Every Good G S ift
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Entrepreneur
Trusting those you lead By Joseph Lalonde |www.biblicalleadership.com | image credit: istock
We all want to be trusted. What we often don’t do is trust those we lead. We hire a new employee. We begin to think of ways the employee may cheat the company. Boom. We’ve broken a bond of trust. The employee may not realize it. Yet. Slowly but surely, the employee will begin to realize you don’t trust them. They will see the “guardrails”you’ve put up to keep them in line.
While this may be true, who didn’t lead the team well? That’s right; the answer is you. Take the blame when projects and initiatives fail. This shows your team that you trusted them to get things done. It also shows them that you realize you failed to support your team.
3. Give respect.
Another problem employees feel in being trusted is that they believe their leader doesn’t respect them. Sometimes this is true. Other times it is not.
We talk about trust like it’s important. We don’t live it out.
We still have to learn how to give respect if we want our team members to trust us.
Here are five ways we can show that we believe in trust, and that we trust those we lead.
A lack of respect tells your people a lot of things. One of those is that they aren’t trusted.
1. Listen more than you speak.
4. Focus on output.
One way we show that we don’t trust those we lead is that we talk too much. We Do you need butts in seats or do you need output? One of the easiest ways to believe we’re giving the person information they need, helping them understand show trust is to allow your people to be trusted. a process, or working them through a problem. Ask for output, not time in seats. But there’s a problem with this. When you demandpeople to be in seats, you tell them you don’t trust them. You We don’t stop to listen. We give, give, and give some more. tell them that their presence is required because it shows you they’re working. What we failed to do was to understand what they need. It shows we don’t un- Want to show trust? Allow your team to produce rather than be present. derstand and trust them.
5. Be trustworthy yourself.
Let’s stop talking so much. A popular phrase says we were given two ears and one mouth. We should listen twice as much as we speak. The last tip I want to give you is that to trust others, you have to be trustworthy yourself. You will struggle to trust those you lead if you don’t keep your word. If that’s the case, why would others trust you? Why would you be able to trust others? Issues are to end with the leader. Whether a project fails, never gets off the ground, or falters somewhere along the way, the blame falls to the leader. Work on yourself. Make yourself trustworthy.
2. Take the blame.
Too often, leaders push the blame on their team. They say that Mitch didn’t get Then, you will have an easier time trusting those you lead. the data, Tommy didn’t follow through, or Sami failed to present the presentation properly.
TT 159 | July 5th - July 11th| 2022
