Trust is the unquestioned belief that the other person has your best interests at heart. So why does it take so much effort to get employees and other stakeholders to accept that that their leadership actually has their best interests in mind and that they should believe what their leaders have to say?
Leaders of well-respected, high-performing organisations are the ones noted for their “open-book communications.” They are the ones who are able to create a culture of trust by sharing information quickly and freely. They develop trust as a leader by continually build on relationships with employees and other stakeholders to enable their organizations to be successful.
In my view leaders who are trusted are those who can communicate not only openly but often, and are able to initiate formal and informal programs and assess their own performance. They will have a crystal, committed communications policy,
Many leaders do a great deal of talking about trust but in fact spend little or no time ‘building’ trust.
At the heart of building trust is the process of communications, this is the fundamental key. Leaders are communicators if they believe that an important responsibility is to communicate.
The reason we find it difficult to trust most leaders, is that leaders need to ‘earn’ their trust in the first place.
Why Many People Still Don’t Trust Their Leaders
My team and I enjoy this ‘Ted’ video on the subject of how important it is to Trust a leader. You can see why in fact many people still do not trust their leaders. Conductor Charles Hazlewood talks about the role of trust in musical leadership — then shows how it works, and it is easy see why many people still do not trust their leaders. http://on.ted.com/Hazlewood
“If only the leaders of our world were required to sing and play music before meetings. Just think of the possibilities!”
