Trust in business – an essential ingredient for success
Recruiting the right people in business can be difficult. It involves a sometimes-lengthy cycle of building a relationship, buying them into your vision and culture, harnessing their skills and ideas to add maximum value and building mutual trust.
“Are you trustworthy?” would be an unusual interview question, wouldn’t it? Likewise, if a candidate asked you “Can I trust you?”, you would be a little thrown. But the reality is, business is built on a foundation of trust; co-directors, team relationships, client relationships, trusting in your brand, in your product and in your knowledge of the market. It is a trust-built confidence that helps you to manage the highs and lows of the rollercoaster that most of us are sitting on.
In business and in our everyday lives, we are wrestling with an ever-changing news cycle – social media, fake news, two or more versions of a story or message about a business, brand or person. It’s not surprising that we are developing a level of natural mistrust and scepticism about what is real and what is fake, and find it difficult to discern what information we should use to make good decisions and what is just noise. Even our favourite AI tools such as Chat GPT have a habit of hallucinating every now and again.
If you look trust up on your trusty AI you find the word trust linked to:
- Confidence
- Hope
- Responsibility
- Credit
- Clarity
- Character
- Consistency
and several other things. It’s a word that links to important elements of every relationship that we have inside or outside of work.
I was working with a client recently, talking about how they best use the resources and skills of their team, their ability to pass tasks or projects to others and what they keep only for themselves, perhaps because they don’t trust anyone else to deliver it as well as they do.
The conversation led to the phrase “I think I am too trusting” – the risk of placing faith in a team member with the potential of being let down and having to manage the consequences. We all have a personal tolerance for what we will give away and what we won’t.
As a founder starts to scale and grow a business, they quickly realise that they cannot be all things in all parts of the business, that they don’t have ALL the necessary skills. Perhaps you are in this situation yourself. It is an essential moment of realisation in the journey of a leader – you have to build a team or teams that have skills more wide-ranging and better than your own, and you then have to trust that each and every one of the people in your team or teams will follow you and your vision, work hard to help you meet your goals, and at the same time, place their unwavering trust in you.
We can forget sometimes that our own ability to trust in business, is, as in all our leadership influences, based on our own life experiences. The more times someone has been let down, the less likely they are to trust. In business you cannot do without trust, it is a core fundamental of building relationships with colleagues and clients, a baseline that allows us to transact with each other. If we operated in a world where every decision was sound and didn’t need trust then there would be no innovation, limited personal and professional development and, ultimately, less profit opportunity.
I admire entrepreneurs for the trust and faith they put in themselves and their goals, the willingness to trust enough to see where the journey will take them, the lessons they will learn on the way and hopefully the success they can build off the back of it. Learning to trust more in business makes you, as a leader, more resilient and more flexible and improves your leadership skills.
The truth is you can never really give all your trust to your team. You can empower them, develop them, give them responsibility and help them to professionally grow, but you must remember that just like you, they are people too, they have lives, loves, emotions, outside influences and different motivations.
Some of the best leaders I have seen are the ones that curate the perfect balance between trusting themselves and their instincts, trusting and empowering others and at the same time accepting that it isn’t a perfect world, that there will be times when people will let you down.
So, my takeaway from this month’s article is this.
You cannot build a business on no foundations, and a core foundation is the trust you put in yourself and the trust you put into your team. The more you give away and empower others, the more successful you will be and the more fulfilled your team will be. Accept the truth that you will be let down, that you cannot always trust everyone and everything. Don’t allow let downs get to you, instead embrace the lessons. Learn from them, leverage them and grow from them. TRUST me! I have learnt the hard way.
Michael Glanville
