Building trust
Creating environments which people feel comfortable in is critical to having a strong successful team and to reduce drama. In my years as a leader it’s been my observation that trust is the foundation to creating positive and productive conditions. When trust is missing, teams fray and become highly dysfunctional. The focus goes to things which don’t serve the community or the business and team morale takes a big hit. There are many ways to improve trust within organizations. I will be exploring a few different tools which I’ve found to be helpful in my practice as a leader.
Johari Window
The Johari window was developed to help people understand their relationship to themselves and others. To build trust, your people need to be able to know you and feel that they have a connection with you. Often it is used as an operation tool to demonstrate how someone might know you, but I like it as a mental model.
There are two axes, one is known to self and the other is known to others. The mental model that you have of yourself is in the upper left hand corner called the Arena, this is known to yourself and known to others. To the right of that is the blind spot which is denoted as known to others but not known to yourself. This area is very difficult to get insight into by yourself and comes from engaging with others. To the bottom left is the Facade, which is known to yourself and not known to others. As an individual you can influence something that is within the facade by how you reveal yourself to others. The final quadrant is the unknown. This area is not known to yourself and not known to others.
For the purposes of trust, I see expanding the arena as a critical way of being more known to others. When you share your feelings, thoughts and perspective you are allowing yourself to be more known which at its core increases trust. The closer you hold your thoughts and feelings the less trust you’ll have with someone. Earlier in my career I would get feedback that I was “robotic”. A lot of this had to do with me not sharing more of myself, my thoughts and feelings and instead overly focused on the work to be done. This significantly impacted the trust people had of me and made it much harder for me to have open conversations about the road ahead.
Clear and consistent communication
When people don’t know what to expect or what the goal is, they will often project into that space. What is projected isn’t going to be what you expect it to be and often can come from a place of fear. If you want to build trust, get clear and consistent in how you communicate. There are a few basic things you can do to greatly improve how you communicate.
Know what the key message is and stick to it. If you are trying to communicate and you find yourself trying to get 8 key messages across, go back to the drawing board. Very little of what you are talking about is going to land, so pick your one or two things and make sure those are clear as day to who you are speaking with. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself over and over again until people are sick of hearing the message if it is important.
The same goes for decisions, especially if they are complicated or challenging. Be as clear as you can be and keep it direct. Don’t spend your time talking around the decision itself or about all of the various factors that went into the decision. You can get to that later. If you aren’t saying something along the lines of “The decision has been made to xyz” then you are likely not being clear enough with announcing the decision to the team.
Honesty and integrity
Foundations of relationships are built and broken on honesty and integrity. It can take a long time to build trust, but only a few moments to break it down. I’ve found the clear commitments and keeping to those commitments help a lot on this front. If you keep on promising that you’ll do something and then don’t, I’m not going to trust you at your word. This is exacerbated if you don’t follow up with an acknowledgement about what has happened. A key to making this go well is to not to commit to something that you don’t believe you can do. It’s usually fine to say that you can’t commit to doing something. It allows you and the team to have richer conversations about what can get done and get to a place where you can stand by your commitments.
A common problem here will be the optimistic commitment. Many times I’ve taken on a lot of commitments, hoping that everything is going to line up just perfectly and I am able to get everything done. Not surprisingly this doesn’t usually work out well. Projects take me longer than I anticipate, more work comes up, my productivity happens in spurts and a variety of other things can cause issues when you do this. Plan on this when you are committing to something and give yourself some space so you will know if you can keep your commitment or not.
There are a few of the tools that I’ve used over time to help build stronger trust with my teams. I hope they work well for you!