Jane Guyton

An environment built on trust is the working condition that staff desire and appreciate above all. To create such an environment is a primary leadership skill. Without a foundation of trust, even the most brilliant people working together on the most exciting project, will have a tough time getting the results they want. Building trust on your team is not, as you may at first think, a product of your personality; it's something you can learn to do. You can learn to hold the conversations with your staff that will nurture, build and rebuild trust so that you can all achieve the results you truly desire.

The Foundations of Trust

There are three basic elements that must always be present for trust to exist: competence, reliability and sincerity. If you are building a team from scratch, you'll want to make your selections based on your judgment that a person embodies these three elements.

• You believe in someone's competence when you assess that they have the ability do what they promise.
• You believe in someone's reliability as they demonstrate that they can fulfill their promises consistently over time.
• You believe someone is sincere when you know that they mean what they say.

Not only do these three distinctions help you in choosing good people in the first place, they also empower you to take appropriate action when trust breaks down. For example, if a team isn't performing well, you may decide it's a matter of competence and send the members for more training. If a person is constantly behind schedule, you might address her reliability by exploring the underlying reasons for her lateness. If you judge a person to be insincere, you might discuss the intention behind what he says. Treating each situation as unique and requiring different conversations and actions, you build trust among the staff that you have a deep and clear understanding of their challenges and issues. If you lump all problems together and treat them the same, performance suffers, and teams and individuals soon become demoralized.

• Think of someone in your team or group whom you do not trust. Is this an issue of competence, reliability, or sincerity? How can you address this?

Keeping Promises

Managing a project from beginning to end involves making, and keeping many promises. How we make, break, or renegotiate promises directly affects our ability to build trust. This sounds self-evident, but in fact, is often not well-managed. One reason for this is that people may be afraid to say no. If you daren't say, "No, I can't do that," or "No, I don't have the answer now; I'll get back to you," your "yeses" mean nothing and others will soon realize that they can't fully trust you. As a leader, you must create a culture where Yes means Yes and No means No. Only then will people relax, and be able to live up to their promises. Of course, with every promise we make, there's a chance that we won't be able to fulfill it. Yet another aspect of the art of leadership is to support your team in being able to renegotiate promises that they can't keep, whatever the reason.

• Have you ever made a promise and not kept it? What happened?
• Has anyone ever not kept a promise made to you? What was your response?

Finally, we can actually identify a "mood of trust." When people trust each other and believe that they will be treated fairly, they relax, enjoy themselves and become more creative. As a role-model, the effective leader not only teaches her team the components of trust, she embodies them herself. The mood of trust, like all moods, is catching. By following the guidelines above, your team can "catch" the mood of trust and the benefit will be felt by all.

Jane Guyton, M.A., Professional Certified Coach, is an Executive and Life Coach, and a Senior Coach and Program Manager with the Newfield Network, accredited Coach Training School. To learn more about building trust in organizations, you can purchase the CD "Trust" featuring master coach, Julio Olalla, with a work book by Jane Guyton. To purchase this product, or to find out how Newfield can support your leaders, managers or teams, call Newfield Network at (301) 570 6680 or email jill@newfieldnetwork.com