Building trust in your team and the organisation is the foundation for creating a sustainable and successful business.
People will stay with you longer, and they’ll have a high level of accountability as they want to deliver for you and their team. However, this is where founder CEOs often, not surprisingly, struggle.
When the business is a small startup, team members are likely to be predominantly good friends with similar backgrounds, perhaps having met at university where they were all doing the same or similar degrees.
As the organisation grows to 20, 50 and more than 100 people, different skills are required in the business and the diversity of the team grows exponentially. The founder CEO must learn how to connect and lead this diverse group.
I have identified the six levers to build trust. They are easy for you to execute, and the more you practise them, the quicker they will become authentic habits. When you consistently execute disciplined leadership actions to build trust and accountability, you can guarantee your team will mirror them back.
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1. Role-model the right behaviours
It cannot be stated often enough: role modelling is one of the most important elements of being a disciplined leader. You need to constantly demonstrate the behaviours you expect from the team.
Social learning theory, as developed by psychologist Albert Bandura, supports this. His research found that people emulate the behaviours they observe, particularly from those they respect. When leaders frequently show consistency between their words and actions, and these align with the company’s values, it reinforces trust.
2. Build strong emotional intelligence
In his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman, one of the world experts in EI, defines it as having four critical components:
- Self-awareness: The ability to recognise and understand your emotions, strengths and limitations. If you lack self-awareness, your team will see through inconsistencies, making it harder to build trust.
- Self-management: The ability to regulate emotions, stay calm under pressure, and respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively. Leaders who manage their emotions will create stability, especially in high-stakes situations.
- Social awareness: The ability to recognise emotions in others, understand team dynamics, and sense the organisation’s pulse. A CEO who is socially aware picks up on concerns before they escalate and can make people feel heard, which builds confidence and psychological safety, and trust.
- Social skills: This is about building a connection with the team beyond KPI discussions. The simplest lever to demonstrate your social skills is to use people’s names, as people love to hear their name said by the CEO.
Some people feel that emotional intelligence is a quality that is inherent and can’t be learned. However, like most leadership skills, it is learnable if you apply yourself and use the above framework to guide you.
3. Share information
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, famously said, “The more you share, the more they care”.
Many leaders restrict information because of confidentiality concerns. In fact, the opposite is true – the more transparent you are, the greater the empowerment and trust within the team.
When employees understand the broader picture, they feel more empowered and invested in the company’s success. Sharing information also shows that you trust them, which leads to reciprocation, with them increasing their trust in you.
4. Interact frequently with leaders and the organisation
There are many ways to deliberately build strong connections – one-on-one meetings, team meetings, all-hands meetings and retreats.
As a CEO, one of my favourite approaches for connecting with the team is what are called ‘skip-level lunches’. These involve the CEO meeting directly with employees who are two or three levels down in the organisation.
5. Use trust-building tools
Psychometric testing tools like Myers–Briggs, Clifton Strengths Finder, DiSC, Hogan, and scenario-based judgement tests provide valuable insights into individuals’ strengths and their working styles. Sharing these results fosters greater understanding and collaboration among team members.
A very simple approach to trust-building is through the use of icebreakers at the start of your leadership team meetings or social events. A few icebreaker questions you might find useful are:
- A principle I lead my life by is …
- My friends would use the following three adjectives to describe me …
- Tell me about a person whom you don’t know but who has inspired you …
- For as long as I can remember, I wanted to …
- My superpower is …
6. Be adept and proactive in handling conflict
You must be good at handling conflict, as it happens multiple times every day, if not every hour.
Essential behaviours to better manage conflict include:
- Recognise that confrontation is inevitable: Avoiding it and thinking the situation will get better rarely works.
- Stay calm and unemotional: This is tough to do, particularly if you are feeling personally connected to the issue. Over time and with practice, you can get better.
- Focus on the problem, not the individual: Do not allow your points to become personal, even if the other parties do.
- Find common ground and solutions: Coming to a comprehensive solution may require agreement over hundreds of points. Remain patient and work through it, issue by issue.
- Know when to walk away: Sometimes, in conflict and during difficult discussions when you see that agreement is not possible, your most powerful action is to walk away. Remember to ‘choose your battles’.
- ‘Eat the frog early’: Strange as it may sound, this means tackling your most difficult task first thing in the morning. Putting it off won’t make it easier – it will only weigh on your mind and distract you throughout the day.
- Document it. Before you leave a hard conversation, be sure to summarise and document what you have agreed upon. This ensures there is no ambiguity and no issues down the track.
The opening statement in any confrontation is crucial to a successful resolution. If you start with, ‘I can’t believe you did this!’, the conversation is doomed before it begins.
- Edited extract from Discipline beats vision: How to be the leader your company needs starting Monday by Dane Hudson (Wiley, $36.95), available at all leading retailers, and Amazon.
