Stephen Covey once said, “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient for effective communication. It is the foundation of all relationships.” Trust is everywhere. It is undeniable. It is required for anything and everything to take place. It is needed in order to have successful teams, marriages, and families. Without a strong sense of trust within the workplace, your teams will fall apart faster than you can put them back together, and before you know it, everything will go up in flames. Time and time again, it has been proven that in order to have a success at work, trust has to be present within the team. Here are a few important foundations for building trust:
Commitment. Doing what you say you will is insanely important when talking about trust. Every member must commit to reaching a certain goal in order for a team to be successful. The ability to rely on one another is also an essential component of trust within a team. If you can’t depend on someone, how can you possibly trust them?
Competence. This is also an essential ingredient in the recipe to form a trustworthy team. If you can’t count on your team mates to follow through in order to make the team successful, it will be nearly impossible to install trust in that person.
Communication. If you have ever seen the popular TV show “Hell’s Kitchen”, you know that communication is key in order to build a producing team. When a team on the show isn’t communicating with one another, it makes it nearly impossible for them to put food out, and everything begins to fall apart. This same situation can be applied to a workplace environment. When teams within an office fail to work together, everything slowly falls apart.
Collaboration. When team members collaborate, it shows that they have built enough trust in one another to be comfortable sharing their own ideas and opinions. Also, a team member that has trust in others is more likely to share their concerns and speak out about something. A collaborative and trustworthy office environment leads to teams forming closer and more personal bonds, and that it what truly makes a successful team.
Towers Watson once said, “Of seventy-five possible drivers of engagement the one that was rated as the most important was the extent to which employees believed that their senior management had sincere interest in their well being and could be trusted.” Through these four foundations, it becomes obvious that trust is heavily prominent within our lives. It is everywhere and we can’t run from it. Hopefully in reading this, it opened your eyes to whether trust is existent within your workplace.