High-performance teams only exist when they’re built upon a foundation of trust, and they feel safe with their leader – psychological safety.
The leaders set the tone in any organisation and organisations have a lot to gain when they embed trust at their core and build an environment where people feel safe sharing ideas, innovations, thoughts, and their mistakes without fear.
If there is no trust within the organisation it can lead to severe, and long term damage to people, brand, reputation, and profitability.
Research conducted by Paul J. Zak, found that high-trust companies gain;
• 76 per cent more engagement from their employees,
• 40 per cent less burnout,
• 50 per cent more productivity, and
• Employees take 13 per cent fewer sick days.
When leaders build an environment of trust, it enables individual employees, stakeholders, as well as the leaders themselves to be truly authentic in terms of who they are, what they stand for and the level of commitment and loyalty they have to offer the company.
Trust supports and encourages a collaboration and ideas sharing. It underpins a transparent, open culture and is critical to the pursuit of people feeling safe and valued at work.
Where there is a workplace culture of high levels of trust and employee safety, people naturally swing their mindsets to voluntarily support and engage with others for the betterment of their team, department, and the organisation as a whole – they form self managed and self lead teams that are highly productive.
The key stepping stone to their highly productive teams is the fact that for them to be successful, people must trust in the capability and competence of the people they engage with. If this trust does not exist the teams would fail.
It’s not that there are fewer mistakes, it is about people holding each other accountable and calling them out and together looking for solutions that make a difference.
High-performing and high-trust environments deliver stronger outcomes because there is a culture of feeling safe to speak up.
To be effective as a leader in building trust and high performing teams, they must develop the artform of active listening, asking rather than telling, building accountability and communicating with clarity.
It takes strong focused people leaders who trust in their people to create the right environment for self lead and self directed teams to blossom.