Leadership development programs often skim over trust. The learning content might mention trust-building as an important part of leadership, but too often, these programs or training sessions don’t get into practical strategies for how to actually do this trust-building on the job.
At Next Shift Learning, we’re hoping to change this! We’ve seen the impact that this skill can have on emerging leaders’ careers and the organizations they work for. And we’ve built an emerging leaders curriculum around helping learners hone trust and other essential soft skills (or, as we like to call them, human skills).
Now, we want to share our strategies for teaching trust, so that you can incorporate this into your leadership program.
This post will cover:
- Why trust is important
- Techniques to understand how trust functions at work
- Exercises to hone trust-building skills
This is the third post in a series about the most crucial human skills for emerging leaders.
Our previous posts in the series discussed why adaptability is important for leaders and how leaders can hone their EQ. Be sure to check those out, too!
>> Want more tips for creating great leadership development programs? Get your free copy of our practice-forward guide on building a world-class leadership development program with any size team!
🤔 Why Is Trust Important in the Workplace?
Trust is one of the most important, and most overlooked, tools in a leader’s toolkit. It’s a valuable social currency in many industries. For example: several of our clients are in the entertainment industry, where work is deeply collaborative, fast-paced, and often on a “gig” or project-by-project basis. In this industry, trust-building is essential both within each project and in order to cultivate relationships that will help individuals navigate a complex environment and succeed over the course of their careers.
Trust is also a valuable skill because it’s such an innate and basic human need. Trust provides the foundation for positive, rich, and fruitful relationships. It’s a prerequisite for feeling comfortable, getting vulnerable, and doing our best work. Research has long shown that trust makes teams work better, and simply makes work itself more enjoyable. People at high-trust companies report higher productivity and engagement, less burnout, and less stress.
Trust is crucial for:
- Empowering team autonomy
- Fostering collaboration and creativity
- Building strong relationships
- Finding sponsors/mentors
- Enhancing transparency and honesty
- Promoting a positive work culture
Let’s explore how you can help learners at your organization conceptualize trust and put trust-building strategies into practice in their work.
The Trust Bank
To make it easier to visualize how trust functions on teams, we introduce the idea of the “trust bank.” This is a metaphorical place where learners can build up trust with their colleagues or end up watching it deplete when trust is broken over time!
Deposits and Withdrawals
Like any bank, the trust bank functions with deposits and withdrawals. Leaders can put trust into the bank and have it steadily accumulate. Or, if they withdraw too often, they can quickly run out of trust when they need it most.
Thinking of it this way helps your learners understand trust as something they need to tend to over time—and an important asset that can begin to run low if things aren’t going well with their team.
To really show this in action, it helps to get specific. Once you’ve introduced the trust bank metaphor, we suggest running through common trust-building and trust-breaking behaviors to make this more tangible.
Deposits: Trust-Building Behaviors
Trust-building behaviors are things learners can do to “deposit” into their trust bank. This is how they build trust with their team over the long haul.
These behaviors include:
- Giving someone your full attention
- Keeping commitments
- Clarifying your expectations
- Checking in consistently
- Inviting others’ perspectives
- Investing in “5 minute favors”
- Celebrating others’ wins together
Withdrawals: Trust-Breaking Behaviors
Meanwhile, trust-breaking behaviors work like “withdrawals” from the trust bank. These behaviors erode trust. No one’s perfect, so it’s inevitable that they’ll happen sometimes. But too many of these behaviors can end up draining your trust bank completely.
These behaviors include:
- Excluding others
- Interrupting or ignoring
- Talking behind someone’s back
- Letting someone down
- Not being inclusive or equitable
- Making assumptions
- Blaming others
These are all behaviors that learners can start to put into practice (or avoid!) in their work right away, whether or not they currently hold a leadership role.
The Trust Equation
To help learners internalize these ideas in our workshops, in addition to the trust bank, we typically have them think about trust as an equation. This provides another way for them to conceptualize trust and break it down into its component parts.
This equation helps show how trust isn’t just the result of one action or workplace transaction. Instead, it’s a multifaceted dimension of human relationships that takes practice, hard work, and commitment to continuously grow.
Walking through the components of trust this way helps learners think about each one and how it functions in their work.
In our workshops, we explain these components like this:
- Reliability: Consistently meeting commitments and delivering on promises
- Credibility: Demonstrating expertise, knowledge, and honesty in your field
- Intimacy: Showing genuine care, understanding, and empathy for colleagues
- Self-Interest: Balancing personal goals with team objectives—the denominator because excessive self-interest reduces trust
So that learners can relate this back to their own teams and tasks, it’s helpful to have them choose one element of the trust equation and commit to focusing on that aspect for the next week.
Then, they can reflect on how it went. What did they do differently? What were the results?
Putting It Into Practice
Now that learners have had the chance to conceptualize trust and begin to apply it to their own work, this idea has become a lot more tangible. But so far, they still haven’t really had a chance to put these skills into practice.
An independent reflection exercise can help.
One idea: offer learners an opportunity to reflect on how the “trust bank” has historically been funded (or neglected) on teams they’ve been part of. This exercise will help them relate the learned material to their own life, making it much stickier.
A few questions to ask:
When do people add to your trust bank? When do people withdraw from it? How does this work for them?
Next, have them think about the teams they work with.
When have they added to the trust bank of their colleagues and peers? When have they withdrawn from it?
This can be a personal journaling exercise with no obligation to share. This allows them to reflect more honestly on their successes as well as times they’ve come up short.
A Key Skill for Relationship-Building
In our Emerging Leaders Program, we use a three-layer framework to help our learners visualize how good leadership works in action. (Learn more about why we use this framework in our kickoff post of this series, which is about adaptability.)
Where does trust fit in? It’s squarely in the middle layer: managing relationships. Without trust, it’s difficult to communicate effectively, collaborate fluidly, or even come to a common understanding of why and how a team is working on a given project in the first place.
Meanwhile, a good foundation of trust—that is, a well-funded trust bank!—can positively affect employee engagement, sense of belonging, and even the ability to be innovative at work.
Bottom line: trust is a skill that’s well worth investing in for your emerging leaders. It changes everything about how we work together. It makes great things possible—and it simply makes work feel better, too.
For a deeper look at how to build great leadership development programs, download your copy of our practice-forward guide for building world-class leadership development experiences (no matter the size of your L&D team!).
Interested to learn more about bringing Next Shift Learning’s Emerging Leaders Program to your organization? Get in touch here. We’d love to hear from you!
