Trust is such an important component of doing business.
It impacts our ability to develop a relationship with our customer, our employees, our vendors, and those to whom we report in our organizations.
Without trust, business is lost. Customers will leave in droves if they don’t trust you. Think Target and the hacking fiasco of 2013 and the product tampering of the Tylenol brand of pain relievers in the early 80s.
Without trust, staff turns over. Employees want to believe in the company mission and they want to believe that management has their best interests at heart.
Vendors may fail to deliver or push your order or request to the bottom of the pile, if they don’t trust their customers.
And as managers, if we don’t trust those to whom we report, we run the risk of becoming disenfranchised from the teams with which we regularly work and the organization as a whole. Passive aggressive behavior often sets in and I have seen department heads take preemptive strikes at others when trust is not present. Think about how often you have taken the extra time to put something in writing because you wanted to create an audit trail to save yourself from possible future finger pointing. What a waste of time, but necessary when we feel we can’t trust the working environment.
In your training programs for the coming year, think about the possibility of training on the aspect of trust. You can include this in your customer service training, management training, leadership succession training, and team building workshops.
When designing this part of your training, keep in mind that there are three important aspects in the trust-building process:
- Be present – Show up and focus on the issue at hand.
- Be vulnerable – No one trusts someone who is perfect. Show your flaws.
- Be generous – give more than you take.
How do you teach or encourage your staff to build trust with your customers, other employees, vendors, and YOU?
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