Leading with trust in a digital world

Leading with trust in a digital world

If you think about how clients choose you, how people join your organisation or how you choose suppliers, very often your answer will include a healthy amount of trust. 

In a digital age, building trust is becoming more challenging with the level of misinformation and misleading claims and content wherever you turn. 

Being able to cut through this and build trust in all parts of your organisation helps you stand out from the crowd. 

Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout. – Harvard Business Review – The Neuroscience of trust 

People thrive in high trust environments. You may have experienced the huge benefits of operating in an environment where you can be open, share your thoughts and challenge those around you. 

The key question you might be exploring is how do you focus on building trust within your organisation? Here are three key areas to develop:

1. Trust and psychological safety 

Trust and psychological safety are critical for an effective workplace. Having both in place promotes teamwork, innovation, and learning. Think of trust as the belief that others will act with integrity and to help others. Psychological safety promotes a culture where you can express yourself without fear of judgment, and mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities. 

This often comes through when we see examples of servant leadership, and when leaders are curious and have a good degree of coaching skills. All three of these situations tend to come with a high degree of empathy and insight. This insight and empathy is a cornerstone of building trust.  

Hygiene factors (or doing the basics and doing them extraordinarily well).  There are a few fundamental aeras to consider around the basic elements of trust:

• Accountability: The ability to take ownership of mistakes and successes.
• Compassion: Trusting people who care about others, there is a relationship and connection beyond what I needed to get the job done. 
• Consistency: People seeing and hearing the same thing consistently helps build trust. 
• Integrity: Actions match words, and people choose what's right over what's easy. 
• Communication: There is a consistency of open communication, disagreement is accepted (even encouraged) and there is a unified message. 
• Reliability: Delivering against actions inspires confidence in others.  
• Empathy: Connecting with others on an emotional level helps builds trust. 
• Values, motivators and beliefs aren’t written on a wall, they are lived by every person every day. 

Former Herman Miller CEO Max De Pree once said, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant.”

It’s not about being easy on your employees or expecting less from them. High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults, knowing that this is the environment for individuals, teams and organisations to thrive.

1. Digital trust in an ever-changing world 

Trust is at the core of effective long-term employee and client retention and development. Having trust within your organisation is at the heart of retaining and attracting the very best people for your organisation. We live in a digital driven world, and you need to look at trust and how this links to both your client and team interactions.  

Digital trust

Think about your online experience versus your face to face experience in these two simple examples:

1. An organisation has a brilliant, slick website and you purchase an item from them. You decide to collect the item from their premises and it’s dirty, and disorganised and no one seems to know where your order is. When someone finds your order, they seem unsure if it’s the right item when they hand it to you and the box is battered and torn. Do you take the item or ask for a refund and walk away?
2. You are looking at job vacancies on LinkedIn and one really matches your skills and experience, in fact it looks like the ideal job. You look at the companies LinkedIn page, and it’s website. Both have little information on and what information there is appears to be out of date. You speak to a trusted member of your network, and they assure you the organisation you are looking at has a great culture, brilliant people and would be a great fit for you, do you apply for the role?

In both cases the digital and real world experience don’t match. There is a break in congruence between what you see and hear digitally and in real life. If you think about your own personal digital footprint and the digital footprint of your organisation are they both up to date and relevant?

It’s important to get a clear view of how you appear to all of yruo key stakeholders, and ask yourself this simple question:

No matter how we engage a stakeholder do they get the same high quality experience?

3.    Trust and focusing on other needs. 

We often talk about a leaders self orientation and the need to reduce this and focus on your key stakeholders needs. Put simply, focus on your clients and what’s most important to them. That sounds obvious, but you would be surprised by how many professionals assume rather than really dig into the detail to find what this client wants this time. 

So, what is self-orientation? Well, it's about where your focus is. Is it on you, your organisation, and your services, or is it on your clients, their challenges, their needs and their aspirations? To increase trust you need to shift the focus to your client, especially in terms of your communications.

Now this can be boiled down to two core elements:

A.    Listening: really listen; don't dive in; don't be tempted to fill a gap in the conversation. No diving on top of something that might lead to a link to your service. Instead, wait, be patient and listen, to build the full picture so that you genuinely understand. Pull back from the immediate transaction and look at the bigger picture. Understand what is happening before, during and after this piece of work. What has led your client to this point? 

B.    Shape your questions so that you're encouraging your client to talk. Now, this means avoiding the “I” statements; keeping away from leading questions and making more use of "TED" questions. TED is an acronym for a set of questions starting with Tell, Explain and Describe. These type of questions can help you build a deeper level of client curiosity, exploring what they are telling you and looking for more information.

By really focusing on others needs, you can build trust in a systematic way before someone even becomes a client. 

Applying the tools and approaches we have described help you develop the core foundations needed in becoming your clients’ trusted adviser.  

One final thing: Trust killers and how you can recover

Not delivering a product or service is not the end of trust. In fact, people who experience a poor level of service can become trusted advocates based on how you handle this poor service. Admitting mistakes quickly is key. Then understanding how a clients wants an issue to be resolved is key. A cancelled order and a refund is no good if I still want the product or service. A rearranged delivery a week later is no good if that is a week after I need a gift to arrive. Getting things wrong is an opportunity to show real client focus in how you resolve things. Get this part right and clients will tell others a positive story about you and your organisation.

With your team, think about all of the positive areas we discussed earlier. You can break trust in any number of ways, simply by not communicating, not living your values or by not following up on your actions. The key here is when things aren’t right you need to over communicate, engage and ensure you put things right quickly. Demonstrate you have learned lessons from mistakes and explain how you have made changes based on those mistakes. You then need to consistently demonstrate that the new behaviours match what was expected and this will help you rebuild trust. 

You can see that the opposite is true, if you break trust, don’t learn lessons, don’t communicate, and don’t demonstrate living your values then trust is broken, and what trust remains is slowly eroded away. 

As adults, trust has many definitions and can be established, lost and regained (Mikulincer, 1998). According to Rempel, Holmes and Zanna (1985), trust requires that partners be seen as reliable and predictable, that the partner is concerned with one’s needs, and that the individual feel a sense of confidence in the relationship with the partner. According to the authors, each element of trust varies in how much it contributes to the relationship. “The most important aspect of trust in close relationships appears to be faith: the belief that one’s partner will act in a loving and caring way whatever the future holds” (Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna, 1985). Another important aspect of trust is that of consistency – or rather inconsistency. 

We hope you have found this article useful, and if you are your team want to elevate the level of trust you have with your key stakeholders please do get in touch. Please trust us when we say, we really focus in on your needs.