“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships,” said New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal best-selling author Stephen Covey.
Leaders know that to create an efficient and impactful organization, they can’t do it alone. They need a team to make extraordinary things happen. And to create a team that wants to act, the exemplary leader must foster collaboration by creating an environment of trust.
Trust is a strong predictor of employee satisfaction, and it is linked with profitability. High-trust organizations have been shown to outperform low-trust organizations by 286%.
The Research
In a simulation, business executives (the leaders) were given identical information about a difficult manufacturing-marketing policy decision and then asked the group of constituents to solve a problem related to that info. Half of the group were part of a team where the leader had high-trust, while the other had a leader with low-trust. The results indicated that teams with high-trust had more fruitful discussions and decisions; while the team with low-trust were ignored and distorted. Matter of fact, the low-trust team began slandering each other and engaged in name-calling since there was poor productivity.
The experiment demonstrated that high-performing teams are those that give everyone in the organization a chance to speak up and offer their ideas. Trust, is not only the glue of life, but of a team as well.
Be The First to Trust
Building trust comes with proactivity -- someone must begin to create that environment. Someone must be willing to risk being the first to open up. Leaders go first. Leaders take the chance to foster communication, bet that others won’t betray the confidence, and risk that others won’t take advantage of them. And the first step requires an incredible amount of self-confidence. But the end result is worth it. Trust is contagious, just like a virus. When you trust others, they are more likely to trust you. And when you don’t trust others, they won’t trust you.
Masud, a Senior Coordinator at a health care company, experienced the development of trust when asked to assemble a team of researchers. In order to create trust, he informed his team that it was his first time leading such a project, and that he asked everyone for their help with ideas and suggestions. From day one, his team members knew that they were open to suggest anything, since he had lent that trust to them. This got the team fully engaged and they took ownership of their work.
Final Thoughts
When you create a climate of trust, you create a workplace that allows people to freely contribute and innovate. And that’s what all team members want -- I know for sure that I want to work in such an environment.. They want their ideas, work, and discussions to positively impact the organization.
Note: All knowledge and ideas are attained from the book"The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations 5th Edition". This blog summarizes the content from the book, but may unintentionally contain the same wording.
Comments