Building Trust for Better Team Performance and Results

Imagine being in the Board Room, talking about the commercial upside of being a leader who builds trust. I found myself on a screen in exactly that conversation and smiling as this conversation took place. I love trust conversations, because they are so powerful. This is the core of leadership and trust.

As I was putting the slides together for this session, I reflected on just about every model or framework that talks about high performance, and it was unsurprising to me that trust features in nearly every single one of them. It's even our own model.

We all agree, that both for leaders and employees alike, trust is an essential ingredient for the commercial success of your business. If you are struggling with some of the results described below, chances are that you have a trust issue.

The Core Challenges Getting in the Way of Team Performance

I get the privilege of taking teams through our Ways of Working programme and in just about every instance, the core challenges leadership teams are facing that get in the way of their performance are:

• Attracting and keeping talent
• Building engagement and reducing people leaving
• Managing well-being, burnout, sick days
• Quiet quitting and low employee satisfaction

When we mention trust being part of the problem, it can often be pushed aside as a reason. Perhaps because it's hard to understand. But in research from Forbes, 63% of employees say that they don't trust their senior leaders, which means it's worth paying attention to when addressing workplace trust. Research by both Gartner and Gallup points to trust as one of the key factors affecting business performance, and trust rarely appears on a management report yet shows up everywhere in your numbers: in the decisions that should have been made two levels down but landed on your desk, in the good people who quietly started looking elsewhere, in the teams that work longer hours and somehow deliver less.

What Happens When Trust Breaks Down

If people don't trust your business, they won't apply to join you. If they detect an untrustworthy leader, they'll look somewhere else. Lack of trust puts people into a neurochemically negative state, which can have both physical and psychological long-term effects. This leads to increased burnout and sickness. If employees aren't trusted to do their jobs, and can't trust each other, they tend to stop trying. All of this leads to lower business performance. The opposite of what most leadership teams are after.

There are leaders whose performance is suffering because they do not trust their teams, and their teams do not trust them. In low-trust environments, team members spend time reassuring their manager they are actually working rather than getting on with the work itself. That leads to longer hours, lower output and burnout. The people carrying the heaviest mental loads, whether from financial pressure, family demands or performance anxiety, are the first to wonder whether their leader has even noticed.

The Neuroscience of Trust: What the Research Shows

In an article called "The Neuroscience of Trust", which appeared in the January 2017 Harvard Business Review, Claremont Graduate University Professor Paul Zak wrote that:

"Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout."

Pretty compelling stuff. The Edelman Trust Barometer adds another dimension that most leaders find surprising: ethical drivers such as integrity, dependability and purpose account for 76% of the trust capital of a company, while competence accounts for only 24%. Visibly doing the right thing matters three times more to your people than financial performance and shareholder returns.

The Commercial Case for a High-Trust Culture

Imagine if you are a $100m revenue business. 50% higher productivity gives you a $150m business. Add to that less time spent replacing and training new staff members. That's more profit, more to reinvest in the business, and more to develop new products, projects, and so on. The sky is the limit. This is the power of a high-trust culture.

Why Trust Remains So Hard to Grasp

Yet trust seems to remain a nebulous concept to most people and as a result, we know what it feels like to trust or not trust someone, but it is fascinating to me that when asked, most people can't describe trust and they don't know how to build it. Building trust in an organisation requires intentional effort.

The dictionary defines trust as "firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something." The key words are firm belief. As children, most of us hold a firm belief that our parents have our back: they will protect, provide and help wherever possible. It is interesting that most leaders never draw the comparison between their role and parenting. Employees want support and encouragement. They want to be allowed to try things and know you will be there when it goes wrong. They also want to know you care about them as people. David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of The Truth About Trust, states that trust is "essential to boosting employee engagement, motivation, and candor."

Your people want to firmly believe you are neither peering over their shoulder nor so hands-off that you have no idea what they are dealing with.

