Trust is a deep and visceral feeling, particularly in the context of the work environment. If you ask any leader who they trust on their team, their reaction is usually instantaneous – they can easily categorize their colleagues into two columns on a piece of paper – the ones they trust implicitly on one side and the ones they do not trust on the other side. Unfortunately, most people overestimate the amount of trust in their relationships with colleagues, and more significantly, underestimate the constant effort required to operate in a high trust environment.
Trust is the glue inside companies that enables high performing teams and cultures to form, perform, and outperform. Through a series of studies, Paul J. Zak, researcher and author of Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies, established a link between higher levels of trust and economic performance. He found that people at high-trust companies reported: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout (compared with people at low-trust companies).
High Trust Behaviors
On a high trust team, people practice the concepts of “assuming good intent” and “I’ve got your back” leadership in their daily interactions. Both concepts are straightforward, but to break them down simply:
Assuming Good Intent
The first concept is focused on how you assess your colleague’s competence in real time. Assuming good intent requires you to provide a certain benefit of the doubt and recognition that your colleague is trying to do the right thing. This means being an active listener who receives information well and attempts to understand their perspective. The real test here is when your colleague shares bad news, how well do you receive it? If you immediately react with anger or frustration, you are not assuming good intent. This erodes trust over time across the entire team because this sort of behavior is noticeable and contagious. Instead, you need to acknowledge the issue and its severity, then begin to seek context to understand how or why something happened in order to begin fixing the issue. This signals that you recognize issues will arise as a part of the job and increases the psychological safety across the team. This is important because in high trust environments, bad news surfaces faster which can be a competitive advantage for teams.
I’ve Got Your Back Leadership
The second concept to practice is “I’ve got your back” leadership. This is a character test in terms of how well you treat and think about others in the work environment. This simply means that when you hear anything that impacts a colleague, you give them a heads up or help them directly – even if it’s not in your job description. When you share information and support others, you are increasing context and looking for ways to co-author outcomes with your colleagues – it signals that you care about their success as much as your own. This practice increases executive trust because you are being transparent, looking for solutions, and improving the overall output for you and your peers.
In low trust environments, executives devolve from a team approach to one of individualism, where they focus on the work that is within their control. There tend to be special people who have access to special information that they use to demonstrate their importance to others, rather than effectively coordinating with their team and peers. It becomes too hard to collaborate with colleagues who have their own self-interest at heart, as opposed to having each other’s backs, so others often decide to limit or avoid interactions with people on the no / low trust side of the paper. When they do interact, the trust is low, so there’s no benefit of the doubt. This will lead to a lot of “finger-pointing” and blaming each other when problems arise.
The Executive Trust Matrix
There is a simple model for assessing executive trust, and it tends to be measured on two continuums – Character and Competence. On the X axis is “Character” from low to high (in slang terms it is the jerk continuum and assessment of whether others like working with you). On the Y axis is “Competence.” A high executive competence is characterized by someone who does what they say they will do with high reliability and output. Establishing executive trust happens over time, as a person demonstrates both their level of competence – how good they are at doing their job – and their character – how easy and likable they are to work with. The goal in the trust matrix is for someone to have a reasonable user interface combined with high executive competence. This isn’t about rainbows and unicorns, as there is often a similar correlation with low effectiveness when someone is overly nice, and it leads to low levels of trust because they cannot be counted on for their executive competence.
Interestingly, many highly competent executives who individually deliver great results can be lower on the character scale due to the friction that may inject when working with others. It’s as if they believe they do not have to follow the same set of behavioral expectations because of the quality of their individual output. They tend to have large egos, and those around them are constantly “doing the math” to figure out whether engaging them is worth the trouble (it usually isn’t).
Conclusion
In our dynamic and ever-changing world where no leader can predict the future, having high levels of executive trust in your teams becomes even more important. Leaders and team members can make a couple simple shifts and incorporate trust-accruing behaviors to have a positive impact on their employees, teams, and organization’s performance.
Read the full article here
