Your employees can work optimally and thrive when they feel the company leadership trusts them. They should feel comfortable coming to work and being treated with trust instead of being micro-managed and watched as long as they are in their workplace. As an employer, it’s your responsibility to create a high-trust environment where employees feel safe, included, trusted, motivated and engaged.
But in the polarised world where we live today, how do you create trust-driven leadership and practice it consistently via small steps to get it perfect? We bring you five effective steps that can help you do just that.
- Focus on a Non-Biased Human-Centric Approach
Just because your company has people from diverse backgrounds and demographics doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inclusive. Instead of staying fixated on metrics and categorising employees by demographic attributes, you need to invest in them and focus on creating engagement and positive work experiences.
When adopting a human-centric approach, you need to emphasise human relationships to ensure your people are your biggest resources, even more precious than any strategic assets.
Though every leader has a unique leadership style, consciously focusing on some key leadership mindsets can help create an environment where all employees feel respected, valued, and capable of contributing their best work. These leadership mindsets include courage, an unbiased attitude, curiosity, self-awareness, resilience, vulnerability, and empathy.
- Boost Transparency at Work
Secrecy erodes trust. To build trust-driven inclusive leadership, you should increase the level of transparency around the work being allotted, completed, and some other key organisational matters. Trust connects people and teams and shows exactly what everyone is contributing to the key objectives.
Apart from creating trust between employees and employers, workplace transparency also reduces job-related stress, and improves happiness, morale, and performance.
When there’s a lack of transparency and the leaders are unpredictable, unable to nurture their human assets, and don’t have authenticity and empathy, people tend to become anxious and second-guess motives. This can be a big barrier to developing a more inclusive and holistic leadership approach.
- Build and Nurture Open Communication Channels
Are your employees afraid of the impending change? Do they feel unsure of how it will affect their career and professional growth? Does your decision upset them? Is any of your employees undergoing a personal problem or setback that’s affecting their performance at work?
Before you say “I don’t like to parent my employees” or “I don’t have time for emotional drama at the workplace,” just pause and think. Simply listening to your employees and giving them a platform to share and talk about their feelings, fears, and insecurities could be all your company needs to bring them on board with any changes or make them align with what your future plans are.
Even when you want your employees to feel challenged (with new modes of work or other changes, for instance), you should do it by giving them a sense of safety and stability. The key is to make them feel challenged just enough that gives them the confidence of stepping outside their comfort zone without feeling threatened or insecure. And you can do this by building and nurturing open communication channels.
- Don’t Shy Away from Mending Broken Trust
Once broken, it’s difficult to mend trust. But it isn’t impossible. Though it’s rare for leaders to admit mistakes, apologise, or hold themselves accountable, these are the things you will need to do if you plan on repairing a rift.
Leaders often believe that admitting their blunders publicly will make others think less of them. However, real accountability and understanding can make it a lot easier to repair trust when it’s broken.
As a leader, your self-knowledge and self-image can trigger defence mechanisms that makes you avoid owning and admitting your faults. This is natural. But you need to realize this and keenly restrict this response to do what is necessary to mend broken trust if you want to build a culture of trust-driven inclusive leadership.
- Be Empathetic
Listening to people’s challenges and problems isn’t easy. Instead of a cynical response like “we just focus on the solutions, not problems,” empathize with the problem. As a leader, not doing the emotional work means you are rushing into solutions by suppressing feelings and emotions.
In the short term, it could work. But in the long run, your employees will feel the company and its leaders don’t want to deal with their emotions, and having emotions isn’t acceptable, because they just want them to perform efficiently.
This could translate into employees thinking that their leaders just want business results and people don’t matter as humans to them because all they want is their employees’ analytical productive self.
But can you really ask someone to bring their 50% to work while shutting down the rest 50% that’s made of their creative and emotional side? Can you really say you don’t want to recognise that 50%? Or that bringing this part to work could jeopardise an employee’s position or even make them face punishment and dire consequences? Even ignoring this 50% will be a type of punishment for your employees.
To stay creative and productive, your employees need to stay connected to both their creative and analytical self. And you should be empathetic to them as a whole if your goal is to create a work environment powered by trust-driven inclusive leadership.
Wrapping Up
Growing as a leader and building a culture of trust-driven inclusive leadership takes time. With a human-centric approach, supporting transparency at work, building and nurturing open communication channels, mending broken trust, and being empathetic, you can achieve it.
Do you have an idea for a future blog or would like to share your thoughts on any particular topic? It would be great to hear from you.
Right International are market leading recruiters to the Loss Adjusting, Claims, MGA and wider Insurance market.
If you are looking to add to your team now or in the near future or are considering your next career move, please contact myself or one of the team.
Follow us on LinkedIn for regular industry updates, leadership articles and latest vacancies.
Take care, all the best.
Gary
Gary Pike, Founder & MD Right International
