'How to be a trusted leader?'
Wrong question
If you believe the headlines of webpages and newspapers, then everyone loves four quick steps, or three surefire solutions, or two guaranteed ways to do….anything.
And when it comes to trust, I can point you to articles that will give sixteen, or fourteen or ten, or nine, or three or two tips for building trust.
Perhaps there’s a fancy AI algorithm that can use that data as the basis to work out what the optimum number of tips would be for an article about how to build trust.
Perhaps.
But that there is a lot of advice makes sense. As a leader, one thing most of us want to do is build trust in our teams. It’s a smart thing to do and it’s good practice.
If you’re a leader reading this, I think you should be building trust in your teams.
Quick solutions?
I’ve seen and read more than one article that will try to persuade you that there’s a quick fix for building or rebuilding trust. Who doesn’t love a quick fix?
These quick-fix suggestions frustrate me, though I won’t point the finger at anyone here. Headline-writers gotta write.
But the articles frustrate me because there isn’t a quick way to build trust. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t care, or hasn’t thought about what trust is.
What is trust?
I’m a philosopher with an interest in trust, so I can happily spend the next 60,000 words giving you an answer to this question. When you ask a philosopher ‘what do you mean by x?’, for any x you like, we can give you a lot of words.
If you happen to be interested in my research and have a few hours to kill, by all means take a look.
Now, sometimes the philosophical approach is really helpful. But this may not be the right time. I can feel the sighs of happiness from everyone reading this….
In thinking through some practical advice for building trust in teams we don’t always need to go that far into the depths of analysis.
Like everything, philosophy has its limits.
What does the research show?
Let’s instead look at some fantastic empirical work that’s been done and use that to help guide us here.
This great paper by Karikumpu, Haggman-Laitila, and Terkamo-Moisio looks at the way that trust has been measured. As they note, they are working in the field of healthcare, but the approaches to measuring trust in leadership that they make use of are all drawn from other disciplines — business and industry (p. 6) are the areas they focus on. Their paper is a review of the ways that trust has been measured across a range of papers across those literatures.
The paper is really helpful in drawing out five themes around how to measure trust in leadership: competence, consistency, openness, appreciative acceptance, and loyalty with risk.
Let’s explore. Because what Karikumpu and colleagues were measuring were the traits of leadership that are associated with trust. So, if you want to be trusted, you need to demonstrate…
Competence
‘Competence included the leader’s knowledge of work, abilities to complete the role, and skills including technical competence.’ (p. 9)
As it says on the tin: as a leader, you need to be able to do the job and demonstrate as much. This should be a low bar, but I’m sure we can all think of cases that might be judged problematic.
Just think of your least favourite politician.
Consistency
‘Consistency was operationalized, for example, as ‘I believe that my manager follows words through with action’ (p. 9).
This shouldn’t surprise you. We’ll come back to why consistency is important for this article in a moment. But for the time-being, we should just note that consistency takes time.
Openness
Do you give space to employees to employees to discuss their personal issues and possible difficulties with you?
Because when Karikumpu et al. looked at the literature for measures of trust in leadership, this was something that mattered. Again, this may not surprise you. If you trust someone, it’s pretty normal to feel comfortable in sharing with them what matters.
Appreciative acceptance
Acceptance and empathy are important, here, as were respect and fariness. Very broadly, this was best captured as:
‘employees’ feelings about the leader’s acceptance and empathy towards them while they were loyal to the leader’ (p. 9)
So this is a two-way streak: people expect to display loyalty and to have your acceptance and empathy.
Loyalty with risk
This is straightforward: ‘employees’ feelings about the leader’s honesty and reliability with benevolence’ (p. 9)
But, though it’s straightforward, just like consistency, this should make us think back to the idea that we can build trust especially quickly.
Let’s return to that.
It can’t be quick
I started by saying that building trust takes time. We can now see why that’s true. For trust, we need consistency. For trust, we need employees to feel that leaders are honest and reliable in their benevolence.
You can’t possibly demonstrate consistency or reliability except over a period of time.
So, if the research is right — and it’s certainly born out by a whole raft of other findings — then, just like love, there’s no way to hurry trust.
What to take away?
Ironically, trying to build trust might be completely the wrong way to think about how to best build trust. Instead, focus on demonstrating competence, consistency, openness, appreciative acceptance, and loyalty with risk. It’s not a quick fix, but it looks to be a powerful one.
Let me know in the comments: are there things that you think are missing from the research?