When I start working with a team, the issues that I hear most often are centered around how to build trust and problems rooted in communication issues. That’s why these two topics are so important when you consider your leadership style, how to manage your team, and especially how to manage conflict within a team (because conflict is healthy, y’all!)
Today, I’m focusing on how to build trust at work. Leaders, it starts with you, and what I have to say about what you need to share and what you need to say may make you a little nervous. But ultimately, developing this skill will allow your team to trust you more. This will spill over into how they trust and communicate with each other.
Lead Kick Ass Meetings
Download this toolkit and you'll get resources to:
- Easily manage task items from every meeting
- Design agendas quickly and allow folks the right info to prepare
- Hold your next effective staff meeting with focused content
- Run a quick daily meeting so your team gets more shit done
- Have your staff turn in meaningful updates so meetings are shorter
- Start meetings in an engaging way. Get everyone to laugh, not roll their eyes.
Read the full transcript:
Hey there, friend, it’s Stefanie Krievins, founder of the Pro Troublemaker Nation, where I share tips and encouragement so you can fix your hot messes. And today I wanna talk about how to improve trust in the workplace, at your job, with the people that you work most closely with. Usually when a potential client brings me in, one of the first things that I hear from them is no one trusts each other, we’ve got a trust problem, and we don’t communicate effectively. And then when I ask, okay, tell me about the symptoms. Tell me what’s going on. Well, there’s not enough communication and I feel like when she says something, she means something else. These are two red flags for me, my friends. And I’m guessing you have those as well ’cause this happens on a lot of teams.
So in the next video, we’re gonna talk about how to improve communication on a team. Today, I wanna talk about how to improve trust, and it starts with you. If you want to trust other people, you must first be trustworthy. So how do you do that in the workplace? You have to display vulnerability. Okay, calm down, all right, did I just make your armpits sweat a little bit? Here’s what I mean by vulnerability, the willingness to say, I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers, let’s figure it out together. It is as simple as that, but depending on how big your ego is, it may not be easy. To display vulnerability, to build trust, say I don’t know more often. As a leader, I want you to define what transparency means within your organization and with your team.
Nowadays, employees expect more information. They expect a slightly more democratic organization than they did 20, 25 years ago. In order to create the expectations in which your employees can engage with you with transparency, you must define that for the team. Otherwise their expectations are gonna take over the conversation, and as the leader, you must define transparency. What numbers do you share, what numbers don’t you share? What do you communicate, how often do you communicate? Because what they say when they want transparency, here’s a little top secret, my friend, is oftentimes what they want is frequent, consistent, thorough communication from you. So if you wanna build trust in the workplace, if you feel like there’s disconnects on your team, you as a leader must go first, and go first by saying I don’t know, I don’t have it all figured out, let’s figure it out together.
All right, now I would love to hear your story wherever you’re watching this. How have you seen increased trust impact the team? What good has it done for your team? And then let’s get off the internet and get the real work done, and I’ll see you next time, friend.
