Circle Of Trust

According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, investing in employee trust is investing in your bottom line. Leaders have a major role in building trust, which in turn leads to team stickiness and improved productivity.

- Omar L Harris

When asked to define leadership in a single word, many people choose influence. Of course, there are many ways to obtain influence (and therefore leadership) in an organisation. But one of the biggest levers is one you may not think about often enough: trust.

Trust is defined as the consistent demonstration of shared team values, comprised of transactional continuums based on past behaviour related to communication, competence, and contracts (doing what one commits to do, on time and in full).

Have you, as a leader, built trust? To find out, begin by asking these four crucial questions:

To what degree does my team trust me as their leader?

Why or why not? How will I know if they do or don’t? What more can I do to build trust with my teams?

Trust is tricky. You cannot just go around polling employees about whether they trust you. Also, even if the answer is yes, they do trust you, the ‘why’ is almost as important. And consider this: your people may have never even paused to reflect on ‘why’ or ‘why not’ they trust you.

So why is trust so instrumental to a leader’s success if people rarely consciously consider it?

Leadership used to be about getting people to work for you because of the power of the position you held. In this model, the title and the number of direct reports were a reflection of your leadership capability. In today’s less hierarchical, virtual business world, influencing others to follow you regardless of your positional power becomes far more critical. Building trust is the true ability of today’s boundary-less power influencers.