Jacqueline Elliott explains how leaders build trust through three things: transparency about struggles, empathy for people, and consistency in following through. You need all three together, not just one or two.
Chapters
As a leader, can you be trusted? See, people don't really care about your feelings. What they really care about is if they can trust you. There's three components that you need to be able to maintain and develop trust. The first component is transparency. Do we sometimes withhold information and only want to present the good news? I think it's so important when you're presenting to your team or your people that something that you're maybe struggling with as a leader, it's better for them to hear it from you first. The second ingredient that's very important is empathy. Do you care about your people as much as they care about your dreams and your vision? In order to get you to that next level, in order for you to grow to what you need to build as a company, your people need to feel like they're a part of that and you care about them. And the third one would be consistency, which is the biggest problem that most leaders have. Do we follow through with our word? What are you sharing with your team? And do they believe you? Or do they hear about something that's going on and they hear it from somebody else and then they come in and they don't know if you're really telling them the truth? We get really hype and really motivated to push certain goals sometimes that we tolerate underperformance, we make idle threats. But you're actually hurting that level of trust because you're also lowering the standard for other people. But you have to make sure that you follow through with your promises, follow through with your threats, follow through with your commitments, and stay in constant communication. And that's a way that you develop trust. It has to be through transparency, empathy, and consistency. You need all three things in order to make it work.
