3.6 Building trust

Earning trust from your team

But ‘employees need to earn my trust’ – right? Wrong – this is a really old-fashioned attitude, and actually quite a lot of the time we give trust to people who have not earned it. According to Armstrong (2019): ‘When we believe that people must earn our trust, we begin putting in padlocks that only we have the keys to, all the while hoping that others will open their doors to us’.

Jurgen Appelo (2011) points out that trust operates in two directions. You can choose to trust someone, and they can choose to trust you – but this might not happen at the same time.

There may be times that you trust your team, but they may not have trust in you as a leader. You cannot assume the team will trust you – trust has to be earned as a leader. When this is lacking, this can cause issues for the team.

Appelo (2011) argues that as a leader, you need to be consistent in your behaviour to build trust. Be ‘predictably pleasant’ to team members to help establish affective trust. Similarly, you can ‘build trust simply by doing what you have committed to do’. The main habit you need to develop as a leader is keeping your commitments. So, if you have promised to give responsibilities to other team members, do not interfere or start micromanaging. If you promise to help a colleague or send them some information, remember to do this.

Keeping your commitments can help you earn trust, but remember also that trust is easily destroyed if you do not do what you say you will do.

Building blocks of trust

Jaffe (2018) outlines some of the ways to build trust:

1. Reliability and dependability
2. Transparency
3. Competency
4. Sincerity, authenticity and congruency
5. Fairness
6. Openness and vulnerability

Trust is a natural response to certain qualities in a person and if those are absent then trust can disappear.

Achieving a culture of trust

To build a culture of trust in a workplace where fear is widespread is difficult. Even suggesting change may lead to defensiveness. As a leader, however, you may have to step out of your comfort zone to build trust in the team. Ryan (2018) offers some suggestions on how to do this:

• Talk with your team about the culture of the organisation. Discuss where there is fear and where there is trust, and how to improve things. If there is fear and a lack of trust in the culture, it may take time for team members to feel safe expressing their views. You need to support that safety.
• Avoid a blame culture – as you have seen many times, psychological safety and a willingness to admit mistakes are crucial for successful agile teams. As part of this, admit both your own mistakes and mistakes made in other parts of the organisation that are relevant to your team.
• Review employee handbooks and policies – are these rules that shape the culture likely to instil fear or trust? Think about what you can do to change this.
• Try to create opportunities for meetings between senior leadership and those working on the front line. Trust will be improved if those at all levels get to know each other better as people.
• Show that you value your team members as people in your interactions with them.
• Check in with team members regularly and respond to their feedback.
• Avoid jargon when communicating with your team – communicate with them straightforwardly.
• Be honest with your team in communicating what is going on in the wider organisation, in terms of plans, priorities and challenges.

In the next video, contributors talk about the importance of building trust, and approaches that can be taken to achieve it.

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_2_2022_sept108_building_trust_compressed.mp4

Show transcript | Hide transcript

Transcript

ELISE LOCKYER

Trust in a hybrid-working, remote-working environment is the most important thing. And they must trust you as much as you've got to trust them. If people don't trust your leadership team, your executive team, and the executive and leadership team are questioning whether they trust their individuals, there's a fundamental problem that you need to address.

So I think the most important way of creating trust is yes, through communication, but that communication needs to be specifically clear. You need clarity in terms of the strategic direction of the business. You need to be clear and honest with your people around what's most important. And the goals will always be stretching in somewhere like Sonovate. They will be. But you need to be as open and as honest and challenging to your people so they understand what's important. They can do their bit and share their skills in what's important and how to deliver against them, but recognising the human point of the world.

The human element of human resources has never been as important as it is today. And whilst a lot of HR teams are being called now "the people team," it's really important to focus on the humans that sit behind the job titles, the roles, the departments within the organisation. Everybody has something going on in their lives, which we may not necessarily be aware of. So whilst the trusting element is important, regardless of what's going on in their lives, it's about making sure we have the communication and the ability to understand what that is, support them through that period, and understanding that at that point in time that work might not be their main priority, for whatever reason. But we can support them in getting through that period in their life to enable them to add more things when things are getting better.

Now clearly, there are times where this doesn't always work out. And we do need to manage performance. That is still a key topic. It is still essential as a business that we deliver what we're supposed to do strategically and commercially. But the human element, and really supporting and driving that within any organisation, certainly within Sonovate, is absolutely essential to make sure that people are giving, being, becoming their best selves within the business. And there will be peaks and troughs within that. And we'll support them throughout that.

