Do you have trust issues?
May 30, 2023
Imagine being in the Board Room, talking about the commercial upside of being a leader who builds trust. I found myself on a screen in exactly that conversation and smiling as this conversation took place. I love trust conversations - because they are so powerful.
As I was putting the slides together for this session, I reflected on just about every model or framework that talks about high performance, and it was unsurprising to me that trust features in nearly every single one of them. It’s even our own model.
We all agree, that both for leaders and employees alike, trust is an essential ingredient for the commercial success of your business. If you are struggling with some of the results described below, chances are that you have a trust issue.
I get the privilege of taking teams through our Ways of Working program and in just about every instance, the core challenges leadership teams are facing that get in the way of their performance are:
- Attracting and keeping talent
- Building engagement and reducing people leaving
- Managing well-being, burnout, sick days
- Quiet quitting and low employee satisfaction
When we mention trust being part of the problem, it can often be pushed aside as a reason. Perhaps because it’s hard to understand. But in research from Forbes 63% of employees say that they don’t trust their senior leaders - which means it's worth paying attention to.
If people don’t trust your business, they won’t apply to join you. If they detect an untrustworthy leader, they’ll look somewhere else. Lack of trust puts people into a neurochemically negative state, which can have both physical and psychological long-term effects. This leads to increased burnout and sickness. If employees aren’t trusted to do their jobs, and can’t trust each other, they tend to stop trying. ALL of this leads to lower business performance. The opposite of what most leadership teams are after.
In contrast, in an article called “The Neuroscience of Trust”, which appeared in the January 2017 Harvard Business Review, Claremont Graduate University Professor Paul Zak wrote that:
“Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report:
74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout”.
Pretty compelling stuff.
Imagine if you are a $100m revenue business. 50% higher productivity gives you a $150m business. Add to that less time spent replacing and training new staff members. That’s more profit, more to reinvest in the business, and more to develop new products, projects, etc. The sky is the limit.
Yet trust seems to remain a nebulous concept to most people and as a result, We know what it feels like to trust or not trust someone, but it is fascinating to me that when asked, most people can’t describe trust and they don’t know how to build it.
There are real examples of this every day. Take for example a new hire. They might find it hard to trust those around them and identify who is an ally and who is a potential threat. Equally, the leader of the team might not have anyone to confide in because they don’t trust anyone. These can be significant barriers to performance and productivity. They also get in the way of people unleashing their potential.
Building trust is a game of exponential returns - once it starts to build, it can really pick up momentum. It is also fragile. Once broken, it’s really hard to repair.
The WoW Lab that we offer as part of our program talks about Building Trust in really practical and easy-to-understand terms. The important part of trust building is to know which level of trust you are at with each member of your team so you can take the right actions that actually build trust. It’s about turning a nebulous concept into a graspable and usable framework.
The WoW Lab covers the 4 levels of trust: Cognitive, Aligned, Relational, and Emotional.
We then talk about the SERVICE model which helps you build trust. I'd love to tell you more about that one!
If you or your team are struggling to get to grips with trust and would like some help, please reach out. We would love to support you to get where you want to be.
If you'd like to learn more about Ways of Working, click here
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- Read our blogs - click here
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