Culture Guide - Trust

Culture of Trust: How to Build and Keep Trust in your Team and Organization

When there is a disconnect between a leader’s words and actions, employees become less engaged

Why Trust?

Trust within the workplace is being able to appreciate what each person brings to the table and using it as the glue to hold and strengthen the structure of the community as a whole. With trust people won’t need to be told where to go or what to do or the expectation to accomplish, they’ll just know and be motivated to do it. The sense of purpose is clear.

What is Trust?

Trust is distinct as it stems from emotion. An unique interaction without words, Trust has its own language within a community. It is about unity in human connection, bonding, understanding, remaining humble, and having the ability to forgive and convey compassion. There is more power in showing trust then in showing authoritative force. Don’t lead with fear, lead with love!

Without trust we don't truly collaborate; we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.

– Stephen M.R. Covey

Trust Metrics to Focus On

Competency

As with self efficacy in gaining the trust of others, competency is the key for the community. This is about your community's ability to engage in an appropriate response, and how it impacts the community as a whole. This is the operation of the collective emotional intelligence of your community. Competency can be the difference between making impulsive decisions that lead to dysfunction and suspicion and taking a collective decision making approach to add conscientious measures to the choice of strategy. It’s believing that your community is efficient and capable of completing tasks needed for sustainability including the ability to get things done in a calm respectful manner.

Dependability

When you trust yourself, you trust your ideas and build momentum and influence others to follow you. What others perceive in you by the way you behave and the understanding of your intent. When this is portrayed consistently by your community. Your community becomes unstoppable. The essence of trust. Your community is so clearly defined by its members and thereby exuberates innovation. People see it, feel it, and want to be around it. They want more of it and will stand by waiting for it. It’s who your company is; how your company really works; and what type of experience your company leave with others. Dependability is the unwritten law of portraying the ability to stand by what the community is known for.

Insightfulness

Insightfulness at work not only conveys a degree of understanding the consequences of your actions, it’s how they impact others and the value you place on it. To be insightful is to be focused and self-aware. Being ready to interpret the message gives you the upper hand in making an impact. To really gain track with others in your community, you must first become skilled at interpreting your own message and what it’s portraying.

Once you gain the skill of interpreting your impact, you can start to tweak your actions in the moment or “on the fly’ to enhance recognition of someone to pay attention to. It’s a form of nurturing your senses and protecting those who are in your team.

Integrity

Integrity is one of the main foundations of trust. In this sense of having a community of trust it is having honor in community process, respecting what the community stands for, and communicating with honesty. How you choose to act, the choices you make and the behaviors you convey based on your own personal ethics or moral principles impacts the community in whether you are aligned with its purpose and vision.

Loyalty

From building a trust perspective, loyalty has nothing to do with the length of employment and everything to do with recognition and reward for hard work and commitment. If anything, sometimes the community spirit can be hindered by a disgruntled employee who is too fearful to take another position or has the intent to tow the line and not budge on any close minded perspective. In other words be unwilling to grow with the community. Loyalty within a community comes from a transparency and respect to keep the lines of communication open and be open to creativity and innovation to attain success for the community as a whole.

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