Trust

Introduction

Research consistently shows that it’s clear, creating an employee-centric culture can be good for business. But how do you do that effectively? Culture is typically designed in an ad hoc way around random perks, socials and events. While such efforts might boost workplace happiness in the short term, they fail to have any lasting effect on talent retention or performance.

Research* has found that building a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organisations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.

*Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies (Paul J. Zak)

What is Trust? What does it mean to trust someone?

This is often an overlooked aspect of creating high trust working environments.  It's much easier to consider whether you have trust in different aspects of a person or of a group.  Consider how much trust you have in someone's ability, attitude and intentions separately.  This is really important because someone may have gained your trust by demonstrating that they are able to do a specific thing very well.  But can you trust them to excel in a different type of task?  This aspect of Trust starts to cross over with  Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership model.

Research into the Neuroscience of Trust (which also contains an 8 point approach to building trust) confirms what we all know, you cultivate trust by setting a clear direction, giving people what they need to see it through, and getting out of their way.  Leaders in high-trust workplaces ask for help from colleagues instead of just telling them to do things. Research found that this stimulates oxytocin production in others, increasing their trust and cooperation.

It’s not about being easy on your employees or expecting less from them. High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults.  Our VFS 4A framework has been shown to consistently create high-trust, high performing workforces.

Increase Trust with these practices:

• Conduct Gemba Walks

• Build Psychological Safety

• Constructively grow peer to peer accountability

• Use The Decider Protocol to reach consensus

• Use Team Charters

• Train your employees for greater Personal Agility

Clarifying Predictive Trust versus Vulnerability-based Trust

What Next?

What can you do to establish and grow trust in your relationships?

Things you can do to build trust today:

• Be clear about your abilities and limitations.

• Deliver against your commitments.

• Actively discuss trust levels between groups and individuals. Solicit feedback on the current level of trust and ways trust can be improved on a regular basis.

• Ask for feedback on an individual level with team members and stakeholders.

• Acknowledge mistakes, and when others make them, reinforce a no-blame culture. Use the opportunity to learn and grow as a team.

Areas your VFS Consultant can help you:

• Evaluating whether to trust and what to trust: probability of trustworthiness,  risks & impacts versus rewards of trusting without validation. Gaining trust in someone's ability, attitude and intent.

• Maximise Feedback: Consider learning more in an iterative manner, just as we strive to practice in other agile techniques.  Inspect and adapt,  maximise feedback.  Learn how to give and to ask for feedback.

• Understanding levels of trust: establish and maintain a base level of trust before making efforts to increase trust.  What do we mean by levels of trust?  Well, I trust you with this information,  with this secret, but not with my life.

VFS Personal Agility Programme - Trust-related aspects:

see VFS Personal Agility Programme

These are the topics we cover in our programme to help teams build trust, and ultimately improve performance.  Read more about Personal Agility.

• Establish safety and then trust:

  • make it safe

  • listen first

  • coach to be valuable, you don't have to be an expert (The difference between coaching and mentoring)

• Try to find common ground between different parties

• Vital Behaviours: Open, humble, kind & curious... all whilst showing a desire to excel and achieve.
  Read more about vital behaviours as part of high performing teams.

  • Don't jump to conclusions or solutions.  Take time to get a good understanding of the problems to be solved

  • Understand what motivates your stakeholders

  • Develop empathy

  • Establish an adult-adult relationship (as opposed to an adult-child).  You need to believe and to be seen as equals in the relationship

Related pages:

• The Trust Equation 

• The Neuroscience of Trust

• The Trust - Transparency Loop

• Psychological Safety

• Improve Psychological Safety in the Workplace

• Structured Mentoring - Coach, Mentor, Provide Feedback with transparency, vulnerability and authenticity

• Building Competence

• The Personal Agility Programme