October 1st, 2024

How to Build Trust

Building trust is vital for team success and organizational culture, enhancing productivity and engagement. Leaders must recognize trust gaps and employ strategies like empathy and psychological safety to foster collaboration.

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How to Build Trust

Building trust within a team is essential for fostering a healthy organizational culture and enhancing productivity. Trust acts as the foundation for collaboration, enabling teams to achieve collective goals. However, establishing trust is a gradual process that requires consistent effort and attention, akin to nurturing a garden. Leaders often overestimate the level of trust in their teams, with a significant gap between managers' perceptions and employees' feelings of being trusted. Research indicates that high levels of trust correlate with increased productivity, engagement, and innovation, while a lack of trust can lead to decreased performance and morale. Effective strategies for building trust include listening with empathy, granting autonomy, sharing decision-making rationales, and recognizing team achievements. Additionally, creating an environment of psychological safety encourages open communication and risk-taking, further enhancing trust. Leaders play a crucial role in cultivating this atmosphere by adopting supportive leadership styles and ensuring fair decision-making processes. Ultimately, trust not only strengthens internal relationships but also positively impacts external interactions with customers and stakeholders.

- Trust is fundamental for team success and organizational culture.

- Leaders often misjudge the level of trust within their teams.

- High trust levels lead to increased productivity and employee engagement.

- Strategies for building trust include empathy, autonomy, and recognition.

- Psychological safety fosters open communication and innovation.

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By @hoxel - 7 months
> Arek held two roles at the startup. He was both CEO and CTO, managing the entire company and its technology stack. Developers and marketing felt ignored. Their ideas were not considered, and the CEO made decisions without consulting them. In addition, they were often wrong, which caused more and more anger. People on the team did not know where these decisions were coming from and felt that their project, which they had worked on together in the beginning, was starting to resemble a dictatorship.

Sounds like my company :]

Overall, a very interesting article.