Tips on Building Team Trust

by Adrian C. SEO Specialist

As most corporate training in the Philippines will point out, trust is one of the most important factors of a successful team. When everyone relies on each other, they are motivated to work and the company becomes more efficient. As a leader, it is your job to build it within your team. These are the tips you can follow, to build trust within your team:

Allow everyone to have a voice

When you only let employees work on their jobs and not give them opportunities to speak about their opinions, they start to feel that they are nothing more than production units. A relationship of trust between a leader and an employee, like all relationships, are supposed to be equally balanced. People will only listen to their partners if their partners also listen to them.

There may a be department problem that heavily affects your employees in a negative way. You as the leader wants to have it solved. But if you don’t bother asking them about possible solution ideas and facts about the situation, you may end up implementing a solution that is unhelpful.

The more times you do this, the higher the chance employees will think of you as dictatorial and uncaring. They are not humans to you, but robots who are only there to do their job. They start to think your not worth listening to. Leaders have a hard time leading people who do not care about their words.

If you let them speak more, they will take your words seriously again.

Enforce self-responsibility

Teammates trust each other when everyone is responsible enough to finish their jobs. Each person doesn’t need someone else to supervise their work, because they already that their actions also negatively and positively affect the team as well. When there is a freeloader who never finishes their part on time out of laziness or other reasons, everyone else gets affected. The team output wasn’t successfully finished, and the whole team gets blamed, even if everyone knows, it was really one person’s fault. People get angry and the work environment nows becomes unproductive.

To make sure every member is responsible for their own self and others, you should first clearly define their job roles in the company. Be transparent with the policies and contract rules as employees. Second, repeatedly state to them that people in this company commonly bend backward for each other. No one hesitates to take off time from their schedule to help someone in need.

Be open about your mistakes

People will trust you more and their teammates if mistakes aren’t shamed about. Everyone, including the leader, isn’t afraid of taking responsibility for the mistakes they made and are open to improving again.

The reason why being open about your mistakes, make you trustworthy, is because this trait makes you also seem more authentic. When you are authentic by showing your true colors, you are honorable and thus, someone safe to trust.

Key Takeaway:

Team trust is an important concept talked about in a lot of corporate training in the Philippines. It is essential to the success of the team and the company as a whole. Therefore, leaders should do all they can to build and maintain trust within the team.