Leading and managing a productive team requires building trust with employees. You may not hear your team members blatantly declaring their mistrust against you as a manager. However, you can detect their mistrust of you and your leadership techniques in their lack of punctuality, productivity, and motivation at work. These attributes can especially shine as a lack of engagement during meetings.
So how do you make your employees trust you? Building trust with employees isn’t as challenging. However, many managers and team leaders find it difficult to skip the first essential step, i.e., showing your trust in employees. As a team manager, you have much more at stake than your team members. Hence, you must place greater effort into developing and maintaining positivity within the team. Since positivity starts with trust, here are some tips for building trust with employees during team meetings:
Ask Them Questions
You cannot expect your team members to deliver their best while being ignorant of the hurdles that keep them from doing so. Moreover, employees have varied strengths and weaknesses that can make various tasks challenging.
However, meetings are the best time to get to know your employees’ challenges. Due to the presence of others, employees may find meetings more suitable to voice their concerns. But employees hesitate to bring up issues when the manager does not seem interested in listening to them. Therefore, as a manager, you are responsible for asking your employees questions about the possible hiccups in the project.
Present Solutions
A manager’s role demands guiding the team to perform its best. Team meetings should not revolve around the manager ordering their employees. Instead, they must be productive sessions focused on finding solutions for building trust with employees.
Hence, you must not only ask your team members about the problems they can identify with their part of the work during meetings. You must also present them with solutions and take measurable actions to make their work easier. In short, don’t just tell them what to do; but be willing to do all the work alongside them. Managers can only inspire trust and motivation in their team members when they aren’t afraid to help them.
Have Their Backs
Things going wrong is inevitable in any project. However, only those managers and team leaders who own the responsibility of their team’s work are the ones who can successfully build trust. As mentioned above, the overall responsibility of a team’s work and the responsibility of each team member’s work within the team rests with the manager.
As a manager, you must own that you did not guide the team member enough or misguided them. Throwing an employee who made a mistake under the bus will never prove helpful. It will only make the team members distrust you and result in an even more demotivated and unproductive team.
However, building trust with employees does not only requires applying these tips in meetings. Managers’ behavior should be consistent with every team member, both in front of others and in private.
