What’s one of the most important elements to build and maintain harmony and mutually beneficial growth at your startup? You guessed it: trust. When trust exists among startup team members, startups are in a healthy position to excel and that should make sense!
Trust building and maintaining that trust should most certainly come from the top levels of your startup. So, how do you build and maintain trust and what exactly is trust anyway? Is trust always a good thing? Maybe you’d be surprised to find out the answer to that last question.
Authentic Vs Non-Authentic
Since trust can only exist in committed relationships of any kind, non-authentic trust can be child-like, blind, or naïve. This kind of naïve trust doesn’t build healthy work environments and thus won’t serve your startup well which is why it’s a bad type of trust.
Authentic trust comes about with relationship building among people. When it’s understood that the relationship among coworkers and between team leaders and team members is more important than any particular example of “success,” then chances are that success will follow.
In other words, trust is about interpersonal relationships among the members of a startup. This means making commitments, following through, and honoring commitments.
Some Ways To Create It
Creating and building trust can occur in a number of ways. An important way to build trust is to communicate ideals and values. The people closest to us in our lives are generally the ones we feel share a particular set of values that we feel are important. Well, in the workplace it’s important to reinforce the ideas and values that are important to us for getting excellent work done.
By communicating these values, the road to achieve goals and success within this vision for business can be achieved.
What Is Shared
It’s important for employees to feel like they have had a hand in the success of the startup so focus should always be on team building. Instead of stressing personal agendas, focus on teamwork and the particular contributions and skills that team members contributed to bring about success.
What Goes Around…
Remember, that to gain your team’s trust, you have to give them the trust they deserve. In order to receive respect, you must give respect. If you communicate with your team and share knowledge, they’ll communicate and share knowledge with you. It’s a circle – don’t forget it!
So how do you lose trust? Well, it’s quite easy. Here are five ways to lose it.
- Inconsistency – If you act or speak inconsistently or treat team members markedly different, you’re definitely going to lose trust and credibility.
- Seek Personal Gain – If you’re always concentrating on your own gain instead of your team’s or your startup’s, you’re going to lose respect and quickly lose their trust.
- Secrets – If you withhold knowledge that could help your team or your startup, then trust will definitely fall apart. Generally, teams talk and this kind of information about secretive team members does get out!
- Lies – Seems obvious but it’s worth mentioning. If you’re caught in a lie, then it’s grounds for team members to begin questioning the degree of truth from what comes out of your mouth from that moment forward.
- Closed Minded – Not considering other perspectives, opinions, or points of view will lead to a lack of trust. If you see only one way to do things for each issue that needs to be addressed, you’re going to lose trust and respect among your team.
Trust is a necessary ingredient for a successful startup. Do you have any thoughts on trust in the workplace or can you give positive or negative examples where trust or a lack of trust either hurt or helped your startup? Share it with KillerStartups in the comments!
