Powerful Links – Why Trust Changes Team Behaviour And Performance

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Have you been leading a team where people nodded and agreed in meetings and then did something completely different afterwards?
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Where problems stayed hidden until they blew up and became a team crisis.
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Where people seemed busy but not really delivering the results that you would expect from all the work put in.
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You might be facing performance problems, or communication difficulties, or accountability problems, or low motivation.
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These might all be symptom problems.
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That is problems created by another underlying problem.
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Your real problem might be trust.
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Trust or the lack of it doesn't just affect how people feel, it fundamentally changes how team members behave as individuals and how they interact as a team.
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Trust is not about being liked.
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In a leadership context, trust is not about becoming friends or being popular with your team or being nice all the time to those you lead.
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Trust throughout a team and between leader and team are beliefs like.
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Secondly, team member collaboration drops and eventually stops.
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Third, innovation and the willingness to try different things drops.
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And fourth, personal and team accountability fade.
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Individual team members and the team as a whole spend more time and energy managing perceived risks than creating team results.
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Team performance is guaranteed to drop in these situations and keep on dropping.
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My name is Jess Coles, and if you're new to this podcast, Enhanced.training provides resources, courses, and coaching for you to build management expertise and confidence to lead any team to their best performance.
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If you or managers in your team are struggling with silence, a lack of engagement, low accountability, or a lack of ideas and solutions within the team, go to Enhance.training, select coaching, and take a look at the coaching programs to help you increase team trust and significantly increase team performance.
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So next we're going to discuss why trust changes team behaviour so dramatically.
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Every team member, including you, go through a psychological calculation before making any decision or taking any action.
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You might consciously do this or it might be unconscious, i.e.
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a gut feeling.
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Team members constantly ask themselves questions like, you know, is it safe to challenge this?
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Is it safe to admit I made a mistake?
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Is it safe to ask for help?
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Is it safe to disagree?
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When trust is high and they feel safe, the answer is usually yes.
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By feeling safe I mean there won't be negative consequences of challenging, making mistakes, asking for help or disagreeing.
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They won't be put down, made to feel little, embarrassed, or feel their pay, promotion, prospects or job security is threatened.
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By their boss or by their colleagues.
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When trust in the team or with their boss is low, the answer becomes no to all these questions.
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In high trust teams, trust translates into these types of behaviours.
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People raise concerns sooner when they are easier to resolve.
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Problems get solved faster, leaving more time to solve the next problem.
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Feedback happens consistently and in more detail so skills grow.
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And accountability and ownership improve.
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In low trust teams, a lack of trust translates into these types of behaviors.
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Issues are hidden or ignored until they become a lot bigger and much harder to resolve.
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Frustration within team members and the manager builds, exacerbating the problems.
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Gossip, put down, subtle bullying and other negative behaviours increase.
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Managers receive very filtered and often unuseful information, limiting their ability to do a good job.
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Low trust environments or environments with dropping levels of trust make the manager's job significantly harder and team performance is much more likely to be lower, which in turn increases the pressure and stress on the manager.
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Dropping team performance increases risks to manager job security.
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So the hidden costs of low trust team environments.
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While you'll see increased conflict in teams with low trust, this is not the biggest cost.
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A much bigger and far more hidden cost is silence and lack of action.
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Many managers worry about having to manage challenging employees, the obvious problem.
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Much harder to tackle is the very capable employee who has stopped speaking up or who doesn't try to solve as many problems independently of the manager.
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Capable employees see the problems, they notice the behaviors, they understand what needs fixing, often better than the manager.
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If they have learnt that it is not worth speaking up, they just stay silent.
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Eventually they disengage psychologically before they leave physically.
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The manager thinks everything seems calm and people are getting on with their work.
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The problems are not obvious.
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The problem is not what is happening, but is what is not happening when there is little trust in the team.
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The only real sign of the trust issue is the lack of motivation, lack of commitment, lack of engagement and lack of ownership across the team.
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This will translate into worse team performance, sometimes dramatically so.
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So here are five ways any manager should build trust through behavior.
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You don't build lasting trust through big gestures, team away days, and similar.
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The most important and enduring trust is built every day through all the little actions and behaviors you do.
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High levels of trust take months to build at least.
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A manager can build enough trust to get the team performing noticeably better in weeks.
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Building that trust takes self-awareness, conscious effort, discipline and determination.
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Here are the actions you should be doing.
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And if you're already doing these, try to do them even better, even more consistently every single day that you're in the office.
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Firstly, to build trust, spend more time listening than talking.
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When people feel heard, they feel valued and trust builds.
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When you show that you want to know about them through listening, trust builds.
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Plus, when you really listen, you'll know exactly what is happening in the team and what their ideas and solutions are.
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Secondly, to build trust, be very clear in the expectations you set for the whole team and make sure you apply these expectations consistently and fairly.
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You must also act and behave as an example to the team for how to beat expectations.
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Third, to build trust, do your very best to do what you say.
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Once you commit to something, make it happen.
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And if you really can't, explain why you haven't done as you said you would.
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This behavior builds a lot of trust quickly.
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Fourth, to build trust, admit your own mistakes clearly and openly.
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Yet this gives permission for others to admit their mistakes.
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Use mistakes as learning opportunities, do not put the person down.
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This is also a great way to build trust quickly across a team and stops mistakes being hidden.
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Fifth, to build trust, be as open, clear, and honest in your communication as you can be.
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Let people know where they stand, share information that will help them with the context to do their job well and make better decisions.
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Don't hoard information.
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Give useful feedback regularly, praise a lot, work to create psychological safety across the team.
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All these create a lot of trust fast.
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And this is not an exhaustive list.
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Take any actions you think that will increase the trust across the team and with you.
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Be genuine and authentic.
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Be pleasant to deal with.
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People trust those they know and like.
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So, in summary, the most common signs of a lack of trust in a team is silence, poor accountability, low engagement, recurring people problems, and a lack of ideas and solutions coming from the team.
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Don't ask what I should do to fix these behaviours.
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Ask what should I do to increase the level of trust in the team and with me.
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Fix the low levels of trust and all the behavioural symptoms that you are seeing will go as a result.
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Trust levels are often the root cause.
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And when managers create trust, teams become more open, more accountable, and more willing to perform at a higher level.
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The behaviors you want don't appear by accident.
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They grow from the environment that you create.
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Work on building a higher level of trust across your team.
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Help the team trust you more through your everyday actions and behaviors.
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If you have any questions on powerful links, why trust changes team behaviour and performance, please email me at support at enhance.