How to build trust and credibility as a new leader (Part 1)

Many leaders feel self-conscious about their communication skills. They want to become better speakers. They want to become more persuasive. They want to think quicker on their feet. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve those competencies. But if you want to improve your communication skills as a leader, the most impactful thing you can do—by a long way—is to become a better listener. That is because for most people to hear you, they first need to feel heard by you.

To become a better listener, you need to give up the habit of listening to respond, and develop new habits of listening to understand, empathize, and surface what’s unsaid.

You can also build trust by institutionalizing listening. One way to do that is to do a “listening tour” in your first month as a new leader:

1. Identify your internal and external stakeholders.

2. Approach them for a 1-hour interview about their objectives, needs, and pain points, both related to your team and in general.

3. Take notes and consolidate your findings.

By doing so, you’re showing that you care while building competence about your organization and environment. These interviews will also allow you to frame your plans in terms of your stakeholders’ needs and objectives, helping you to get buy-in from them later.

When doing this, take a top-down, inside-out approach to avoid inadvertently crossing any boundaries that you may not be aware of when you’re new to an organization. In other words:

1. Start with your boss, interview them first, and get their input (and permission and referrals if needed) on what other leaders, business partners, and customers you should talk to.

2. Speak with your team members, and as you interview them, ask them which other teams they interface with the most—so you can add the leaders of those teams to the list of people to interview.

3. Approach other managers in your department for an interview.

4. Approach the relevant managers in other departments for an interview—start with the head of department and get their input (and permission and referrals if needed) on who else in that department you should talk to.

5. Approach top business partners and customers.

When you interview stakeholders, talk with them about their goals, their challenges, their perception of your team (or company or product), and how you and your team can help them.

As you progress with your interviews, start building a stakeholder map so you can keep track of how you’ll engage with your stakeholders in the future depending on how much influence and interest they have in your and your team’s work:

One problem when trying to build trust as manager is that demonstrating your competence can easily come across as demonstrating another person’s incompetence even if that wasn’t your intention at all.

Are you accountable for your team members’ performance?

Of course.

Does that mean you need to correct every little mistake that they make?

Not at all.

Don’t be the manager who asks the designer to change the color of a website button or makes spurious edits in the content writer’s copy to achieve a marginal improvement that most likely only you can see. Don’t be the manager who holds people accountable to expectations that have never been clearly articulated. And most importantly, don’t be the manager whose first impulse is to assign blame when some things inevitably go wrong.

Sure, if a mistake is likely to have high impact or high visibility, correct it. If there is serious under-performance or toxic behavior, address it promptly. If someone needs to improve a skill, help them. But if someone is generally meeting expectations, or a piece of work is good enough, resist the temptation to compulsively demonstrate your competence by showing how it could have been even better.

Why?

Because if you want to build an effective team, you need to prioritize ownership over optimum.

As now famous research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard University has shown, teams are more effective when leaders create a learning-oriented (as opposed to blame-oriented) culture, a climate in which mistakes can be discussed, corrected, and learnt from openly, without fear of being shamed or punished.

“Project Aristotle,” Google’s own research into what makes teams effective, has reinforced these findings by showing that psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is the most important contributor to team effectiveness.

According to Edmondson, a psychologically safe team is one where:

1. Mistakes aren’t held against people.

2. Team members are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

3. People on the team don’t reject others for being different.

4. People feel safe to take risks.

5. People feel safe to ask others for help.

6. People don’t deliberately act in ways that undermine each other’s efforts.

7. People’s unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

One way you can encourage people to grow by learning from mistakes, taking risks, and trying new approaches is to make them feel safe by showing vulnerability. Show them your humanity in its full fallible glory by talking openly about your toughest challenges. Tell them about some of the worst mistakes you’ve made. When you feel uncertain or don’t have the answer, admit it. Ask for help when you need it. Admit and apologize if you’ve done something wrong. And take the blame if someone on your team has messed something up.

After all, the buck stops with you.

Here’s a scenario that’ll be familiar to most of you:

It’s a cliché but true: nothing breeds success like success.

