How do you generate trust?

Great Topic!

Developing, nurturing, and sustaining trust must be an on-going leadership activity. I find a team will reciprocate a leader’s traits and behaviors defining an optimistic culture ONLY if the team trusts what the leader does and says (walk the talk). This means a leader supports the program vision and mission demonstrating this through high levels of communication, delegation, and mentoring/training opportunities. It’s not hard to identify a liar or someone who can’t stand up for their team’s beliefs and opinions. As possible, it’s important to be transparent about decisions and governance intention. If team members believe in their leadership they’re more likely to behave in a similar manner. There will always be a rotten egg in the bunch. The key is to manage expectation and minimize overall stakeholder risk.

I agree with you Valerie.

Trust is one of critical link of conducive Project environment. Without creating a trustworthy culture among your team it is difficult to achieve set success.

Openess and effective communication is very important to built trust among your team. Transparency is another critical element to gain trust from your team members. Showing and demonstrating empathy is another success factor to win trust from your team.

The culture of any organization (or team) is shaped by the best behavior the leader is willing to amplify. Modeling the right behavior, and facilitating the team's creation of a working agreement which includes how team members will deal with interpersonal conflicts and encouraging candid feedback can all help.

Longevity also helps which is another benefit of long-lived value stream-centric teams over short-lived project teams.

Kiron

Interesting one.

Valerie, this is a great topic. Thank you. Trust is the basis of any relationship. Trust is shaped by multiple factors such as organizational culture, type of leadership and a unique relationship of the project manager and the team.

In my opinion, being humble and upfront on stating our own expectations is critical for the team to understand what is expected. It will be unfair to demand trust when we are not upfront stating our expectations and living a culture of openness.

This first steps goes a long way in creating a culture of trust. .

This is good topic. I believe its the team which makes the culture and leader is the one who can shape that by his/her behavior. How management treats its people impacts everything and that makes a lot of difference. I have worked with leaders who creates environment of trust and stands by the team in bad times and hence created a high performance team.

Valerie, thanks for this topic.

A culture of trust in an organization instills staff and any projects team the liberty of exercising the "package\" of behaviors that trust brings.
"The benefits of a ....model based on trust are significant. In such relationships, even disagreements can be negotiated collaboratively (Kerzner, 2004)".

I see trust as the willingness to suffer. It is an emotion, that can (and should) be triggered by a leader.
If a leader
* respects my status, role and personality
* acts responsible e.g. by taking blame for team failures,
* reduces fear and increases certainty, e.g. by showing a vision
* allows autonomy, e.g. delegates decision making and
* instills a team identity and pride and
* decides fairly
- who should not trust this leader.