Fundamentals -TRUST 3: Putting Trust into Practice

This is the third section of our Fundamentals series on TRUST. See all our Fundamentals here.

Organisations need trust to perform at their best; as do leaders, individual team members, and collective groups and teams. Having captured some of the key learnings from research on this topic in Notes 1 and 2 in this fundamentals series, we look to reap the benefit of that learning through the questions of “What do we need to do, and be, in order to cultivate, sustain, and repair trust?”

The interdependencies are real and powerful; making the one silver bullet solution obsolete. Here are some options and principles for engaging with this topic.

Self Trust

We start here because people who do not fundamentally trust themselves in the different aspects of trust are less able to generate trust with others. So what helps?

Commitment to self-awareness

Self reflection, seeking feedback, and being honest with yourself and others.
Identify credibility, integrity, and benevolence gaps in your trust stool.
Accept challenges to your self-perception and approach leadership growth with curiosity.
Examine your beliefs and old practices that may hinder extending trust to others.
Sticking with the process of personal growth as an essential part of change. Personal change takes time and effort.
Go first as a role model and be vulnerable with what matters to you to create an environment where others can be vulnerable too.
Ease off the self criticism and judgment. See things for what they are and decide what you want and take action from there. In the same we erode trust through unhelpful and inaccurate narratives about others, we do so with ourselves. Explore what these are for you?

Trusting others

Remember the link between feeling trusted, wanting to be trustworthy, and the trusting that comes from the flow of oxytocin.

Extend trust to others

Exercise your ability to trust others decisively and instantly.
Put practical supports in place to enable easier trust-building.
Demonstrate trust in people and teams, which extends the oxytocin link to others.

Engendering trust in you as a leader

We return to the attributes of trust and check for a wobbly stool.

Credibility

Demonstrate experience, skills, knowledge, and behaviours relevant to your role. If you need to up-skill or learn more, then do!
Show credibility through active listening, inquiring, noticing, and consulting.
Work transparently with known information and acknowledge what is not known.

Integrity

Act with authenticity, honesty, fairness, and principled decision-making.
Stand by the decisions you make.
Deliver on promises.
Know your values and act from them. This keeps us congruent with who we think we are. Others see this!

Benevolence

See individuals beyond their tasks and genuinely care about their well-being.
Respond in ways that consider their interests.
Listen and acknowledge others.
Avoid second guessing their hopes and fears- ask!
Include and consult.

The key to maintaining a steady stool is to remain attentive to when it wobbles and take action to keep it balanced. This is likely to require courage- particularly in remaining firm on integrity and exhibiting the vulnerability that may be required to be clear on credibility. Benevolence will call on the courage to do things that may buck the business world trend at times- showing up as human in a professional world where caring is seen as weak.

Putting Trust into practice when leading teams

Trust in teams

Trust, and its contextually designed cousin Psychological Safety, provide the basis of high performing teams.

Without Trust there can be no healthy conflict. Healthy conflict is the source of ideas and commitments in diverse teams (and we want diverse teams because homogeneous teams bring little new). Without the commitments we cannot build accountability and this is the road to poor attention to results. How then to go about working with trust in teams?

As a leader ensure you are prepared and have done your own inner work. You will need to go first on all aspects of trust behaviour.
Notice whats there and not there. There are checklists and methods of observation that benchmark the presence of trust behaviours and those that suggest a lack of it in teams.
Notice what is being shown non-verbally, and in throw away comments, that might cause you to become curious about how people are feeling and what they believe?
Ask for feedback. Directly in person and conversation or indirectly through written feedback aggregated across groups of people.
Prepare the ground for feedback exploration. Much of this work can be done by you or with the support of others. This particular piece of work we recommend engaging with the support of someone skilled or independent from you and your team if you suspect there may be a trust issue.
Speak openly and listen even more openly. Remain curious and constructive. Accept your contribution. You may need to be ready to let go of some more deeply held “Truths” and being right.
Build commitment around how you want to be, what will change and how you will know?
Acknowledge positive change and challenge what is not accepted in terms of how you want to be as a team.
Be prepared to take courageous and caring action with anything and anyone who threatens the trust in the team.
Similarly, consider what does and does not support psychologically safe environments for team members to be themselves, admit mistakes, speak up, challenge, bring problems and convenient truths, offer ideas and acknowledge each other emotionally and practically.
This will require patience and consistency. Falling over and getting up without slipping back, blaming or giving up will role model what it takes.
Celebrate success for the outcome of the way you have all chosen to be. In other words make how you are as important and what you deliver.