Trust is the defining characteristic of high performing teams. When you build relationships of trust within your team, motivation soars and productivity rises.
For years, businesses have wondered: why do some companies succeed and others slog along or fail? Forty years of research confirms: A culture of trust causes high performance. Trust is the glue that creates the conditions for high performance, team cohesion, and corporate resilience.
For many managers, this is counterintuitive. They think that telling people what to do is what a boss does. They believe that a little fear is a good thing and that leadership is synonymous with authority and control. However, studies show that authoritarian approaches to leadership destroy trust and erode performance. The truth is–and new research confirms it–the command and control style of leadership never worked.
The defining characteristic of every successful team is trust in the team leader to set achievable goals, to support the team when they try their best, and to appreciate and recognize effort and success. This research has been confirmed by researchers at Harvard, McKinsey, Gallup, and many more. Trust is the most important and most valuable asset of every high performing team.
The Cycle of Trust
Trust encourages people to put the needs of the team over the needs of the individual. It is the basic building block of human experience and belonging. When employees trust their leaders to define clear goals, support learning, and recognize effort and success, performance soars. Only in a culture of trust do employees willingly participate in the flow of information, innovation, and change, all of which are crucial to team success in an era characterized by constant and unprecedented changes.
The Cycle of Mistrust
Managers with a command-and-control leadership style begin with the assumption that employees cannot be trusted to know what to do or to work hard and do their best. This basic mistrust distracts significantly from the team’s ability to succeed. Managers and employees descend into defensive patterns designed to preserve their interests. Employees actively resist passing information, stop generating innovative ideas, and refuse to accept change.
New research by Gallup shows:
- Traditional command-and-control performance management never worked.
- According to Gallup research, only about 2 in 10 employees strongly agreed that their performance was managed in a way that motivated them to do outstanding work.
- According to a famous meta-analysis spanning 90 years of research, more than one-third of feedback interventions result in worse performance.
- A leader’s true threat is not your hard-working employee but losing the trust of your best people.
Trust Is a Universal Psychological Need
Psychologists have long observed that if you tell your children you believe in them, they will build confidence and resilience as they try harder in order to be worthy of your trust. They’ll do everything possible to live up to the expectations you set for them. If you want to see how brilliantly this can work, watch Jimmy Valvano talk about how his father’s belief in him motivated him to keep believing in himself until he won the NCAA Championships in a major upset victory. In business as in sports, a winner is often just a loser who never quit.
Similarly, psychologists have also found that if you doubt your children, they will doubt themselves. As a result, that doubt will distract them from active efforts to achieve. Sometimes, they will quit trying, feeling when they fail that they have performed to expectations already.
Trust Causes High Performance
Studies have found that this same dynamic operates in the boss/employee relationship (see Ryan and Oestrich, Sucher and Gupta, Gallup, and this excellent research on the neuroscience of trust from Harvard). In other words, trust in the workplace actually causes high performance. Similarly, distrust or doubt in the workplace actually causes people to lower their performance.
You can’t fake trust. True trust is a natural outgrowth of emotional intelligence. Specifically, trust is a result of mastering two foundational emotional intelligence skills for leadership: self-regard and self-awareness. Together they create the foundation for building relationships of trust with others.
If you want to improve performance, you need to build authentic relationships of trust through emotional intelligence.
Since 2020, literally millions of people have been quitting their jobs every month. The number one reason people quit is a lack of trust in their boss or supervisor.