How to Build a Culture of Trust

Where do truth, transparency, and trust fit into our leadership repertoire? Lately I’ve been asking many people about this. Anecdotally, I’ve found that more people than not have experienced a work environment deficient in trust.

How much does trust matter in our work lives? Does it affect productivity, outcomes, feeling valued and free to express opinions that differ from the norm? The short answer is “yes,” trust does matter in our work lives. Fortunately, creating a culture of honesty, psychological safety, and mutual respect is becoming more of a priority among senior executives today. 

Joel Peterson, the former Chairman of JetBlue Airways and Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, wrote The 10 Laws of Trust: Building the Bonds That Make a Business Great.  He identified characteristics of high-trust leaders, including regular communication, transparency, listening without an agenda, and willingness to admit mistakes.

These were a few others that stood out to me: High-trust leaders consider themselves as duty-bound to lead. They think of themselves as a fiduciary, a special guardian of others’ interests. And because trust takes a long time to build, they understand and accept that they may have to keep running toward fires. An organization with a foundation of trust and a leader who builds those bonds can make a business great.

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, emphasizes that trust is not a soft virtue. Instead, it’s a measurable skill and an economic driver – and a learnable competency. Covey even considers low trust to be a hidden tax on every business transaction – slowing action and raising costs.

In addition to some of the qualities of high-trust leaders noted above, Covey values behaviors like these:

The payoff for employees? Paul J. Zak, author of Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies, has carefully studied this. When compared with people at low-trust companies, those at high-trust companies report:

I’ve touched on just a few of the qualities and benefits of a high-trust organization. You can learn more through our Inspire Leadership Program, where we examine Leader as Truth Teller as one of 7 key leadership characteristics. It is absolutely a critical part of being an influential, multi-dimensional leader.   

Lead well,

Renee

 

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