Trust in relationships, on a team, and within an enterprise is the critical building block of effectiveness. Without it, everyday tasks become burdensome and take longer, as people must find a way to get comfortable with what they are told.
When trust is low, verification, second-guessing, and interpretation clog the ability to act quickly and smoothly. A lack of trust prevents a team from operating fluidly and without unnecessary steps. Establishing trust is an essential step in all great relationships and teams.
Unfortunately, building trust takes time. It is a conviction built slowly through experience. Trust requires a consistency and predictability proven through repeated interactions.
Trust built without a strong foundation of experience creates relationships that are fragile, superficial, and vulnerable to a single act which can erase it quickly. Taking the time to establish a thick and sturdy trust that can withstand the small assaults of questionable choices is an investment good leaders make.
But that doesn’t prevent leaders from accelerating the process to a degree. The best leaders have learned there are a few shortcuts that help them speed up trust and they use them to their advantage. You can, too.
If trust depends upon repeated interactions and experience with others, then leaders can purposefully expand the number of times such interactions occur in a given period of time. Simply engaging in more conversations, more experiences of working through issues, and more decisions made together speeds up trust.
Rather than allowing the normal cadence of contact and experience to play out, leaders who want to speed up trust create more opportunities for interaction in a shorter timeframe. This is especially powerful in new relationships and with newly formed teams.
In addition to more opportunities for interaction, those who want to accelerate trust often go out of their way to make small promises and to keep them religiously. They set precise expectations as to when they will show up to events, how they will follow up on key items, and what resources they will deliver.
Keeping those promises exactly as they were offered deepens trust in a way nothing else can. When leaders can be counted on to keep the small promises they make with precision, trust blossoms. Small promises kept faithfully are symbolic flags of trust. Doing this mindfully and intentionally accelerates the faith people place in leaders.
If others can’t count on you to take the small matters seriously, they know for certain you can’t be trusted on the large ones either.
Think small when it comes to creating big trust.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
