Trust is a non-negotiable, required element of leadership. But here’s the problem, trust is fickle. Trust is — in most circumstances — something incredibly difficult to build and amazingly easy to destroy. It’s like a house of cards, except a house of cards that can hold up a skyscraper. Trust is tedious, it takes time, and it can easily topple over…but when it’s firmly established it becomes the basis for everything else.
So how do you build trust? That’s the secret ingredient everyone knows about but no one wants to be true…you take your time. There may be moments, or people, that allow for quick building trust. However, the reality is that most trust builds over time. That means the trust-building process has to be relational in nature, and steadfast in pace. If it takes time, requires commitment, and grows slowly, we need to have a framework of what we can be doing over time with the people we lead to grow trust.
Everyone knows that “time is your most valuable resource.” That saying can tend to make us focus on the short-term, immediate investments we can make.
However, the secret ingredient to leading well is not the short term value of time, but the trust that can be built in the long run when time is leveraged well.
Here are five things that I believe, if done regularly with a group of people you lead, will solidify the trust you’ve built. In doing so, I believe these things are also leadership catalysts in almost any context.
Read the full article @ Medium
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