Earning Our Team’s Trust

 Since I had no direct authority over the team of behavior-based safety observers supporting me, earning and maintaining their trust was a crucial part of why they chose to remain engaged in the process when it would have been easier for each of them to focus solely on their actual job requirements. To that end, I had to be just as careful about being credible with everyone else in the facility. During my close to twenty years in manufacturing, I can only remember two times where I went on the shop floor without safety glasses. In each case, I had my regular glasses on and forgot to swap them out. I can think of just one time that I didn’t stop to put on steel-toe shoes before going into a production area, and that was when I had been called in late one night to begin an accident investigation. I’m not making excuses for any of these, but sharing how intentional I was about setting the best example I could because I knew everyone would be watching me; I couldn’t expect anyone to take my input on how their behavior could put them at risk if I wasn’t following the company’s safety guidelines. As my former boss shared in his example, trust can be lost very quickly!

When it comes to our core values, we can have the clearest words and most articulate definitions in place but our teams will be paying far more attention to what we do than anything they see on paper or a single word we say about them in a company meeting.

A few years ago, a friend (who happened to be one of the top performers in his organization) shared that the company’s executive team had recently implemented a policy defining how quickly team members were expected to respond to customers and clients. His rub was that he had several requests in to two folks on that executive team, all of which had gone well beyond the time defined in the policy, with no acknowledgement whatsoever. Near the end of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink cites research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist and principal researcher for Microsoft Research, that stated “Email response time is the single best predictor of whether the employees are satisfied with their boss. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their emails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.” If those executives were attempting to hold responsiveness up as one of the company’s core values, were they succeeding in exemplifying it to their team? Before you assume that their lack of response was an isolated instance, I’ll share something we learned (I believe from Mark Cole - who will be delivering the closing keynote at our upcoming 2025 LeadershipLegacy Experience): “How we do one thing is how we do everything!” Would it come as a surprise to learn that my friend is no longer with that organization?

With the importance of earning and maintaining trust being fresh in our minds, consider teamwork being a core value of the company you’re a part of. Simple enough, huh? I can’t imagine an organization that wouldn’t want to strive for modeling world-class teamwork. If the executive team defines that as “building on trust” while developing business relationships with out-of-town partners that actively undermine long standing local relationships, especially when preaching to their employees and customers about enriching their community, what are the chances of team members beginning to question the character of those executives? You and I both know the answer…

Make no mistake, I’ve never suggested that leadership is easy. In fact, it’s damn hard! The phrase I’ve heard my friend Terry share most from his time at West Point ties to consistently “choosing the harder right over the easier wrong.” When it comes to earning and maintaining buy-in from our team, exemplifying our values will indeed require choosing the harder right. If it’s not important enough to do so, are they really our values - or just words we’re hoping to impress people with? We’ll dig into that more soon. First though, we’ll take a look at what we can expect to see if we fail to exemplify and uphold our stated values…