A Culture of Trust

  Career Development   Leadership   New Practitioners   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Creating a culture of trust is one of the most important roles of a leader. Trust improves team morale, which improves performance. Here are six cornerstones to building a culture of trust on your teams, from keeping your word to sharing the spotlight.

Alice and Bob are both supervisors at a medium-sized company. One day over lunch, they were comparing the pluses and minuses of some of their past bosses. During the discussion, they were reminded of Greg, probably the best leader they ever had.

While Greg was personable, focused, and set high standards, they concluded Greg’s greatest quality was that he created a culture of trust.

Greg did not yell, threaten or lie to get his teams to meet short-term deadlines. He also did not, and would not sacrifice long-term success to meet short-term deadlines.

This was in stark contrast to Mack, who was Greg’s polar opposite. Mack would lie to his customers about the ability to meet accelerated schedules. In turn, he would peddle these same falsehoods to his team about a non-existent urgent customer need to meet the accelerated schedule. The kicker? After the team rallied to accomplish its goals on a sped-up timeline, Mack would proudly — and fraudulently — claim success for their results. He abused his team for his personal gain, and the team members would leave Mack’s team at the earliest …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.