JONATHAN MORGAN

When the pandemic hit, we saw a huge amount of trust being transferred from the management to the workforce. And in the main, the workforce has absolutely, 100% responded by delivering the level of quality of work and the level of amount of work that they always did when they were in the office. And that's been an amazing thing to see. In the office of course, you're there, you're seeing them, you're helping them, hopefully, to achieve their aims. When they're working from home, yes, there is an element of trust there. Yes, there is an element of not being able to watch them on every minute of the day. But actually, the results are the work. And the results are in every meeting that we have and the quality of the work that they deliver.

Object Matrix built trust with the employees, really, by if you like regular meetings, perhaps when we were in the office, we didn't necessarily speak to everybody every day. We were just here. We were doing our work. We were in meetings sometimes, but not always. We did take a conscious decision when working from home that meetings should happen every day, and nobody should be left alone. Nobody should be left alone because maybe, they get very focused on the problem at hand without discussing it. They shouldn't be left at home because ultimately, that builds trust for sharing amongst co-workers and management, what's happening. And they shouldn't be left alone also, for their own mental health reasons. People can very easily spiral in a bad direction if they don't have contacts with their co-workers and the world in general. So there are many reasons why regular communication is fundamental to building trust between the company at all levels for interaction.

LISETTE SUTHERLAND

On top of that, though there is the organisational side of just being a team. And so for that, we can dive probably more into this in a bit. But for that I would say, one of the things about team building and what we know about trust on a remote team is that it's built on reliability, consistency and responsiveness. So you need to create an environment in which you can build reliability, consistency and responsiveness. So in order to do that, we start by creating agreements for how we're going to work together. And that's just basic. Like, what information are we going to share? How are we going to communicate? How do we know each other are doing? And then, we build regular feedback loops. So agile software teams have retrospectives once every week or once every two weeks. And it's not about the work. It's more on how they're doing as a team. And I think that that is a brilliant practice to bring into any team is to just once every two weeks, sit down and talk about what's going well, what's not going well, what could we do better, and what are we still questioning. Right? Like, just that act alone builds trust on the team. So it's not one thing, which is why it makes it so complicated. But it's a variety of things that we have to do deliberately in order to have it.

So in the past when we were working together in a physical office, we kind of knew what was going on by proximity. And nothing was too far away. You could always correct it by just walking over to a desk. When we go remote, we have to create, we have to visualise that environment in a different way-- or when we go hybrid. So our work needs to go online, but so does our task planning and how or where we have to visualise that, somehow. Every company has a different system, so there is no one right system. But we definitely know that visualising the work and making it more transparent, one, it helps with everybody knowing what's going on, and it helps build trust in the environment, because we have to go from being time-oriented to being results-oriented. Which sounds super easy to say, until you really start to dive into-- I mean, just think about, how do on any given week for yourself, if you've been productive or not? Like, how do you measure that for yourself?

NATASHA DAVIES

I think it's probably fair to say that the pandemic has accelerated a shift in ways of working that was probably underway already. And organisations, like Chwarae Teg, we've been talking about the need for more flexible, agile, remote, inclusive ways to working for a long time. And the pandemic kind of forced the issue, particularly in relation to remote work, because we had no choice other than to support many workers to work from home. So I think it really challenged a lot of perceptions about what is and isn't possible, dispel some of the myths, I guess, around productivity might go down if people aren't in the office, how can I trust people to be doing the work that they say that they're doing. So it's kind of shifted that quite significantly.

I think from our perspective, we'd say that the shift is happening whether we like it or not. So I think it's really important as we move forward that anybody who's involved in structuring and organising workplaces are prioritising issues, like autonomy and choice, thinking about how people's different circumstances might affect how they experience changes in how we work and the shift to hybrid working. It's really important that equality is built in from the start, really simple things, like asking staff what they think, how they found working from home during the pandemic and post-pandemic, what they think might be best going forward. Working with community groups, trusted leaders within different communities, because trust is a big issue as well, particularly for example, if we're talking about people from ethnic minority backgrounds, racism is still rife and discrimination is still rife that there are so many stories of bad experiences within employment, particularly within areas where perhaps, there is a particularly smaller population of people from an ethnic minority background, which is why we see huge numbers of young ethnic minority people leaving south Wales for example, to move to places like Birmingham and London because there's a sense that that's going to be a more welcoming and inclusive and safer environment for them.

So I think that trust piece is really important. And we can do a lot with local communities thinking about routes in-- is there more that we can do around apprenticeships, internships to give people a hands-on opportunity to come in and find their way? And bringing that positive action measure in as well, I think is a really important thing, because we don't live in a meritocracy. I wish that we did. But the reality is that sometimes, we need to treat people differently in order to make sure we have fair and equitable outcomes. And until we actually get to the point where we have a level playing field, that's going to be a requirement I think.

End transcript

Download