Newsletter from Magnify Leadership and Development

Step One to Leading Teams: Establish Trust

Basic to all effective teams is a sense of trust between the leader and the team members. While the leadership position is given an individual from the organization, trust must be earned from the team members. The title gives the leader position power, but trust is earned slowly through the efforts and actions of the manager. While it is possible, and sadly, often true that it some managers manage to gain short term results without the trust of the team, it is unlikely that long term team performance will be able to be sustained without it. Building trust is the first step in leading teams!

Team members lose their confidence in a leader who does not take the time to develop a relationship of trust with their team members. Without confidence, commitment to the team and to the team leader is not likely ever to be established and team members will not give their best efforts to support the leader or even one another in the long term.

This is especially true when the team faces times of change. Trust must be established between the leader and the team as a whole, as well as with each and every individual team member, in order for there to be a foundation of trust which can sustain the change effort. The lack of trust of those proposing and leading the change is on e of the major reasons employees resist change. "Distrust can magnify the effect of other sources of resistance" (Yukl, 2006, p. 285). As Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden argue in their book Contented Cows Give Better Milk, "As managers careen wildly from one tactic to another, many forget that the critical difference between a brilliant strategy and one that gets successfully executed resides in the hearts and minds of people (Catlette and Hadden, 1998, p. xv).

Employees who work in an environment of trust with their immediate manager are more likely to be able to listen, discuss, brainstorm solutions, and work toward effective implementation, than those who work in an environment of mistrust. Like contented cows that produce more and better milk than do cows that live in stress, employees that work in an atmosphere of trust will face the change effort more effectively than those who work in an environment of mistrust.

Trust, therefore, must be the first step in effective leadership. If a leader takes the approach that they will begin to focus on establishing trust once the change has begun, he or she has already waited too long. The success of the project will be jeopardized because of the magnifying effect the lack of trust has on other sources of resistance. Any intelligent employee will interpret efforts of the manager who uses phony methods to build trust once under pressure to deliver results, as an insincere attempt to manipulate the team. The likely dip in performance and the length of the fall and the ending results are all likely to be deeper, longer and less effective. Trust must be sincerely developed over time and established as the first step of leading a team well in advance to the beginning of any project in order to have the positive effects on the rest of the process.

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