Clegg argues that trust is the foundational ingredient for leadership and organizational success: when present it boosts productivity, creativity, employee satisfaction, engagement and retention; when absent it raises stress and leads to poor decision-making and turnover. Trust must be earned and actively nurtured by leaders through authenticity, transparency, reliability, and by spending time connecting employees' purpose to organizational outcomes. Clegg recommends establishing a leadership development program to teach future leaders how to generate trust; building trust is continuous and fragile—years to build, seconds to lose.
Chapters
All right y', all, picture this. A workplace where every conversation, every project and every decision gets benefits like skyrocketing productivity, creativity and a significant amount of employee satisfaction. The only ingredient that secures that is trust. Trust is the keystone to leadership and organizational success. But here's the twist. Trust isn't giving, it's earned. It can be nurtured, but it can also be shattered in a blink of an eye. Trust is is the silent hero. It's part of the strategic vision that propels your organization to the desired outcomes that you're seeking. Trust isn't just an option, it is the foundation. Trust greatly enhances organizational performance, employee satisfaction and engagement, which we know. All of those lead to employee retention. Keeping your top talent. On the flip side, the consequences of low trust are very high. It increases your employees stress and leads to ineffective decision making. And as a reminder, the boss is usually the topic of dinner conversation between a spouse and a significant other each evening. The question is always so how was your day? And there will be one of two responses. With trust, the response is going to be pretty positive overall. Without trust, it's going to be a negative response which likely and ultimately leads down the road to your employee leaving the organization. Building trust is actually pretty easy, but it does require focus and intention. It requires the leader to be authentic, transparent and reliable. And you cannot gain trust if you do not spend time with your people. Delegating trust is not a real thing. Sorry. When trust is extended to other people, they can help influence trust throughout the organization. But it requires your time because without connection with the person, you're not going to gain trust. Employees need purpose and meaning in order to be retained long term. And without trust, you can't identify what their purpose and meaning is. It's really up to you to ultimately connect the organization's desired outcomes with the employees purpose and meaning. The last and very critical and not discussed a lot suggestion that I have is create a leadership development program. Because it's great if you learn how to develop trust within your organization. But you're not going to be there forever. And if your organization is going to grow, then the chances are you're going to need additional leaders. And it's a requirement for you to make sure that they are taught how to gain trust inside the organization. Trust isn't anything that's in isolation, nor is it all encompassing. It's tested daily and all the employees expect it. We have to teach the next great leader how to generate trust. It's a continuous process and it should never end. It takes years to build trust, but only seconds to lose it. As usual. Like comment and share. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where all things are leadership and personal development.
