How To Build Trusting Teams

Learning how to build trusting teams at work is critical if you’re going to be successful as an employee, a manager, or an effective leader. If you don’t have trust, it’ll be more difficult to communicate and coordinate with your peers or colleagues. If teams lack trust, it’s difficult to achieve true collaboration and create performance greater than the sum of each individual’s talent.

A team isn’t a team without trust. Without trust, it’s just a group of people who share the same boss-who they probably don’t trust either.

But with high levels of trust, teams can do amazing work. People who work at high-trust companies experience 50% greater performance and 74% less stress. The opposite is also true. A low-trust team underperforms and unnecessarily stresses out for everyone involved.

In this article, we’ll outline four ways to build trusting teams-and hence unlock that greater performance.

Signal Vulnerability

The first way to build trusting teams is to signal vulnerability. Especially if you’re in a leadership role, it’s important to signal vulnerability and admit weaknesses from time to time. This doesn’t mean “deal-breaker” mistakes or weaknesses that would undermine your credibility. But in those moments you’re willing to admit you don’t know the answer or haven’t figured out…