At work, you can always tell when something is a little off. Maybe there’s some tension in the air, something that’s affecting how your team works together. So you start hunting around, trying to get to the bottom of it: is it a lack of clarity from our leadership teams? Conflicting priorities or strategies? Is it the ways our leaders communicate? Do we need a better system of accountability?
Some or all of these issues might be present, but all of them derive from an elusive root cause: a lack of trust. Trust—and especially the trustworthiness of your leaders—is the fertile soil from which sustainable, healthy organizations grow. Without it, new problems sprout up: weeds in the dirt, demanding our attention and distracting us from the real problem.
Trustworthy Leaders
What do you want from your organization’s leadership team?
You want a team that adapts to uncertainty, moving forward with conviction and speed, for one thing. You also probably want leaders that are clear-eyed and considerate, and who are able to communicate organizational shifts with a holistic appreciation of what the impacts of those shifts will entail.
These qualities don’t come out of thin air. According to Patrick Lencioni, father of organizational health, leadership teams need to foster accountability, commitment, and creative friction to form that kind of resilience and decisiveness. They need to be focused on results, not egos; and that is impossible if you don’t fundamentally trust the people around you.
But trust is a nebulous, slippery thing. Even the strongest leaders struggle with its cultivation. Trust demands vulnerability over time; it demands the safety to admit mistakes, to ask for help, and to share concerns without fear of judgment. When leaders demonstrate and provide the space to demonstrate trustworthiness consistently, then trust amongst the team flourishes. Openness and collaboration and results soon follow.
Where to begin?
Organizations need trust now more than ever. Collective Next knows that you can’t just turn a knob to increase trust or bring in a consultant to instate it. What you CAN do is thoughtfully evaluate and start to foster individual trustworthiness, especially at the leadership level of your organization.
An effective leadership team is one that thinks about what trust means for their team and works toward it with intention. But that’s a lot easier said than done. It helps to have a partner to work through this process alongside you, with proven solutions for assessing and exploring trust in your organization.
How does your team currently think or talk about trust? When’s the last time your team evaluated your trust in your leaders, and in each other? Let’s grab some time to talk about it. Reach out to us today.