacation deprives you of recovery, but even worse it shows your team that you do not trust them to execute in your absence and that you expect them to likewise work while they are away (following the “shadow of the leader”). The end result of your workaholic behavior is a feeling of negativity and reduced work output and quality brought on by distrust and exhaustion. In short, do not work on vacation!
Repeat. Repetition of all of this, with a fair degree of frequency, will build and sustain trust in the leadership, amongst the team, and belief in the Mission and Vision.
Reminder: this is not a sequential set of steps but a list of actions done in unison and repeatedly.
Like the very pillars of trust or the mission and vision of the team, these actions must be repeated, revisited, altered, and updated.
Mental exercise: what is your story? Thinking of your past/present leaders & managers, how did they do on this list? Given your role as a leader (at work, home, etc.) how does this list align to your actions? What is missing from this list?
