It’s one of the core elements of emotionally healthy relationships and productive businesses, but our definition of “trust” gets cloudy and confusing.
Trust is the level of confidence someone has in your willingness and ability to protect them.
That definition works with many of your stakeholder groups, including the employees you lead as well as your customers, community members, peers, and the leaders above you.
If it feels better to you, you can use the word “trustworthy” instead. When employees express a lack of trust in their leaders or coworkers, they’re usually trying to say they’ve had experiences that prove these people are not *worthy* of being trusted.
As a leader, being perceived as trustworthy is a process that happens over time through the interactions you have with people and the decisions you make. These are the experiences or touchpoints that signal to others whether they should be confident that you’ll look out for them or not.
It’s the running total of these interactions and decisions that result in how trustworthy you are perceived to be. I call this your Trust Balance. When your interactions and decisions are perceived to be focused on your best interest or to benefit one stakeholder group while harming another, your Trust Balance goes down. But when your interactions and decisions are perceived by others to convey that you’re both willing and able to look out for them, your Trust Balance rises.
To create an environment where employees feel confident trusting leaders and each other, take a closer look at these interactions:
1) One-on-one meetings between leaders and their employees
2) Team meetings
3) When feedback is provided
4) When conflict occurs
Imagine these interactions from the employee’s perspective and consider how you could design an experience that would leave them thinking, “I feel like everyone has my back.”
And then keep expanding that approach to other interactions so it becomes the norm. Consistency is key. You won’t get it right every time, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s normal and healthy. It’s your authentic intention that makes all the difference. When you genuinely intend to shape trustworthy experiences, people can feel it.
There’s more insight about the innerworkings of trust – and why it typically shows up alongside challenges related to internal communication, decision-making, strategic clarity, and collaboration – in my article in HR Director Magazine: https://www.thehrdirector.com/senior-leaders-can-build-trust-todays-human-centric-era-work “The key is to be mindful of the status of the relationship. As soon as it begins to feel adversarial, recalibrate your leadership approach right away. Once trust starts to slip, it’s difficult to recover.”
And here’s a 50-second video about how trust showed up as a “tricky subject” in my research with more than 200,000 employees and leaders across various industries, job types, and locations.
About the Author
A former communication executive and global leadership advisor, Jessica Walter has been helping leaders solve culture, engagement, and communication challenges since 2002.
She spent 15 years on the executive teams of government, non-profit, and publicly traded businesses before transitioning into research and advisory roles, including senior positions at a global consulting firm.
Her research includes leading multiple studies on communication, relationships, and leadership effectiveness that included input from more than 200,000 employees across multiple industries, job types, and geographic regions. She recently published the insights from her research in her book, Shifting the Energy: How Love Leads Remarkable Teams.
In 2023, she was a featured speaker at the annual conference of the Society of Industrial and Organization Psychology where she gave a presentation on burnout and the joint responsibility of leaders and employees to reduce burnout in the workplace. Her advice has also been featured on CNN Radio and in HR Director magazine, Training Magazine, Mindful Marketing, Becker’s Hospital Review, and PRSA’s Strategies & Tactics.
Jessica studied Executive Influence at Wharton, earned a master’s degree in Leadership & Business Ethics from Duquesne, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication from Towson. She holds the Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) and certifications as a Leadership Coach, Lean Systems Leader, and Hogan Assessments Advisor.
She lives near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and is the mom to a former U.S. Army Paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne Division.
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