What came to mind first? Great leadership, cohesion, exceptional communication, or perhaps mutual respect? Certainly all those components are necessary for a team to function optimally, but none of those things is possible without CONFIDENCE.
Without a foundation of trust to build on, none of your team’s accomplishments will be as great as it could be. Exceptional teams start with this and develop outward.
It all starts at the top of the organization, so team members must first trust their leader. Any organization that does not trust its leader will underperform (and often fail) regardless of the amount of skills and experience on the team.
So, you may wonder, how does a leader gain the trust of his team members? There is more than one way to earn the trust of those around you. However, there are many factors that tend to be present in most situations where the leader has a high level of trust.
At the top of that list would be authenticity. You have to know who you are and what you stand for, or people will see through you. Also, you can’t preach one thing, do another, and expect people to fall in love with it for a long time. This is called “doing what you say” and there is no faster way to generate respect than to live your life this way. I’ve seen instances where coaches or leaders blinked only once, leading to their downfall, as well as their team’s. As soon as you blink, you open the door for all the other members of your team to start taking shortcuts as well.
Also at the top of the list would be what I call heart or compassion. As the great coach John Wooden used to say, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” People will go to the ends of the Earth for you and others when they feel valued and cared for.
Being consistent and fair is another key component in gaining the trust of others. People mistakenly think this means that I think leaders should treat everyone on the team the same. What this means to me is that you treat everyone as they deserve to be treated. Ideally, everything would be won and all people would be held accountable for their actions. A subset of this would be the need to be honest with everyone and not dance around things. People may not always like it when you tell them the truth, but they will earn your respect when you do and quickly lose it when you don’t. A secondary benefit of telling it like it is is that it prevents more pain in the future.
Once the leader has established that they are trustworthy, the next step is to get team members to trust each other. I’m going to come up with two key components here. The first is a shared vision of the team. It is imperative that everyone on the team strives to achieve the same goal through an agreed process. Once team members know what their responsibilities are and how their task affects other team members who depend on them, bonds will begin to be forged.
The second component is the one that I think separates the good from the truly exceptional, knowing your teammates on a deeper human level. I can’t stress this enough! When you bond with people, you naturally see the good in them through a magnifying glass and the bad in them through inverted binoculars (which have the effect of making things appear small). This causes team members to give each other the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong, the net effect of which is to reduce or eliminate animosity between teammates. This translates into more energy and focus for the team to achieve its shared goals.
Once you develop a foundation of trust, you can be a better leader, develop cohesion, and have exceptional communication and respect for one another. It will also make all the other things you want to do easier to accomplish.
Remember: “It takes time to build trust, just a few seconds to break it and an eternity to repair it.”