There are real examples of this every day. Take a new hire. They might find it hard to trust those around them and identify who is an ally and who is a potential threat. Equally, the leader of the team might not have anyone to confide in because they don't trust anyone. These can be significant barriers to performance and productivity. They also get in the way of people unleashing their potential.

A Practical Framework for Building Trust

The WoW Lab that we offer as part of our programme talks about building trust in really practical and easy-to-understand terms. The important part of trust building is to know which level of trust you are at with each member of your team so you can take the right actions that actually build trust. It's about turning a nebulous concept into a graspable and usable framework.

The Four Levels of Trust

The WoW Lab covers the four levels of trust:

• Cognitive
• Aligned
• Relational
• Emotional

Trust also operates across three domains: self, teams and systems. To build it, you start with yourself, get your own house in order, then look to others, and then to the system you occupy. Knowing where you stand in each domain shapes which actions will actually move the needle.

The SERVICE Model

We then talk about the SERVICE model, which helps you build trust across all three of those domains. It works as a practical self-audit: work through each element honestly, starting with yourself, before looking outward to your team and the wider system.

Safety

Safety covers both physical and psychological safety. Are you looking after your own mental health and wellbeing, and that of the people around you? Are you watching the right indicators for changes in absenteeism or incidents?

Empathy

Empathy means listening to yourself and others and hearing what is being said, including how people are feeling. It is easy to slip into a task-focused, survivalist mode when pressure builds. Be kinder to yourself, and make space to hear the challenges your people are carrying across work, home and other pressures.

Reliability

Reliability is about managing your routines and practices to keep yourself on track. For your team, it means doing what you said you would do. They need to know you have their backs, and they respond well to communication that comes out consistently without fail.

Value

Value asks whether you are valuing yourself and the people around you. Are you making space for what matters? Are you watching for signs that your team is burning out? Are you clear on what your organisation offers and communicating it in the right way?

Inclusion

• Is your whole team brought into decisions, changes and communications?
• Are you including yourself in time off and holiday planning?
• Are you checking in with people working remotely to make sure they are not falling behind on information that those in the office have access to?
• Are your clients included in your communications so they know when to expect delivery?

Clarity

Clarity is the single biggest differentiator for team performance: everyone being clear on the purpose of the team. Are you clear on why you are there and what you are working on? Is everyone else? Keep your communications short, regular and simple.

Expectations

Expectations asks whether you are clear and comfortable with what is expected of you, and whether that is aligned with your own balance. Do the people around you know what is expected of them? Clear expectations reduce the ambiguity that quietly erodes trust over time.

Two Practical Ways to Start Building Trust Now

Frameworks are only useful if they change behaviour. Here are two practical approaches that work well alongside the SERVICE model.

Structured One-to-Ones That Create Alignment

There needs to be a clear alignment of expectations and obligations between managers and employees on what is going to happen and who will do it. A one-to-one structured around a small number of consistent questions can create that alignment and build trust in the process. Employees are more likely to follow through on goals set by a manager they trust, and more likely to surface the problems they can see at their level before those problems become your escalations.

Restoring Incidental Socialisation

The second approach is about restoring something that disappears when teams become busy or dispersed. Formally called incidental socialisation, these are the corridor conversations, the passing-by-your-desk questions, the lunchroom chats. Meetings tend to start and end with business, and the trust-building small talk falls away. We are relational by nature and need that interaction to feel a genuine connection.

One simple adjustment: move meetings to a 45-minute format that starts with small talk.

• Meetings are called on the hour and people arrive by five past, which gives five minutes of conversation before the agenda starts.
• Meetings finish at quarter to, which gives those who want to stay and talk the space to do so.
• Those who need to move on can leave without awkwardness.

It sounds small. It isn't. The trust that builds in those unstructured minutes is exactly what makes the structured parts of your meetings more honest and more productive.

Get Support with Trust in Your Team

If you or your team are struggling to get to grips with trust and would like some help, please reach out. We would love to support you to get where you want to be.