Magnify Trust in Leadership

Basic to all effective teams is a sense of trust between the leader and the team members. While the leadership position is given an individual from the organization, trust must be earned from the team members. The title gives the leader position power, but trust is earned slowly through the efforts and actions of the manager. While it is possible to gain short term results without the trust of the team, it is unlikely that long term performance will be able to be sustained without it. Building trust is the first step in leading teams through change.

A democratic approach to leadership helps to establish trust and reduce resistance to the change effort. If leaders open up the process to more individuals in the organization, they will become a part of the solution, rather than pawns manipulated for management's benefit. Therefore, there are several actions which leaders can take to establish and maintain trust during change efforts, including, leading with equity and fairness, sharing information, creating an open decision making process, giving employees freedom and autonomy, creating a safe environment where employees are free to voice their opinions and experiment with possible solutions without fear of retribution, and listening to employees with intent to act upon their ideas and needs.

This democratic and collaborative approach will help employees feel engaged in the process and is the vital first step in moving forward in any change effort. Team members lose their confidence in a leader who does not take the time to develop a relationship of trust with their team members. Without confidence, commitment to the team and to the team leader is not likely ever to be established and team members will not give their best efforts to support the leader and/or one another in the long term. This is especially true when faced with dramatic change. Trust must be established between the leader and the team as a whole, as well as with each and every individual team member, in order for there to be a foundation of trust which can sustain the change effort. In quoting the works of Connor in examining why employees resist change, Gary Yukl points out that the lack of trust of those proposing and leading the change is one of the major reasons employees resist change. He states that "Distrust can magnify the effect of other sources of resistance" (Yukl, 2006, p. 285).

As Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden argue in their book Contented Cows Give Better Milk, "As managers careen wildly from on tactic, to another, many forget that the critical difference between a brilliant strategy and one that gets successfully executed resides in the hearts and minds of people" (Catlette and Hadden, 1998, p. xv). Employees who work in an environment of trust with their immediate manager are more likely to be able to listen, discuss, brainstorm solutions, and work toward effective implementation, than those who work in an environment of mistrust. Like contended cows that produce more and better milk than cows that live in stress, employees that work in an atmosphere of trust, will face the change effort more effectively than those who work in an environment of mistrust.

Trust, therefore, must be established before the change begins. If a leader takes the approach that they will begin once the change has begun, he or she has already waited too long. The success of the rest of the steps may not be realized because of the magnifying effect the lack of trust has on other sources of resistance. Any intelligent employee will interpret efforts of the manager who uses phony methods to build trust once a change effort has begun, as an insincere attempt to manipulate the team. The likely dip in performance, the length of the fall and the ending results are all likely to be deeper, longer and less effective. Trust must be sincerely developed over time and established as the fist step of leading change well in advance to the beginning of the project in order to have the positive effects on the rest of the process.