How to Build Trust within Your Team - Executive Coaching for Leaders

Are you a team leader in your organization but you've been frustrated with the team building activities and you're just feeling that they don't have lasting results? Well, you will understand that building trust within your teams is one of the most crucial activities that are going to move your productivity and innovation forward because your team members are the most value-creating and value-sustaining assets that you have. So that's why team building is so important. But the reason why team building activities don't happen, don't really work, right, and we all know what they are, they could be spending a couple days in a retreat, doing these activities, balancing on a beam or maybe catching each other as you fall backwards. Activities like that and many others that I've seen in corporations, the essence of why they don't work is because they're not a reflection of real issues at work. They are contrived, they are artificial and they don't reflect the real environments of the workplace. And so a lot of organizations are spending, investing a lot of resources, a lot of capital, a lot of personnel and time into these team building activities. And although they have good intentions, the intentions are to build collaborations, the intentions are to deepen relationships within the teams. But usually the effect that it has is quite not the way that it was intended. I'm hearing a lot of feedback from these team building activities that sometimes these activities can feel very awkward for participants or they can feel like there's no relevance to it or they can feel quite bored by activities and so on. And they don't see the relevance to their issues and how it's going to solve the conflicts they're experiencing in the teams. So in this video, what I want to share with you is how do you build trust within your teams effectively so that you can lead with confidence and that your team members can respect your leadership as well. And these are the principles of leadership. I'm not going to share with you tactical things on how do you have team building exercises or what some exercises you can lead your team through. Those are just the tactics and tactics don't always work. And so I'm going to be sharing with you principles based teachings on how can you build trust. So let's go. So just a fair warning as we proceed that I am not about to share conventional wisdom with you. If conventional wisdom is what you're looking for, then this is not the right video for you because conventional wisdom is what you see on the internet. It's what everybody else is doing with respects to team building exercises. And I'm not here to share conventional wisdom. So moving forward, these are the principles of building trust. And if that's you and you're still here, then I acknowledge you for being here. So let's move forward. When it comes to building teams within your workplace as an executive or a team leader and beyond, the essence is to know that there are two types of trust in any given relationship. It doesn't matter if it's with your supervisor or your stakeholders or your partner in life or your friends or your children. There's two types of trust, human trust. And the two types of trust is we have task based trust and we have relationship based trust. When it comes to task based trust, this is what most people are familiar with. Task based, which means are you going to do what you say you're going to do? And are you going to do it in the time that you said you're going to do it? Do you really have the skills you say you do? And are you really going to help me with what you say you're going to do? So those are task based trust and we're all familiar with that. The problem with the going back to the team building exercises is that it has such a high emphasis on task based trust. However, the way that team building activities are trying to draw out the trust is irrelevant to the real work situations. It's irrelevant to the real work environments and the issues at hand. So task based trust is only one type of trust. And mind you, every individual is different. For some individuals, task based trust is more important. For others, it's relationship based trust. So what is that? What's relationship based trust? Relationship based trust is, for example, did I share a meal with you? Have I had an opportunity to observe how you treat your parents, your mother, your own mother, and your partner? Have I had an opportunity to really have a personal conversation with you, to share a meal with you as well? Have you shared with me your personal values, your challenges, your personal experiences in life, right? So that is built on a relationship. And so for some individuals, if there is a relationship there, then there is trust. What the other opposite of it is task based trust. If you do what you say you're going to do, if you have the skills you're going to say, if you help me with it, then I trust you. But with relationship based trust, it's more like, well, have we had an emotional connection together? If so, then I trust you. So these are the two basics of human trust. Which one is more important? Well, that depends on your audience. And that's why it's important to know who are you building trust with, your members of your team. You're going to notice that some of them tend towards the task based trust and some of them tend towards the relationship based trust. And some of them, it is a mixture of both. So in your communications and the way that you build trust, that's why the tactics don't always work. Well, do they align with human nature? And this is the base principles of human nature with respects to trust. So moving forward, what do you do? I'm going to share with you three keys on how you can implement this in your teams. The first principle is that mission creates alignment. What is the mission of the team that you're trying to achieve? The mission of your team should align with the mission of the organization. So be absolutely transparent in how you articulate the mission to your teams and how they align with the individual values of your team members as well. So that is principle number one. Principle number two is that transparency creates accountability. So when it comes to transparency, what are you being transparent about? And there are key things that is important to be transparent about. One of them is metrics. How do we know that we're going to succeed? How do we know how far we are? And also the second thing is responsibilities. Does every single member of your team know what everybody else is responsible for? And do they know the progression that they have been making on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis? And finally, the other thing about being transparent for is what are the issues that are coming at hand? Where are things that didn't work for us? What are things that work well for us? So when you have absolute transparency and you create that in your team, you have accountability and you build trust. And the final principle is that a great leader is one that leads by example. So how can you lead by example? There are certain things as a leader that are important to you. For example, what is important to you? Is it meeting deadlines in a timely manner? Is it reporting to you on a weekly basis? So whatever those things that are important to you, lead by example and you, in other words, you're not above it. Lead by example of what is important to you. So those are the three keys, the three principles on how you can build trust based on the principles of two types of trust in human relationships. So coming up next, I have a video for you. These are the next video I have talks about five key traits of a great leader and how you can implement those on your teams. That's coming up next. I'll see you there.