Ten Ways To Build Trust On Your Team

 

1. The first way to build trust in your organization is to talk about fear and trust as business topics. For many leaders, this is the hardest step to take. We have been trained not to talk about our fears. If there is a high level of fear in your organization already, employees may bite their lips rather than tell the truth about your toxic culture even when the topic appears on a meeting agenda.

2. The second way to build trust in your organization is to step away from the philosophy of blaming and shaming employees for mistakes. Every mistake is a learning opportunity. If you track your employees' mistakes but say nothing about their triumphs, you are begging for the best people to leave and only the most fearful ones to stay.

3. The third way to build trust in your culture is to review your employee handbook and policies. Most organizations have way too many picky rules and punishments embedded in their cultures by way of the employee handbook. Your employees are not wayward children. They are qualified, creative adults and value creators. Honor them, and don't pester them with grade school rules. The typical employee handbook could shrink by 75% -- and should.

4. The fourth way to build trust in your culture is to get your executives in front of employees as often as possible and in the most informal settings you can arrange. Tell your CEO and VPs to show up at department meetings so they can meet and mingle with your employees in every function. Get them out among the people who report to them.

If you are a CEO or VP and you're not spending half your time with non-leadership employees, you are missing out. You are not connected to your team. Let people see you making decisions and leading your staff. Let them get a sense of you beyond your title and your bio. Why be a leader if you only lead through a closed office door?

5. The fifth way to build trust in your culture is to value your employees as people more than you value them as production units. You get to show how much you value your employees every day, in a thousand ways. When you make human decisions instead of mechanical ones based only on dollars and cents or "operational efficiency," people notice.

6. The sixth way to build trust in your culture is to role model appropriate leadership and get your fellow leaders to do the same thing.  Too many managers look at "the employees" as a bloc and seldom think about the individual people they supervise, or their needs or challenges. Real leaders are intently focused on the people who report to them and the energy on the team. Every leader can develop that same focus. You can support one another in the journey!

7. The seventh way to build trust in your culture is to admit when the company makes mistakes, or when you personally make a mistake.

8. The eighth way to build a trusting culture is to use a human voice in your communications with employees. Get rid of the terse, governmental jargon used too often in business communications, and address your employees as the brilliant human beings they are.

9. The ninth way to build trust in your culture is to ask your employees how they're doing, what they think and what they'd like to see at work -- all the time. Don't do it through an anonymous survey. When you have to promise anonymity to get honest answers from your employees, you've already lost the war between fear and trust.

10. The tenth way to build trust in your company is to be honest with employees. The more visibility your employees can get into the future (and their own futures with your firm) the better. The more they know about the organization's plans, priorities, challenges and opportunities the more in sync they will be with the leadership team.

SOURCE:forbes.com