Honestly, after that headline I’m not sure what else needs to be said about trust and relationships!
Let’s start with a definition. My favorite.
Trust: a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.
In other words: the feeling that Jasmine felt when she took Aladdin’s hand and stepped off a balcony and didn’t fear her instant death.
Sometimes we feel like we trust someone and we don’t always realize why.
Some research breaks trust into 3 components while folks like Brenee Brown have a list of 7 and those factors contribute to that feeling of trust.
Here are 4 components of trust that I think about:
- Reliability: Believing that someone will act consistently over time/various situations
- Integrity: Confidence that someone will adhere to moral and ethical principles in other words they “do the right thing”
- Competence: Believing in someone’s ability to perform a job correctly
- Empathy: Confidence that someone will understand and be considerate of your feelings and needs.
When someone consistently displays those characteristics I’m more likely to trust them.
And trust shows up at work in various ways.
3 dimensions of trust at work:
🤝Trust among coworkers: Do your employees work well together? Trusting relationships between coworkers leads to better collaboration, teamwork and higher quality work. If you see your employees struggling with each other, they could be missing trust. In the distributed world trust becomes INCREDIBLY important.
👑Trust in leadership: Do your employees trust that your leaders will make the best decisions and act consistently? Part of being a good leader is being able to build trust with those you lead. The tumultuous nature of work the last few years has had a huge impact on leadership trust.
(Not so) fun fact: Only 21% of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their org.
🫡Trust in the organization: Do your employees feel like your policies are transparent and fair? Do they believe in the success and future of the organization? If you answered no to both of those questions, you may have some trust issues. It’s not enough for employees to trust leaders; they also need to trust the organization!
Let’s look at what can contribute to trust being lost.
Common ways trust is lost:
Trust can be lost so so so so quickly.
JOIN 130K+ HR LEADERS
Get insights, learnings, and advice on how to build companies and cultures that people actually love.
No spam. Unsubscribe any time.
And the hard part? Getting the trust back can be really tricky. More on that below!
2 common ways trust is lost:
1. Lack of transparency: Not sharing updates or important info can be really damaging to trust.
Spoiler alert: when employees don’t get updates they may feel like something is being hidden!
The complicated thing about transparency is that it can mean something different to each employee. To get ahead of it organizations need to be really clear about what they will or will not be transparent about.
I once worked at an organization where the founders made it clear that they will be transparent about everything BUT: how much money someone makes and why someone chooses to leave.
That set the expectations for employees and defined the level of transparency.
2. Favoritism/bias: I find this to be one of the most impactful things that damages trust but the hardest to discuss.
Why? Because favoritism can be subjective and incredibly difficult to prove.
But if favoritism is common in your organization it’s going to erode the trust in HR’s ability to create an equitable experience. Cough SHRM that’s why the E is important cough.
👀Keep an eye out for these common places favoritism can creep in:
- Assignments
- Promotions
- Informal mentoring
- Performance evaluations
- Recognition
An easy way to spot it: if everyone who is advancing at work belongs to the same demographic group, you may be dealing with favoritism.
Other common ways to lose trust at work:
- Poor communication
- Inconsistent behavior
- Micromanagement
- Ignoring employee wellbeing
- Unethical behavior
- Broken promises
How to gain back trust:
You didn’t think I was going to tell you all about how trust is lost without telling you how to gain it back did you???
Never!
Gaining back trust is HARD. It takes work, patience and time.
2 ways to gain back trust:
1. Do what you say you’re going to do.
🔢The equation: Consistent actions + accountability = trust being built.
⏯️In action:
Deliver on your commitments: project deadlines, changing policies or addressing employee concerns. To ensure you’re successful, set realistic deadlines. Not everything can be achieved in hours. Set a thoughtful deadline, deliver the work and watch as trust blossoms.
Set policies and follow them: make sure your criteria is clear & objective for things like evaluations, promotions, departures, etc. Then communicate and follow it! And when it comes to those who break from the process…
Hold people accountable: here’s the hardest part – you have to hold people accountable to gain back trust. That means making sure there are consequences for actions that go against your policies, procedures and values. Maybe that bad manager who only promotes their favorites shouldn’t be a manager anymore… Accountability is really the secret weapon to rebuilding trust. Be prepared to have some hard, and maybe uncomfortable, convos.
2. Become excellent at transparent communication.
📣No one, and I mean no one, is born just great at communication. You learn.
Here’s the cheat sheet to nailing transparent communication post a breach in trust:
Talk about what happened to cause the loss of trust. Isn’t that novel?? By talking about what happened you actually start to rebuild trust. Now, in my experience, I’ve worked with dozens of people who would rather just “move on” and not acknowledge it. Bad move. Admitting what you did and apologizing goes a lot further.
Something as simple as: I want to acknowledge that the recent changes to our promotions process were not communicated clearly company wide. This led to confusion from leaders about eligibility and frustrations and feelings of unfairness from employees. I apologize for the oversight and moving forward we will make sure all parties understand the promotion criteria and process. We will extend our promotion period to ensure we did not miss anyone.
Provide updates: Consistently share with employees steps being taken, where in the process things are and what remains to be done. These updates can be done in various ways (meetings, internal newsletters, spotlights, etc) and don’t forget transparency about progress being made helps rebuild trust by making folks feel like your partner in the process! Everyone wants to feel like they are along for the ride.
Solicit feedback. Want to show all involved parties you take the breach of trust seriously? Ask for feedback. And don’t just collect it – share it and respond to concerns. Sharing the feedback is super powerful and shows employees you’re being accountable.
The power of ✨ communication ✨ is really something…
Next week:
Next week I’m giving you a primer on communication.
I always talk about how we’re bad at communicating, but I want to break that down more.
Next week I’m covering communication styles and sharing my secret tips for how to build strong relationships through understanding communication styles.
