53. How to build trust in you and in others, with Prina Shah

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Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace. This one is gonna be a really good one to help you uplift your leadership game. Hello and welcome to this solo episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself, Prina Shah. And today I want to talk to you about trust at work. It is such a huge topic. I had a coache that I recently finished with who said that the main thing that they wanted to work on was to build trust. And that was at the beginning of our coaching relationship, so I thought that was fascinating and very insightful of where the majority offers are, often within the workplace. So trust is the essential ingredient of good relationships, good teams and good leaders. Trust gives us the ability to build and maintain those decent relationships. Patrick Lancioni, who is a consultant and author on all things leadership, he states that one of the core dysfunctions of teams and crappy workplace cultures is usually the result of an absence of trust. Hello, an absence of trust. So many workplaces are like that. Now forget workplaces. Think about it from your personal life. If trust has been broken, how does it feel? Let's imagine the worst. Being cheated on. Man, that stings. And how do you even recover from that? So when I'm working with leaders either through a coaching capacity, consulting, or developing them via training, or even via this podcast. One of the things that I really talk about is the importance of trust and your reputation. If you lose the trust of your team, if you lose your reputation to your team or your stakeholders, then that's one thing that's really and truly difficult to regain. So why is it that we feel it difficult to trust people at work? That's another question that I've been toying with. I've got some thoughts. I don't know what you think. So why is it that we feel difficult to trust people at work? Perhaps it's because others have taken credit for your work in the past and that's burnt you. Perhaps it's because others have lied about changes to your workplace and your BS meter has just gone ding ding ding ding ding over and over again. When our safety and our security needs are based on our salary and our income, when that's threatened, so are we. It's our basic human rights. It feels that are in question when we've got instability at work. Therefore, we need to build trust in us and we need to build trust in others. There's two aspects there, and I really want to delineate the difference between the two. So, first off, we need people to trust us. Hey man, your reputation is everything, as I say. So, how do you build trust in you? How do you get people to trust you? Say what you've promised, practice what you preach. Keep confidence. If people have said something to you in confidence, keep it a secret as it should be, or keep their confidence. Do not break confidence of others. Don't take credit for other people's work, give them the credit and share the love. There's a really good lesson that I learned from a CEO that I was working with a few years ago, and he differentiates between being friends and being friendly. So, that's something that I have taken on board really well over my career when I used to work in corporate. Within the workplace, when I used to work in a job, I used to tell my team that I am going to be friendly with you. Absolutely so. However, out of the workplace, we are not gonna be friends. Look, I worked in HR, I had positional power like you would not believe, and that's not only with my team, but with the people that I looked after. And you know, as a HR professional, you do look after all of the employees in your organization. Therefore, I ask you to consider what kind of boundaries you need to put in place for yourself at work so that you can maintain your positional power and others can reliably trust you. So the big lesson from this CEO was that there's a difference between being friendly, which is what I opted for, and being friends. And then the other thing I stated to you know my team and my colleagues in any job that I've been in, essentially, especially in Australia, is hey, when I finish this job, I am happy to be friends with you, we can get social, whatever then. But while I'm working with you, I will be friendly, but we will not be friends per se, in you know, the personal aspect. So that's how we can build trust of others in us. Now, the other thing is that you may have well been burnt in your workplace, and you want to develop trust in others, in your manager, in your colleagues, in your CEO, whatever it might be. So, how do we do that? How do we build trust in others? And this coaching assignment that I had has been a really fascinating one to really understand the quirks of us and our human condition and what really makes us tick in relation to how we can trust others. So, in others, expect the best. One thing I try and do, if at all possible, is to drop your history. You never step into the same river twice, as goes the saying, we all change. I'm a different person than I was last night, as are you. So why is that other person not different? I guess we have to give them the benefit of the doubt as well. Often people change. If you're a leader in the workplace looking for you know your brand to develop even further and for people to trust you even more, enable diverse conversations where people feel safe to question and disagree. Create mechanisms for everyone to be heard. And that also stops fraud by the way. Those kind of mechanisms can be, oh my gosh, pulse surveys. It could be, you know, I remember one HR manager who was brand new in uh the organization that I worked in once, said, I'm brand new, I have no information, I am gonna leave a bit of a ballot box outside my office. And if you've got any notes for me, if you want to give me a heads up about anything, drop me a note in there and I will address it. That's really cool. So if you've got a bad culture, there's completely creative and innovative ways of addressing it, but then you actually have to do stuff with the information that you glean from the people who have spoken with you, whether it be anonymously or in person. So do something about it when people do speak to you. One thing I come across repeatedly within the workplace in terms of complaints, is that the leader or the CEO or the general manager or my manager, whatever you want to call yourself, a supervisor, have not held person X to account. So when there's a culture of unfairness, people really pick up on that and it creates a divisive culture, there's a Zeminus, and then that truly impacts on your reputation and the trust that people have in you. So if you're one of these managers who I call an ostrich, you dig your head in the sand and you don't want to have any of those difficult conversations, sort that shit out. You need to change that because you are going to lose the trust of your team so quickly. Address the issues, fix them. One rotten apple ruins the whole team. So, I've given you lots of tips today in relation to building trust in you, how others can build trust in you, and how you can build trust in others. As always, if you've got any questions for me, or if you've got any tips or real life case studies or wonderful juicy stories to share with me that I could even have on my podcast, let me know, drop me an email, all of my details are in the show notes, and I wish you well in building trust because your reputation at work is everything. Ciao for now and I'll see you in the next episode. If you want to work on developing your trust even further, you need to tune in to episode number 32 of Best Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast. It's called Become Better at Business Relationship Management, and I speak with the wonderful Malini Jaya Ganesh, who is an expert on business relationship building, and she has such a beautiful visual language, and shares so many practical tips with you that you are gonna need a pen and paper when you listen to that episode. So, episode 32 of the Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast called Become Better at Business Relationship Management with the wonderful Marlene Jayaganesh. You are gonna love it. If you like this episode, check out the show notes and sign up to my newsletter. That will help your workplace to be less shitty. It's full of novel ideas, good food for thought. And if you like this episode, pass it on to at least two people who will benefit. That's your good deed done for the day. Also, remember to subscribe to the Ways to Change Your Workplace Podcast via your podcast provider. And I will see you in the next episode.