3 Steps to Build Trust in Your Team
/[Updated March 30, 2021]
We explored in the article, "How Trust is Essential to a Productive Workplace," what can happen when trust is missing, and how trust is a cornerstone to employee engagement, productivity, and more. As Dr. David Ballard, the head of APA's Center for Organizational Excellence, says: “...Lack of trust should serve as a wake-up call for employers...Trust plays an important role in the workplace and affects employees’ well-being and job performance."
Building trust within your team is an ongoing process that grows over time, and it starts with you as the leader of your team, department, or organization.
Step 1: Lead by example
Be trustworthy yourself, knowing that everyone’s watching you and learning from you. This is more important than you may realize: “More than half [of respondents to a study] feel like their employer isn’t open and upfront, a third feel that their organization isn’t always honest and truthful. One in four say they don’t trust their employer at all.” (Source: Harvard Business Review, April 2014)
Gain trust by trusting: the more you give, the more you get. Examine your own behavior, and explore honestly if you are demonstrating trust with your team. Find the areas where you have less than ideal trust. It often shows up out of judgments and assumptions we make about people which may or may not be correct. Ask yourself:
Do you trust each of your team members?
Do you listen to each member (not just the ones who speak up or with whom you share values)?
Are you being sensitive to interpersonal styles that may be different from your own, and could you be making unfair judgments of those individuals, or simply ignoring them because you don’t understand them?
Step 2: Build open communication and respectful discourse within your team
Open, honest communication engenders respect and trust. People feel more likely to trust when they feel heard and understood. They’re more likely to engage, collaborate, and contribute their ideas to the team. After all, this is why they were hired, so you want to do everything you can to bring out the best in them and not to squelch their capacity to contribute.
Creating a "team agreement" around what the team needs to trust each other to do is a super first step. In other posts I outline this process. A good team coach/facilitator inside or outside your organization should be able to assist.
Step 3: Learn how to manage conflict
What we often find in our work as Conflict Advisors is a direct correlation between negative or unmanaged conflict and an erosion of trust, not only between the parties who are engaged in the conflict but also the ripple effect that spreads through the team and sometimes into the whole organization (more on this in my Forbes article). The longer the disagreement goes unresolved, the harder it becomes to return to normal productive relations — and to build up the trust that has been lost.
Building awareness around conflict is absolutely necessary to enhance innovation and avoid destructive patterns. You must manage conflict or it will manage you!
Look for tools and training that will help you learn about: how conflict shows up in your workplace; how to identify underlying systemic conflict issues; and how to build strategies to use constructive conflict to enhance your team's creativity.
Harnessing the power of conflict is not only one key to building trust in your team, it also underpins open communication, collaboration, healthy change management, and innovation.
When we join a company, partnership or team, our expectation is that everyone involved will exhibit professional behavior toward us and each other. Instead, it’s highly possible that we may become one of the more than 60 million adults in the United States who are affected in some way by bullying behavior at work.
What kind of behaviors are we talking about? Our definition is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful behavior.