Addressing a Lack of Trust

By Andrew Cooke | October 12, 2015

Often a lack of trust, within teams or the business overall, is not always well addressed. Creating trust creates “dividends” for the business, and a lack of trust creates “taxes” for the business. When you encounter a situation where there is a lack of trust, how can you deal with it?  There are four ways you can do so including:

1. Frame it in economic terms – the issues of trust, or rather the lack of it, needs to be framed in economic terms, otherwise it will become a ‘nice to have’ initiative, not an economic issue.  What is the impact of speed and cost on every dimension of the company; ask yourself if you could improve it then what would the impact be e.g. in innovation, execution, or strategy.
2. Make trust a specific objective – make so it is not seen as a nice by-product, but rather as a way of improving which inspires trust and confidence.
3. Focus on instilling practicing and applying the behaviors that engender trust in the company – it is not just the softer behaviours, but also the harder results, that help to drive results.  People need to be seen to be performing and being credible, this creates trust, and helps to drive it.
4. Build Trust – trust is key for driving good business and for avoiding the costly implications of the seven “trust taxes”.  Build trust for yourself, for your managers, reports and peers within your company and for those with whom you have relationships (or want a trusting relationship). To do this follow these three steps:

Make Commitments, Keep Commitments and Repeat

Do this for yourself with all those who you deal with, share this with your teams to help them do the same, and be clear about why you are doing this with the people with whom you are looking to be build trust.

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