Building Trust
Discover more from How to Lead Everybody (with their permission)
Members of an effective team need to know how far they can trust the other team-members.
Trust builds over time and experience. As leaders, we can start with building mutual trust between us and each of our reports.
There are two components of trust that build over time—intentions and competencies.
We can trust that someone will be honest and make a genuine effort—that’s intention.
We can trust that the person has the intelligence, skills, training, and experience to do the job well—that’s competency.
Be mindful of what your people can pick up from you. Do you know what you are doing technically? Do you know what you are doing as a leader? Are you competent for the position you hold on the team? And are you honest with them? Do you keep your word and honor your commitments? If you say you’ll get something done by 3pm, do you do it by 3pm? Be trustworthy.
Give your people opportunities to earn your trust. Hold them accountable. And grow their competencies through experience, through training, through coaching and mentoring, and through empowering them, so that you can trust them to handle even more at a professional level. This isn’t all or nothing—start by trusting them with smaller things and scale up as they prove they can handle them.
(Photo by Ronda Dorsey on Unsplash)