Building trusting relationships on the work team is easy in principle, but much more challenging in practice. Trust forms the basis of all relationships and interactions, whether it’s professional or personal ones.
Collaborative teamwork will only take place if there is a high level of trust among team members. A company with a strong sense of trust in the workplace have the capacity to fight the storms and have the capacity to maintain a clear vision of what their company’s objectives or goals stand for.
Trust is important in any business. It’s the ladder to the growth of the company. Every company experience with their employee’s trust issue and too much fear in the workplace. Such an environment is called a toxic work environment, where poor performance, the tension between the teams, stress, political infighting and lack of commitment are all the symptoms.
Trust takes time to develop and to understand it, is sometimes difficult. There is a principle that every leader or manager should learn and accelerate it correctly. Fundamentally, the leaders need to understand that one can never trust someone on the team who doesn’t believe is competent in what he or she does. Collaborative, high-performance teamwork depends on every member doing their job, and doing it well and leaving no windows of getting their actions second-guessed or judged. If by chance any team member is incompetent or alleged to be not competent enough then there won’t be a question of developing trust.
Moreover, fairness and equality are very important in building a trust factor. If one member of the team is higher ranking than the others, the team could still be productive, but if that higher-ranking member is exercising their rank to overrule, the trust will not develop in that team. Also, if one member work late hours, whereas, the other leaves the office early in the evening then the trust will not develop between them and since we are driven with the fact of comparing ourselves to others than by absolute measures.
Trust is such a factor where a leader or a manager is accountable to maintain it among the employees. Empowering staff to own their day to day responsibilities, permitting teams to make decisions and put together their own proposals that they believe benefit the business, being open and transparent on key decisions/ changes to business process or procedure, refrain from treating anyone or any team more favorably than another can help to retain the trust factor among the team members.
Similarly, team members should know the strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues to be able to help and support each other when needed. This is one of the main trust factors to have a united team. To develop high performance, all team members must respect one another and be willing to engage in true collaboration. When team members have trust, structure, helpful practices, and a strong commitment to the team’s mission and vision, they are placed for excellence. The team can set high standards, be creative and forward-thinking, and set collective goals and plans, all of which are crucial for high performance and meet the needs of the company’s objectives, in addition to, gaining the trust of the employers.
