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.
Find easy actions to accomplish, make public statements to the team as to your personal commitment to achieve to complete the action (when and how). Then DO IT! After you do it, be certain the full team knows you did it.
The tasks you commit to achieving can be as simple as arri ING somewhere at a certain time, but arriving ten minutes ahead of your commitment. It can be promising to provide an answer to a question within twenty-four hours and delivering it in ten hours. You get the idea?
Find ways to set expectations you know you can beat! Make certain team members kknow of your commitments. Beat the expectations. Make sure the team knows you have bettered your self-imposed deadline.
A bonus suggestion, get someone else involved from your team to assist you in surpassing expectations. That person will almost assuredly become your cheerleader if you grant him or her public credit for helping you to achieve the success.
This a deep insight and when understood, can be executed easily. Make simple, and easy to keep commitments, like, “I’ll update you by email by 9 AM tomorrow,” and then do it. Intentionally creating “artificial” opportunities to show you can be trusted is a way to hack this process. And then keep building on it over and over again.