The Key To Team Success And Productivity

Trust, it can be said with confidence, is the operating system of every durable relationship and every successful organization.

Trust is built and maintained by many small actions over time. It’s not a matter of technique or tricks or tools. It’s all about behaviors

Charles Feltman clearly understand this, and he offers sound advice in The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Prier for Building Trust at Work.

Feltman says the choice to trust consists of four distinct assessments about how someone is likely to act. Those assessments are care, sincerity, reliability, and competence. He explains how explicit conversations about those characteristics help people build a high trust culture in the workplace.

“Let me tell you about Robyn’s team,” he says. “They were meeting goals adequately, but he knew they could be more innovative, and the key was stronger trust. He just didn’t know how to talk about it with the team. Trust was too big and ambiguous a topic. When they were introduced to the idea that trust can be thought about as four distinct, interrelated assessments, however, it radically changed how they were able to talk about it.”

Feltman says the framework allowed the team to have productive conversations about trust. “They identified two domains where their trust was strong (care and competence) and two where they needed some work (sincerity and reliability). From there they were also able to pinpoint specific behaviors that would increase their trust in those two domains. By consistently doing so over time, they became part of their team culture.”

When people are new to a work environment, what specific things can they do to demonstrate to their new colleagues that they are worthy of trust?

Feltman explains with a story about Olivia, a woman who started a new position as chief marketing officer in a fast-growing software company. She realized that quickly building trust with her new boss, colleagues, and employees was critical to both her short- and long-term success.

“Olivia was familiar with the four trust assessment domains and determined the fastest way to demonstrate trustworthiness initially was to focus on behavior that signaled she was reliable and competent,” Feltman says. “While sincerity and care are equally important to developing high trust relationships, if she quickly built a reputation for reliability and competence people would extend her their trust, at least provisionally, in the other two domains.”

To build reliability, Olivia scrupulously followed through on the commitments she made. Part of that, Feltman says, was avoiding overcommitting. “She knew if she launched too many balls at once some were bound to fall, and so would her reputation for trustworthiness. She built trust in her competence by doing what she could do well—letting people know what she was still learning (and asking for help when it was appropriate) and being up front about what she didn’t know. She also sought feedback to learn and improve.”

For leaders who expect performance excellence, what are Feltman offers tips for communication clarity when delegating a task.

“When delegating a task or job, think through exactly what you want as an outcome or end product,” he advises. “Then use this to paint a clear picture of what ‘done to my satisfaction’ looks like. This supports success and builds trust.”

As an example, he tells about a leader who asks an employee to do something such as create a presentation for an executive team. The employee, naturally wanting to display expertise, creates a presentation deep in the weeds, not useful for execs. “Asking the employee to shorten the presentation doesn’t help because it’s fundamentally pitched at the wrong level,” Feltman says”. Only when the leader takes time to help the employee understand what those executives need—what ‘done to my satisfaction’ looks like—will the employee be able to get it right.”

Are some people naturally good at building trust? Yes. Trust-building is a competency, which means it’s a learned set of skills. “No matter how good we are at it now, we can work to improve,” Feltman says. “For me, an exceptional trust-builder is someone who can build and maintain trust with a wide variety of people, repair it if it’s damaged, and create an environment in which others can easily build trusting relationships. That is a learned competency.”