If people feel they’re doing well, that feeling alone will greatly enhance their expectancy and self-efficacy, and hence their motivation and ability to do well.

As a leader, you have a crucial part to play in setting the mood on your team. Instead of a vicious flywheel of mistrust, you can set in motion a virtuous flywheel of trust and confidence on your team by focusing on, amplifying, and reinforcing what’s going well.

Of course, that doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to problems or abdicating responsibility by shying away from addressing issues promptly and constructively. But you’re doing no one—including yourself—a favor if you get too preoccupied with what isn’t going well while failing to notice—and amplify—all the positive aspects.

In some ways, the glass is always half full and half empty. But it’s the part that’s full that will give you and your team the energy to deal with the empty part. So focus 80% of your energy, communication, and feedback on the half that’s full, and only 20% on the empty half.

• Focus 80% of your strategy on what you already do well, and only 20% on building new capabilities.

• Focus 80% of your thoughts on what you can control, and only 20% on things that are out of your hands.

• Focus 80% of your time on engineering quick wins, and only 20% on worrying about long-term outcomes.

• Focus 80% of your energy on top and core performers, and only 20% on those who under-perform.

• Focus 80% of your efforts on aligning people’s roles and work environment with their strengths and values, and only 20% on helping them address their weaknesses.

• Focus 80% of your feedback on praising your team members for what they’re doing well, and only 20% on what they can improve.

For me personally, this was perhaps the most hard-earned lesson in my 15+ year leadership career. It took me a decade until I’d fully absorbed that “coach” rather than “policeman” was my role as a manager. Like the police, I only used to pull people over if they did something wrong, and took all the things they did right for granted. By contrast, a good coach will spend more time bringing awareness to your strengths and help you leverage them to offset your weaknesses. They’ll hold the bar high while helping you clear it.

The following approaches have worked well for me as I’ve increasingly learnt to build trust and increase people’s confidence, motivation, and performance by making them feel valued:

1. Aligning people’s roles, work environment, goals, and incentives with their individual values and strengths.

2. Giving frequent and impactful positive feedback.

3. Celebrating wins, birthdays, and work anniversaries.

You can do this by:

• Understanding what’s important to each person on your team, and setting up their goals and incentives in a way that leads them to those valued outcomes.

• Understanding people’s strengths and preferences, and setting up their roles and work environment in a way that allows them to perform at their best.

• Giving at least five times more positive feedback than constructive criticism, i.e., praising every team member for something they did well every week.

• Recognizing efforts and progress, not just successes, and make sure your praise is specific and connected to the outcomes, values, and strengths you’d like to foster.

The third approach—celebrating wins, birthdays, and anniversaries—is perhaps a bit more “tactical,” and you might think that it speaks for itself. And yet I haven’t come across too many managers who do it in a way that’s truly meaningful.

The problem with “Happy birthday!” and “Congrats on your work anniversary!” is the same as the problem with “Thank you!”— in the worst case, they’re forgotten, and in the best case, they’ve become a commodity.

To avoid these negative outcomes, you need to invest some energy into personalizing your approach.

• What’s one thing that’s unique about your team member?

• What’s one thing that makes them special?

• What’s a key strength that they have?

• What’s a distinctive way in which they contribute?

• What’s a memorable or helpful thing they’ve done?

• What’s one superpower they have that they themselves might not be aware of?

• What’s one thing that others truly appreciate about them?

• What’s a remarkable thing that most people don’t know about them?

In recent years, asking HR for the dates of my team members’ birthdays and work anniversaries has become one of the first things that I do when taking over as the leader of a team. I put these dates on my private calendar, and compile a mental “uniqueness audit” of each of my team members’ distinctive strengths and contributions through our daily interactions so I can praise them in a meaningful, personalized way on their special days.

In some cases, tears of joy have been shed over these comments.

Perhaps more of mine than my team members’… And not just because I get more and more sentimental with age. But because there’s no greater privilege in being a leader than to cherish and affirm the truth that each and every person on this planet is meaningful and extraordinary.

This article has been edited down from its original length. To read the full version, visit The MotivatingManager Monthly on Substack.

Tune in next week for Part 2!