Creating Trust in Management

Trust is one of the most important characteristics of a strong leader and organization. Organizations that are credible, respectful and fair are high-performing businesses. They achieve better results. Their employees are happier, work harder and are much more likely to go above and beyond. Improving trust in your organization or with your team takes deliberate effort, and those companies that get it right consistently beat the market.

Improving Trust With the Executive Suite

The C-Suite has a limited number of members, so there needs to be ways to empower everyone from the frontline representative through the CEO. There’s a lot of room for improvement. When it comes to how well each management layer trusts the organizations, it should come as little surprise that those farthest from the top with the most limited line of sight have the least trust in leadership. Outside the doors of the Executive Suite, only 64% of senior management, 51% of managers and 48% of the rank and file trust the company. Executive-level projects to improve trust will yield the greatest results, and empowering management teams at all levels will make things happen faster.

Executive teams need to show they trust their employees at-large. Within reason, let managers, teams and individuals determine the best way to implement a company’s overarching strategy. This doesn’t mean throw out your Big Five Goals for the year and let the chips fall where they may. Rather, it means structuring policies, procedures and budgets in a way that engages employees.

Open up your employee manual. If you review your policies and procedures, what kinds of risks are they designed to avoid? Is it a question of protecting the consumer by improving quality, or are they designed to protect the organization from its own employees? Are the policies there to foster innovation or to thwart bad actors? Innovative approaches and insightful thinking should be appreciated and rewarded, whereas deceptive and underperforming employees should be excised. Tweaking your policies will improve a sense of fairness amongst peers. It also creates a higher level of engagement by empowering teams to tackle challenges and projects through the corporation’s strategic lens.

Executive teams should bring a level of autonomy to each layer of management. For example, during the budgeting and strategic planning process, allocate some discretionary capital to frontline managers and teams earmarked for innovation and experimentation. Adequately fund the business’s primary goals, however set aside a percentage of those monies for investment by teams. Create greater team accountability by establishing smaller, achievable goals with clear success metrics appropriate to the task or project. It gives the team the power to apply their own problem solving skills and gain an increased sense of pride in the result.

A Trustworthy Management Plan

If you aren’t running the organization, there are steps you can take immediately to improve trust within you bailiwick. Whether it’s a department or a small team, deliberately focusing your self-improvement paradigm on cultivating trust will improve your team’s performance. These tactics must be centered around improving the confidence, welfare and capabilities of each team member while allowing each of them to contribute meaningfully to the decision-making process.

Tweak personal Interactions:

• Show your team that you are vulnerable. It’s okay to ask questions, and it’s okay not to know the answers. Real people have real vulnerabilities, and the ability to share those with your team demonstrates you trust them with more personal information about you.
• Intentionally build relationships without micromanaging. Managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work.
• Share your personal values and experiences. People appreciate learning how folks tick, and many employees want to better manage their manager. Know how and when to share your thoughts. For example, engineers are famous for wanting the freedom to solve the project riddles without much managerial involvement, however they want career guidance.
• Share what you know about situations, explain thought processes and don’t beat around the bush. You will foster an understanding of their role within the larger organization. This has the extra benefit of increasing employee and team engagement.

Provide discretion and wiggle room:

• Managers need to adequately scope assignments, grant the team some authority, and support them the entire way. Ceding control also requires a certain tolerance for mistakes. Rather than taking harsh corrective action, treat an employee’s mistake as an opportunity to facilitate learning.
• Enable job crafting to allow employees to choose which projects they’ll work on. They can focus greater energies on what they care about most, and will be more invested in its outcome. Make sure roles, responsibilities and goals are clear. Set expectations when an employee joins a project, and rely on 360-degree evaluations to measure team member contributions.
• Give everyone attainable stretch goals. Objectives that are impossible cause people to lose hope before they even start. Goals that appear to be barely within reach get employees engaged and excited. Make sure they are rewarded when they hit the finish line.

Model behavior through leadership:

• Exhibit highly ethical behavior from start to finish. You need to be honest, candid and transparent throughout your communications. It also means following company processes and enforcing policies fairly.
• Take action when needed, whether it be due to employee performance or project issues. Teams trust leaders that act judiciously and quickly. Not all actions or decisions are easy, but it is up to you to fulfill those expectations.
• Share information broadly to your team. Some material is sensitive, however most of it can and should be shared. Only 40% of employees report that they are well-informed about their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics.
• Never tell a team to “bring solutions instead of problems.” It gives a clear message that you aren’t invested in helping them grow. Don’t take on their monkeys, rather provide guidance and insights to help them find a solution. It also increases the number of opportunities a manager has to uncover issues that are hurting the team. A team member that comes to you with a problem may have already tried to address it themself. The solution may be out of their control or too intimidating. Your line of sight may help them chart a path, or figure out if another area of the company is already working on it.

Take the First Steps

Now is the perfect time to begin building trust in your team or your organization. Even if you aren’t in a position to change the world, you can begin making positive changes in your own management style which will pay dividends down the road. Changing your style will make you a better leader, which will help advance your career. It’s a rare all-around win.