No Trust, No Teamwork

Trust is the unspoken, often unconscious, glue that holds teams together. It permeates through all work and is the key determinant of how readily accountability and responsibility is taken, the level to which employees get work done and the foundation for the building and evolution of a vibrant culture.

Of course, trust goes further than our working lives and is prevalent (or not!) in the relationships we have outside of the office and yet, as humans, our default is to lack trust and insist that it be earned, rather than assume the best of everyone from the start.

The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer report found that ‘Nearly 6 in 10 respondents say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see evidence it is trustworthy’. This is often the dichotomy of trust. It’s required for us to feel happy, valued and content, yet our default response is to doubt trust, which in turn encourages a fixed mindset which then undermines our own happiness!

The aforementioned report does, however, paint a good picture of how employees view their employer overall (particularly in relation to governments or the media!) with 70% of respondents saying that they trust their employer. Of course, this is only possible if the business and the managers within it take steps to generate that trust in the first place.

On a day-to-day basis for people in teams, trust isn’t a big statement or a value to be upheld, it lives in the micro-experiences that they encounter every day:

• Do they need to ask for permission to make decisions on work they are responsible for?
• Can they decide their place of work?
• Is their opinion valued?
• Are they allowed to challenge inefficiency in the hope of improving things?

When people feel trusted, this leads to empowerment, which leads to productivity, which leads to results. If they don’t, then of course, the
opposite is true.

This dynamic was heightened during the pandemic.

For years, many organisations held onto a model that lacked flexibility, not because the technology didn’t work, but because they couldn’t trust certain members of their workforce. Everyone was tarred with the same brush and the office was seen as the only place that work could take place. One piece of research found that only 40% of managers thought that remote workers’ performance was better in a remote setting despite having no evidence to determine whether they had or not.

As we start to come out of pandemic conditions it’s important not to lose the trust and emotional capital that’s been built during the shift to remote work and recognise that the office is now one of the places that productivity can thrive providing that employees are trusted to do the right thing.

Of course, trust is a two-way street that requires employees to do the right thing to ensure that managers have no doubt as to their intentions. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Be a good human during interactions with others
• Be selfless when it comes to teamwork
• Live the values
• Deliver on promises
• Be disciplined in how work gets done
• Be generous in sharing information with others
• Make time for creative thinking
• Take appropriate risks
• Challenge inappropriate behaviour or poor performance.

When these traits are consistently demonstrated, employees not only earn the trust of management, but also of those around them, which in turn enhances emotional capital and the culture of the team.

However, in order for them to do this they need the following from managers:

• Clear expectations around behaviour
• Clear expectations on the outputs expected of them, the time that they have to complete them and the quality required
• Freedom over ‘how’ the work gets done
• Time to think and plan
• Latitude to take appropriate risk
• Time — to allow them to discuss their ideas or challenge conventional thinking
• A culture of ‘no blame’
• The support of the team.

When employees work hard to earn trust and managers do likewise to give trust, then a culture of mutual understanding exists and this provides the foundation for all future work which benefits everyone. As leadership author Stephen Covey wrote, ‘Trust is the glue that holds everything together.’

When you expect the best of someone then that’s what you get. You should always start there.