Building trust
Questions I get asked regularly:
How do I keep good employees?
What do I do with my culture to create a great place to work so that I can keep valued and trusted employees?
Building trust with your employees is key to retaining and growing them. Here, I’ll give you my top four tips for building trust within your teams and with your employees, but first I’ll tackle a couple of misnomers.
Firstly, please don’t trust me. Now, that might sound odd, but stick with me. I don’t trust myself! So often, I let myself down, I’ll break my promises to those around me. I’m sure you can relate. We can’t talk about building trust without first finding our true starting point — and that is that we can all be quite unreliable, quite untrustworthy.
So how do we build this value called trust?
Trust is based on perception of our behaviours. As we build self-aware leaders who understand the importance of showing up well to their teams, demonstrating the values of the organisation each and every day.
Building trust in genuine relationships takes TIME.
Especially when we're new to leadership, we often want to show our teams that we've got it all together. It's certainly a log that I tripped over when I was new in leadership — acting like I had it all together and hoping it looked like I knew way more than I did.
Being genuine around your people, genuine around your teams, and sharing vulnerabilities, strengths and weaknesses are not being scared to let them know that you don't have the answer.
I encourage you to take the stance of “I am just the leader.”
My job is just to help these people move forward in a common direction. But this doesn't mean I need to know all the answers. We actually want to surround ourselves with experts — we don’t need to be the expert.
The servant leadership model puts a really large emphasis on placing the needs of others before ourselves. At Grace Curve Consulting, this is one of our foundational beliefs.
How do we serve others first before we try and lead them? This is our main focus as we work closely with leadership teams around the country. This perspective allows us to take a different mindset when we're trying to lead teams that we're involved in, and it shows a great deal of care.
Start with building caring relationships.
Before asking them to do any task for us, we want to show care and concern for the individual. We want to show them that we're invested in their development. We want to show them that we want the best outcomes for them when they come to work each and every day.
As we demonstrate a consistent, caring approach and a servant leadership approach, the more trust we'll build up over time.
See every day as an opportunity.
Naturally, we’ll each gravitate towards some individuals more than others. Surround yourself with people that you enjoy working with. Surround yourself with people that are going to challenge you and get the best out of you like you're trying to get the best out of them.
Don't overlook the time you take to be with your teams. There's no shortcut to building relationships with your people, and the more time you can invest around your people and with your teams, the stronger the relationship will build over time.
Integrity is doing what you’ll say you’ll do.
We're never gonna tick every box when it comes to integrity, but as we build this value ourselves, we give our employees opportunities to trust us. Look for opportunities to spend time, and to follow through on commitments for your team — this will likely fast-track your way to building trust.
