In my 13 years of leadership experience, I have read many books and blogs and watched hundreds of hours of youtube on leadership. But most fail to make leadership concrete and tangible, particularly when it comes to understanding trust. Trust between employees and managers is often something fluffy and hard to grasp. But there are practical signs that your employees trust you that you can look for.
The signs that your employees trust you as a manager include their willingness to take risks, ask for feedback, implement feedback, and share personal information. Keep reading to understand exactly how to spot these on your team!
1. Willingness To Take Risks
If the people on your team are willing to take chances and risk failure, chances are that they feel very comfortable with you having their back in case something goes wrong. This can sometimes mean that people step out of line but that they are okay with you correcting them.
If the people on your team are willing to take chances and risk failure, chances are that they feel very comfortable with you having their back in case something goes wrong.
2. Asking For Your Feedback
Asking for feedback is a personal and tough matter for all of us. You only go to the people you truly trust and ask for feedback. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, you trust the person so much that you know they will give you something of value and not treat you with disrespect or shame. Number two, you value what they have to say.
These are all excellent indicators of your employees trusting you.
3. Being Receptive To Feedback
In my career, I have sometimes met people asking for my opinion and my personal feedback about their behavior or performance. But then, I never see any implementation or improvement. I’ve sometimes come to the conclusion that this is due to a person uninterested in changing but interested in looking as if they were trying to change.
Therefore, it is a good sign of trust when people listen to your feedback and implement it!
4. They Annoy You
One of my best second-in-commands is also the one who annoys me the most in the world; he is really a great guy, smart, intelligent, and excellent at his work. And one part of his work is to challenge my decisions and ideas.
When I say he annoys me, I don’t mean in the sense that he should stop doing it. I mean it in the sense that as a person with an ego, it’s tough to always have someone find the flaws in my ideas, but as a professional, I wish for nothing else.
If you have people on your team willing to make you a little bit uncomfortable and annoyed with every decision you make, and they still keep doing it, you can be pretty sure that you have treated them in a way that is respectful and trust-building.
5. Sharing Personal Information
If your people are willing to share personal information about their family life and even more intimate secrets, then you can be pretty sure that the level of trust is high between you two.
Although it must be stated that this only is true if they come to you with information, not if you are directly asking, since this can sometimes make them feel pressured to share something.
6. Respecting Boundaries
When people say no to you, that means that you haven’t run over them with authority. It is considered a good sign when people on your team feel strong and confident enough to say no when someone crosses their blood.
Saying no to the manager requires even bigger confidence and understanding that they will not get punished. Unless this person is solely a troublemaker with nothing to lose, I consider this strong evidence of trust in you as a manager.
7. Sharing Stupid Ideas
At Sancus Leadership, we encourage stupid ideas because we know that for every great idea, there must be 100 bad ones, and if we censor the 99 bad ones, we will never find the good ones.
It is common to be in a meeting where a team leader asks for ideas but shrugs their shoulders when they hear something they don’t like.
This type of negative behavior indicates to the person presenting the idea that it isn’t welcome and shouldn’t be repeated. It doesn’t matter how often you tell them there are no bad ideas if your body language indicates something else.
If your team often presents ideas that are crazy, provocative, and probably never going to work, then you can be pretty sure they feel comfortable with you.
If your team often presents ideas that are crazy, provocative, and probably never going to work, then you can be pretty sure they feel comfortable with you.
8. Being Proactive
If you have a team working actively to solve problems before you notice them, you are in a golden position, my friend. Most managers and leaders dream of teams like this, and I know just how amazing it can feel to lead a high performing-unit. My bomb disposal team was just like this.
A big reason why your team is being so proactive is that they believe that you trust their decision-making skills so that they can operate autonomously while knowing that you help them if needed.
Below is a video of Simon Sinek talking about how building trust in your team is essential and crucial for success.
Final Thoughts
At Sancus Leadership, we know that trust is the foundation of any successful team! Being trusted by its members is the highest compliment a leader can get. Trustbuilding should be honored as a sacred practice and be held above all other tasks.
The old saying is true; trust takes years to build but only seconds to destroy.
