Trust.
Stephen Covey talks about the speed it brings to an organization. Patrick Lencioni says that without it, a team is plagued with a whole stack of five dysfunctions.
Trust is the cornerstone of psychological safety in an organization. But what can you do for the psychological safety in your team when trust seems to be crumbling in the rest of the organization around you.
Depending on your situation, and your personality, you may be tempted either to defend the organization and hope that your performance of trust will be contagious or to commiserate with your team members and join in their criticism.
In most cases, neither approach is helpful.
Feigning trust in a volatile organization can undermine your own credibility, but publicly aligning yourself against that organization can threaten your ability to have any ongoing influence at all.
One option is to simply keep your head down and don’t rock the boat. That’s the safe thing to do, but most people who I talk with want to make a difference more than they want to feel safe.
What I’m about to say takes a lot of courage because, well, it’s risky. But strategically taking risks is part of leadership.
One way to make a meaningful difference is simply to create for your team the kind of leadership interactions you wish were true of the rest of the organization.
When a team member makes a mistake, think about how you would want senior leadership to respond if you had done something similar. Then give your team the benefit of the response that you would want.
I know that some environments make that idea harder to implement than others. So if you’d like to explore your specific situation further, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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