Give trust to get trust
To give is to get, to earn respect, you must earn it. It feels counterintuitive that if we want something, we must give it first. Trust is no different. If you want to make friends, they’re not going to magically become your friend unless you take the initiative. Perhaps you get lucky and someone approaches you, but taking the first step is often rewarded.
I often ponder how to earn trust in the workplace and how to build relationships that are both supportive and meaningful. A solution is to give up that feeling of control and to let others in. If you’re someone that needs to hover over your employee’s backs all the time, you won’t ever gain their trust. Furthermore, they will not go out of their way to help you. it’s one-sided for sure.
Empower and support
The best relationships have some form of empowering you to start something and supporting you if you need it. It doesn’t involve baby-ing you every step of the way nor is it micro-managing everything you do.
It might be common in friendship, but at the workplace, you see it all the time where people complain about the management and how they’ll, in turn, complain about how lazy the workers are.
Both can be true. I strongly believe that as an individual, you have a choice to be great or not. As an employee, that can be figuring out ways to help out your team. As an employer, empowering and support your staff in any way you can.
As an employee, you get trust by showing that you are reliable and dependable. As an employer, you give your employees a chance to work on projects to improve their skills and support them as needed. Both methods must give in order to gain.
Clear and concise
This doesn’t mean giving so much away without boundaries or keeping things so ambiguous that the objective is lost.
I was an assistant coach for a soccer club once, and my role was to teach our beginners the fundamentals. The coach gave me free rein to teach whatever I wanted, but the problem was I didn’t know where to start that would fit with his game plan. For example, if the coach wanted us to play a possession base game, then focusing on positioning and passing would be smarter. If we wanted to play a counter-attacking game, it would require understanding when to attack or defend.
The best thing would be for the coach to provide clear instructions on what he wanted but gave me the freedom to execute it. So if he wanted the beginners to get comfortable with pressure and the feel of the ball, I would construct the drills to be different versus telling me to just get them “better”.
Now we had to start all over again, which wasted precious time that could be used to develop the athletes.
if you’re in a position to empower others, that doesn’t mean giving them all of the trust from the start. You allow them to show you that you don’t need to micro-manage them by letting them do manageable tasks. Then when they gain more confidence, you give them a bigger project and ease off a little bit more. You give them the trust of confidence that they can be successful without you there. Again, remember to not disregard checking in and making sure they have the resources to complete any tasks or projects.
Your goal as a leader is to support and provide the benchmarks. You give someone too much freedom and trust and they will interpret it in a different way and you won’t get the results you wanted.
It’s not perfect but it’ll do
Another question is how do you get people to step up? Think about anything you like to do or spend lots of time on. Most of the time, you’ll do it without anyone telling you to do it. In fact, it’s something you look forward to doing. The best plans are the ones that you make.
When we ask our friends or partners where they want to eat, I believe that’s not the right question. You’ll just end up with an “I don’t know” or an unsatisfying answer. I think it’s better to propose a few selections to have them choose from. It serves a few purposes to do it this way.
One, you allow them to choose what they want to do, therefore they’re more likely to want to go and enjoy it.
Two, they’ll reject it and propose their own solution. Then you can go ahead and choose it. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s a decision that’ll get you out the door to eat. Which is your goal from the beginning.
Three, if they don’t propose a solution, you can let them know that if they don’t propose suggestions, they’re stuck with yours.
Most of the time, what you want from others won’t be ideal and that’s fine. As long as it meets the majority of the objective, we can live with that. if our goal is to empower people and to have them trust us, we have to let them come up with the plans and run them.
I’m reminded of the time, our college professor allowed my group to teach a lesson on sexual harassment in the office place and was granted permission to turn it into a musical number. We sang afternoon delight as the what-not-to-do, and it’s still one of the most memorable things I did in college. Was it ideal, probably not. Other groups just had a PowerPoint presentation and covered more in-depth topics than we did. Our presentation met the majority of the objectives and it made that class worth going to for the rest of the semester.
Let it go
A big part of what prevents us from gaining trust is fear. Fear of losing control, fear of power, fear of failure, and so on. When you give someone trust, you’re basically asking them to not screw you over. It’s scary because if they fail, the blame is either on you or you double down on confirmation bias.
I believe that when you give someone trust, you now have an opportunity to help that person succeed. If they don’t succeed, it’s probably on you. Whether it’s not communicating the right objectives or not providing adequate resources to put them in the right position to succeed.
If that person succeeds, you can now put them on more important projects and they’ll become an even more valuable teammate for everyone else. This will free up some space for you to do even more important things such as helping others become just as good or stepping back to see the whole picture and guide from there.
Most importantly, when you give trust away, you get to see what kind of person you are and how you react to things when things are out of your control. If you’re the type to not be able to sit still and let people work out problems, it’s good to take note of that. People will see you’re nervous and will get nervous themselves.
but if you’re calm and confident, they will too and you’ll see improvements in their performance simply because they see that you believe in them.
If you know that someone trusts you, believes in you, and wants you to succeed, you’re going to do your damn best to not let them down. As a leader, you want to do this earnestly and not have to make it seem like someone above you gave you an order.
Let go of your fears, trust your people, and let them be great.
*Check out my last article on Memorial Day*
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