10 Ways to Build Trust and Transform Your Team Culture

The first of the three elements of developing trust is positive relationships, which is the foundation of any relationship. To develop trust, whether it's personal, professional, on teams, etc. In any organization, it's critical when you develop a positive relationship. It signals that the leader not only values you as a teammate and but they value you as a person, not because of your output or because of your performance. Building positive relationships with your employees has to be very intentional, but it's really simple and here are 10 steps to do that. Number one, communicate frequently. I can't tell you the number of leaders that I talk to that do not spend hardly any time with their employees on a week to week basis. And that's critical because when there are gaps in communication, people often will fill in the gaps with negative items, not with positive items. So give your employees the opportunity to communicate with you frequently. Number two, communicate your vision and your values and communicate that often. Your values should be the expectations for the organization. This is where clarity comes from in question. Number one, on the Q12 survey that Gallup puts out, which is one of the largest surveys that have ever been conducted on employees, the first question is, do you, do you know what's expected of you in your role? And so when you look at that, if you're not communicating what your standards are on a day to day basis, you're missing out on a really good opportunity to provide your employee with a significant amount of clarity. Number three, invite input. Even if there's a challenge that you think you know the answer to or how you should respond potentially to a client, get the input from your team. It's not very difficult. And here's the other thing, you might actually learn something from an employee that you didn't otherwise know. Number four, communicate respectfully. This isn't just about the words you use. Pay attention to a couple of other things. Pay attention to tone, the tone of your voice and pay attention to body language. These are two things that are often forgotten inside of the communication model, but they're really critical and big parts of how we communicate on a day to day basis. Number five, show appreciation. It's really simple. Recognize the people for the things that they do. Number six is a great segue from number five. And number six is about expressing the gratitude for the achievements that your team is making. It's not very difficult. I mean, sometimes even a gift card, or if it's not monetarily, sometimes just saying thank you or I appreciate you can go a lot further than any monetary gift that you can give your employees. Number seven, recognize their strengths and their talents. This is actually a really good opportunity for you to understand how, how to put together a development plan for them. You know, a lot of times we often put development plans around where people are not good. And it's okay to provide support in areas of opportunities for people, but where people really excel is when you actually invest in the things that they're already good at. Number eight, get to know them individually. It's not difficult to do that. It's very casual conversation. It could be a walk around the block, it could be chatting at the water cooler, or just simply going to a local cafe and grabbing a cup of coffee. It doesn't have to be scheduled. It's very informal. And it's one of the four steps to building connections in the leadership squared framework. Highly recommend this step to get to know your employees. Number nine, support and empower your employee. Help them take risks. If you're not taking risk, and I'm not even talking just about educated risk, which are very helpful, but if you're not taking risks inside of your organization, the chances are you're not innovating. And if there's anything that we know in this day and age, in the world that we're living in is that technology is changing every single day and our businesses need to adapt to change to those technologies. So certainly please empower your team and support them and the challenges and the things that they're doing on a day to day basis. And finally, number 10, provide your team with the resources that they need. Now this could be something as simple as just getting them a software or a tool. It could be even just getting them a subscription to a training and development opportunity. That's something that would be highly beneficial to them them. By going through these 10 action steps, these are things that you can do that will all lead to developing a positive relationship, which is the first element of developing trust inside of your organization, which will ultimately lead to high engagement into a great culture. So as usual, please subscribe to the YouTube channel where all things are leadership and personal development.