Do you find yourself working harder to manage your employees than you feel you should? Low trust negatively impacts organizational performance in two ways. First, it creates a situation where your employees are scared to make mistakes. Secondly, it can produce situations where employees hide errors and information to protect their status. Both waste valuable time, money, and resources that should be put towards solving customer issues or improving business efficiency. One of the best ways to make work more manageable is to reduce the inefficiency that low trust creates in your organization.
Why Psychological Safety Matters.
I recently worked with a small business owner who grew frustrated with his team due to how they responded to his leadership. He felt their slow response to direction and lack of engagement negatively impacted sales. He sought coaching to understand better how his current behaviors were getting in the way of driving results. Through coaching, we discovered that low trust was the primary issue. The solution? Creating more psychological safety within his organization.
Sign 1 of Low Trust: Unasked Questions
I helped the business owner see that some new employees felt uncomfortable coming to him for guidance. During meetings, he would set expectations for the week. He thought they understood his expectations, but there frequently were gaps between what he said and what they understood regarding key tasks. For him to improve team performance, the employees had to become comfortable asking clarifying questions and proactively asking for help when needed.
Sign 2 of Low Trust: Lack of Collaboration
Low trust between employees made the situation even worse. Competition for status, advancement opportunities, raises, and bonuses created an environment where employees did not share tips and best practices outside group meetings. This meant that most communication and talent development fell on the business owner, which slowed down employee development and created incremental stress for the business owner. For employees to develop faster, he needed tenured employees to help newer employees learn new skills and how work is done within their organization.
Sign 3 of Low Trust: Lack of Feedback
Through coaching, he also identified that employees hesitated to point out business improvement opportunities. When he started hiring staff, he envisioned them helping him develop new ideas for growing the business, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. While all his employees had opinions about how things could be improved, it was rare for employees to suggest ways to improve. This stagnated organizational growth because the owner did not have time to ponder and evaluate potential changes. Instead, he spent too much time following up with employees who were not executing tasks to his expectations.
Sign 4 of Low Trust: Feelings of being Unvalued
Finally, we identified that some of the employees felt undervalued. They were unhappy about certain aspects of the job but did not feel comfortable voicing those concerns. The business owner only heard complaints when employees were under a lot of pressure and would overreact with emotional outbursts. This typically made the business owner furious at the employees because of their poor communication and failure to emotionally regulate themselves.
How Did We Improve Trust?
We teach business owners the Power6 Leader framework's success equation: process multiplied by culture equals results to help them improve trust within their teams.
Processes help employees and bosses manage the complexities of work by reducing the number of decisions that must be made before action is taken. For example, if a status meeting is held every Monday, employees know that at least once a week, they will have an opportunity to discuss what is and is not working well within the business.
Organizational culture is essential because everything cannot be managed through processes. When novel situations occur, having norms, guiding principles, and values helps guide decision-making. For example, if a norm within your company is to challenge the status quo, then employees know that it is safe to question why a task is being done a certain way and suggest alternative ways of completing a task.
Make Meeting More Meaningful
Few things are complained about more than meetings. They can take up a lot of time. They pull people away from doing other work, and most leaders never go through effective meeting training. Within the Power6 Leader coaching program, we challenge business owners to evaluate:
· How frequently are meetings held?
· How to generate more engagement?
· How to gain feedback to keep them fresh and valuable?
There are four types of meetings we encourage all business owners to have.
One-on-One Meetings: designed to build relationships, provide opportunities for support, and ensure employees are getting the direct feedback they need to perform.
Group Meetings: designed to build relationships between team members, facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, and ensure that group members are focused on shared goals and understand interdependencies.
Business Reviews Meetings: These meetings are designed to ensure key stakeholders are aware of key performance indicators and variances to goals and to develop plans to close performance gaps.
Quarterly Strategy Reviews: designed to get key stakeholders to pause, consider current priorities, and evaluate whether they align with long-term organizational mission and vision.
We discussed these types of meetings, who should be invited, what the agenda should be, and how to ensure that they help to support trust. Every business is different, and you need to customize the approach that will work for you and your current stage of business growth.
Reinforce Organizational Cultural Expectations
After optimizing the meeting cadence, we focused on defining the norms, guiding principles, and values employees should use when making decisions. We discussed how each meeting should reinforce the organizational culture the business owner desired to build. Through consistent discussion of organizational culture, the seeds of values, norms, and guiding principles take root.
What was the outcome?
At first, the employees were skeptical. They thought the business owner was going through a phase and things would revert to normal. After 6 weeks of the business owner focusing on improving processes and organizational culture, the employees started to accept that this was the new way they would be doing business. They became more engaged and trusted the business owner and their peers more. The business owner noticed employees asking more questions, collaborating, and providing suggestions for improving the company; many communicated that they were starting to feel like valued team members.
What you should do next?
Consider the four signs of low trust. Identify if you see any of these signs within your organization. If they are present, develop a specific plan for addressing the issue. Start first by looking at your meetings. How can they be improved? Make minor tweaks and ask your team about the impact of your changes. Next, reflect on how you want your team to treat one another, customers, and other stakeholders. Make your expectations known, and consistently find ways to help your team understand how things are done here.
Thank you for reading the latest version of Your Path to Business Success. Over the last 14 weeks, we have shared tips and best practices that small business owners can use to make 2025 their best year yet. If you have any questions about this or any other business topic, email Executive Coach Dorian Cunion at dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com
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