Trust is the foundation of every good relationship, personal or professional. Because of that, trust is considered to be the bedrock of effective leadership. Like a vital cog in a machine, trust acts as the driving force behind every leadership style. It ensures that leaders’ efforts have the reinforcements needed to make a real, lasting impact.
The Role of Trust in Leadership
For leaders, trust is the crucial component that turns their everyday interactions into meaningful performance drivers.
If they’re willing to invest the time and effort it takes to build trust, leaders can lay the groundwork for forming vital relationships with their team. which ultimately creates a path for leaders to:
- Boost engagement and motivation
- Foster psychological safety, confidence and loyalty
- Promote accountability, task ownership and a growth mindset
- Encourage alignment, collaboration and open communication
- Inspire leadership skill development within their team
While creating and maintaining connections like these can unlock new opportunities for leaders to drive performance in their teams, they also enable leaders to create more efficient processes of their own.
Because these working relationships were built on a foundation of trust, team members feel more comfortable engaging in open and honest conversations with their leaders. These discussions give leaders the chance to get to know their team on an individual level, gaining insight into their team members’ personalities, workflow preferences and unique working needs.
Empowered with a deeper understanding of their team, leaders can make more informed decisions and provide a more impactful, individualized approach that will set each of their team members up for success in their roles.
Trust: The Driver Behind Every Leadership Style
Each of the four key leadership styles in the Situational Leadership® Model have one thing in common: their purpose. All four leadership styles were designed to help leaders provide the exact amount of support and guidance a follower needs to be successful.
But the only way leaders can do that is if they understand what kind of support and guidance their follower actually needs. That’s where trust comes into play.
By building trusting relationships with their team members, leaders create an ideal environment for transparent performance conversations to take place. Team members know they’re in a safe space and feel more comfortable being completely honest about how they feel about a task, giving leaders a more accurate assessment and diagnosis of the team member’s Performance Readiness® Level.
Take, for example, a situation in which an employee knows that they’re R1, or insecure and unwilling, for a task. Without trust, an employee may not feel comfortable sharing their Performance Readiness
However, if trust is at the core of their relationship, the employee will know they can have an honest discussion about their readiness with their leader. They won’t feel intimidated or afraid to admit that it’s their first time performing that task or that they’re unsure of what steps to take. Instead, they’ll trust that their leader will reiterate that being R1 for a task isn’t a bad thing. They’ll feel confident that their leader will offer clear directions and input that will help them execute the task successfully.
With trust as the foundation of your leadership, you can set yourself up to build crucial connections. These connections will allow you to properly diagnose your team members’ Performance Readiness® Levels and deliver all four of the leadership styles effectively and purposefully.
Lay the Right Foundation With CLS
Put yourself in the position to utilize each leadership style as needed by setting the stage for trust early on. But if utilizing a trust-based approach is unfamiliar to you, you might want to check out our course, Building Trust. You’ll learn expert strategies to create trust-building behaviors that empower you to be the most effective leader you can be.