Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You, and What To Do About It
Would your employees state they feel safe to bring up issues when the arise? Or would they just say they felt safe, but suffer in silence? How much do your employees trust you to take their concerns seriously?
In our opinion, trust is an underrated characteristic of a healthy work environment and needs some attention in the current work climate. How do you know if you are fostering an environment of trust? That’s what we are here to talk about.
Today’s employee market is filled with millennials and other young folks who have different expectations than what used to fly in the past. There is no room in today’s leadership style to include the outdated command and control style management that was once up a time so highly valued. In today’s climate, young people are looking for leadership, not management; they seek guidance, not control; they long for purpose, opportunity, and growth, not to fill a seat as a yes-person.
If you are a leader who has not yet caught up with the times, and are noticing that your leadership style is no longer working, that people are leaving, attrition is high, and employee disengagement in causing problems, it may be time to explore a change. To lead the current work force, leaders are needing to guide, support, and enhance an employee’s experience to improve their potential. If your team is failing, part of that responsibility falls to you. When we fail to provide our teams with guidance, and don’t listen to the needs of each team member, we are missing an opportunity to build a relationship built on trust….and without trust, nothing truly great can be accomplished.
At Enhance, we believe that building trust, leads to more transparent conversations, which leads to conflict, which is sometimes needed to air out what is not working. Conflict done right, can lead to new ideas and innovation that can transform a team that is in trouble into a team that triumphs.
Building trust looks like:
Creating opportunities where team members can be honest and transparent
Encouraging people to bring forward issues that are impacting healthy work culture
Creating a culture of honored diversity, where people can be their whole selves without fear of discrimination, judgement and criticism.
All of this which contributes to an environment of psychological safety
The term psychological safety may sound familiar to you if you followed Google’s famous study on effective teams named project Aristotle. The most important factor was indeed, psychological safety, described as a team’s confidence in their ability to take risks, bring forward issues, and be vulnerable without fear of embarrassment, ridicule or consequences.
The reality of psychological safety can be better understood when exploring examples on a spectrum of severity. At its worst, an environment lacking this safety can lead to literal danger, think of stories like the Colombia space shuttle where engineer, Rodney Rocha, was met with sarcasm and ridicule when he expressed his concern for the structural integrity of the shuttle. Rocha kept his opinion to himself, leading to the explosion of the shuttle on February 1st, 2003, killing 7 astronauts. We also can look back to the devastating nuclear meltdown disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, where many politicians, and scientists kept their concerns of the spread of radiation to themselves, claiming measures to ‘prevent panic and provocative rumors.’ The radioactive material spread across Europe and thousands of people experienced radiation-related illnesses, which could have been prevented if the evacuation had not been stalled to ‘prevent panic.’
Currently, we can highlight the trending focus organizations have on creating diverse, equitable and inclusive spaces (D,E,& I work). Psychological safety means spaces where our differences are not used against us, that we are respected and accepted for our whole selves (race, gender, sexuality, disability, education, class, age, religion, marital status). This means leaders must learn to encourage team members to use inclusive language, to take responsibility for when others cross the line, to challenge one another to do better. This is not possible without psychological safety, because without it, no one will feel safe to challenge one another, or to call out inappropriate language. This goes both ways, as there needs to be safety for someone to speak up when they see something inappropriate and to challenge someone to use more inclusive language - this in itself is scary and vulnerable. But there also needs to be room to make mistakes, to say the wrong thing, to feel safe to be challenged and then admit that we are wrong, and deconstruct how we may have been programmed to see the world and the people in it. This too is vulnerable and challenging. Both sides need understanding, patience, bravery, and safety if we are ever to make real change.
Safety can also include trusting your superiors to have your best interest at heart, believing that they will support and guide you, and help you leverage your skills to grow your capacity as an employee and in your career. On the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the concept of the ‘great resignation,’ and ‘quiet quitting,’ we see an increase in employees’ need to feel valued, satisfied, and developed in their roles.
A personal example of this, dates back to a role I held before launching my coaching career. I was in the process of phasing out of a job that I finally realized I had outgrown, and was discussing an exit plan with my manager to go down to part time. Instead of being met with disappointment, which I had expected, my manager shared how he was surprised I lasted as long as I did. He confided in me that the leadership team figured they would get a year out of me and that I would move on to bigger and better things, that they saw so much potential in me. It was the first I had heard such high praise, and this was after 2 years I had been in the position. Sure it was nice to hear I had been identified as a high potential employee with great opportunities, but it also eroded any trust I had in the leadership to be invested in my growth and fulfillment. Managers are meant to keep positions filled, but this was a missed opportunity to deepen my growth, and the trust in our working relationship.
All of these examples provide you with different reasons why creating and contributing to an environment of psychological safety can help teams deal with problems, make room for understanding and diversity, add to mutual trust and inclusivity, improve engagement and capacity and in some cases, literally prevent explosions.
Would you like to learn how to promote psychological safety in your team? Let us help your team create a culture of shared responsibility, welcomed challenge, trust, and respect that will add to your teams collaboration, innovation, retention rates, and employee engagement.
Connect with Enhance Leadership today to explore bringing psychological safety training to your team!
