Why Building Trust in Your Team Starts With Small Conversations

Trust is one of those things that rarely appears on a management report, yet it 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. Research by both Gartner and Gallup points to trust as one of the key factors affecting business performance right now.

There are leaders whose performance is suffering because they do not trust their teams, and their teams do not trust them.

The leaders I work with are not wondering whether their people are watching Netflix instead of working. Their team members are not spending half their day reassuring their manager they are actually at their desk, which is what happens in low-trust environments and which leads to longer hours and burnout. Those are probably not the leaders reading this.

On top of managing a new workspace and performance anxiety, many people are being stretched by family demands and a range of other pressures. Several clients have told me their partners have lost jobs, been made redundant, or been put on limited hours, creating real financial strain. When someone's mental load is that full, focusing on delivering results becomes harder, and they start to wonder whether their leader has even noticed.

I did some qualitative research with a pool of client employees globally and asked them how they rated the importance of trust at work before COVID and then again at the time of writing. They were then asked how they rated the way their leader was building and maintaining that trust. The results are shown below:

Trust has become more important to most employees. Despite best efforts, many leaders have fallen short since the move to virtual, largely through lack of training, knowledge or support from their organisations. They were left to work it out themselves, and that has had consequences.

I asked the importance and execution questions across all six of the leadership traits I focus on. Trust scored in the top two for what employees said mattered most.

The dictionary defines trust as "firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something." To me, 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. The situation many teams are in right now is something like children under immense exam pressure, multiplied by a thousand.

In business, 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. 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. Can you honestly say you do that? Do you know a leader in your business who does it well?

This matters for performance. 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."

So how do you build it? Here are two practical examples from my programmes.

1. There needs to be a clear alignment of expectations and obligations between managers, employees, and between employees themselves, on what is going to happen and who will do it. A one-to-one structured around four simple 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. Try these questions in your next one-to-one, with the genuine intent of building trust, and watch what changes.

2. The second example is about restoring something that disappeared for many people when work went virtual. 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.

I recommend moving meetings to a 45-minute format that starts with small talk. Meetings are called on the hour, 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, while those who need to move on can leave without awkwardness.

The point of sharing these two examples is to remind you to take the time to build and maintain trust with your teams. They need it right now, and so does your business.

MENTAL HEALTH NOTE – If you are feeling alone or overly worried about things right now, please reach out to me directly for a chat. I am here to listen and want you to know you have someone to connect with who cares.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

#waysofworking #blog #jimmyburroughes #jimmybleadership #impact #leadershipcoaching #confidence #goals #fastgrowth #leadership #adeption #entrepreneur #impostersyndromecoach #leadershipdevelopment #mindsetcoach #motivation #success

#YouCanHaveSuccess #mindset #growthmindset #personaldevelopment #mindfulness #selflove #impostersyndrome #imposter #burnout #burnedout #hybridwork #hybridworkplace #mindsetmatters