Building Trust: The Foundation of Success in Your Career and Business

In a world filled with distractions and competing priorities, what is the one thing that can make or break your professional relationships, your career, and even your business? Trust.

On a recent episode of the "Coaching Gold" podcast, Executive Coach Dorian Cunion joined host Dr. Rudy Jackson to discuss his coaching journey and the critical role of trust. As a former 7-Eleven executive, Dorian shared how his own experience with an executive coach motivated him to help others find their authentic leadership style and advance their careers.

This podcast episode is a must-watch for anyone who wants to improve their leadership, build stronger teams, or find more success in their professional life.

Key Concepts Around Building Trust

1. Trust is the starting point for all successful collaboration.

Dorian explains that whether you're trying to land a new job or lead a team, establishing trust is the first and most crucial step. He models this in his coaching by creating a safe space where clients can be vulnerable and share their fears and goals without judgment. This approach is not just a coaching technique; it's a blueprint for effective collaboration in any setting.

2. Mistrust can be the root of performance issues.

Many business owners and leaders blame employees for not meeting expectations. However, Dorian often finds that the real problem lies in a lack of trust. When there's a breakdown in communication, it can prevent employees from asking for help or lead to leaders micromanaging their team. The solution is to focus on rebuilding trust first.

3. Small actions can build trust.

If you want to start building trust immediately, set aside a little extra time to get to know people on a personal level. Move beyond a casual "How are you?" and ask thoughtful questions about their family or what's going well in their life. These simple, human interactions are the foundation of trust and are a critical first step toward building stronger relationships.

4. Repairing trust requires humility.

Dr. Jackson added a key insight, noting that trust is often broken unintentionally. The key to repairing it is a combination of awareness, prioritization, and humility. By acknowledging your mistake, listening to how your actions affected someone, and modeling the behavior you want to see, you can create a culture where it's safe to admit mistakes and work toward a solution.

5. Coaching helps you find the answers within yourself.

One of the principles of coaching is that people are naturally gifted and whole. A coach's role is not to provide all the answers, but to help clients tap into their own values, strengths, and experiences. 90% of what people need to succeed is already within them, and coaching provides the clarity and confidence to unlock that potential.

Why You Should Watch the Full Video

This podcast episode offers more than just theoretical advice; it provides a real-world perspective on what it means to be a coach and how the principles of coaching can be applied to everyday professional challenges. You'll get to hear from an experienced executive coach who has walked in your shoes and is dedicated to helping others succeed.

Whether you're a small business owner, a leader, or an individual in career transition, the insights shared in this conversation can help you build the trust needed to achieve your goals.

For more information on Dorian's coaching practice, you can visit his website, Your Path Coaching and Consulting, or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Leaders Must Be Trusted

The journey to becoming a trusted leader is continuous. At Your Path Coaching and Consulting, we offer executive coaching services specifically designed to guide leaders in their personal and professional development, including leadership development, team building, and communication skills – all of which are linked to building trust.

For those eager to delve deeper into the nuances of leadership and the art of building trust, we highly recommend tuning into the Coaching Gold podcast. This insightful resource explores various aspects of executive coaching and provides valuable perspectives on how to cultivate trust within your leadership practice. By listening to Coaching Cold, listeners can gain practical tips and strategies to enhance their leadership capabilities and foster stronger, more trusting relationships within their organizations.

Building Trust Through Coaching

Why Trust Matters: The Ripple Effect

The impact of trust in leadership can be seen across numerous facets of an organization:

1. Empowering Better Decisions: When trust is high, leaders and their teams feel psychologically safe. This safety allows for open discussion, honest feedback, and the sharing of diverse perspectives without fear of judgment or retribution. Such an environment is crucial for leveraging collective intelligence, leading to more well-rounded, informed, and ultimately, better decisions. Imagine a leadership team where vital information is withheld due to a lack of trust; the consequences for strategic planning can be severe.

2. Fostering Open Communication: Trust fosters a free flow of information, enabling team members to share critical details, insights, and concerns, ensuring everyone has a complete picture. This transparency minimizes misunderstandings, reduces misinterpretations, and leads to the smoother execution of tasks and projects. When leaders are transparent about their intentions and decisions, even when those decisions are difficult, it builds confidence and strengthens relationships.

3. Boosting Team Performance and Collaboration: Trust directly translates into stronger team performance. Trusting teams collaborate more effectively, leveraging each other's strengths and working seamlessly towards shared goals. This fosters an environment of increased engagement and ownership. When employees trust their leaders, they feel valued and supported, and are more likely to take ownership of their work, leading to higher productivity and a more motivated workforce. This is particularly evident in challenging times, where a high-trust environment allows teams to navigate obstacles with resilience and a collaborative spirit.

4. Enhancing Problem Solving and Innovation: In a trusting environment, individuals feel empowered to take calculated risks and share innovative ideas. They know that even if an idea doesn't pan out, their initiative will be valued, not punished. This psychological safety fosters creativity and enables the inclusion of diverse viewpoints, resulting in more innovative and effective solutions to complex problems. Leaders who demonstrate vulnerability by admitting mistakes or sharing lessons learned from past failures further cultivate this environment, making them more approachable and human.

5. Strengthening Company Culture: Trust is the foundation for a positive and respectful company culture. Employees who trust their leaders feel a greater sense of belonging and loyalty. This not only increases employee engagement and retention but also enhances the employer brand, attracting top talent who seek a positive and collaborative work environment. A culture built on trust minimizes internal conflict and office politics, allowing energy to be directed towards productive outcomes.

Building Trust: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Building trust is not a passive endeavor; it requires intentional effort and consistent action. Leaders must embody the very qualities they wish to see in their teams. Key pillars of building trust include:

• Reliability: Consistently following through on commitments and promises. When leaders do what they say they will do, they build a reputation for dependability.

• Authenticity: Being genuine and transparent. This doesn't mean oversharing, but it does mean being honest about what can and cannot be discussed, and showing a willingness to be oneself.

• Competence: Demonstrating a certain level of expertise and capability. While leaders aren't expected to know everything, their teams need confidence in their ability to lead effectively.

• Care and Fairness: Showing genuine concern for the well-being and interests of team members. This includes treating all team members equitably, especially when it comes to opportunities for growth and development.

Leaders set the tone. By actively identifying and minimizing behaviors that weaken trust (e.g., betraying confidences, prioritizing personal interests over team needs, professional incompetence) and reinforcing behaviors that strengthen trust (e.g., sharing information openly, keeping confidences, collaborating), leaders can cultivate a thriving, high-trust environment.

Learn More About Executive Coaching and Building Trust

Schedule a free consultation today to discuss how Your Path Coaching and Consulting can help you achieve your goals and cultivate a leadership style founded on unshakeable trust.

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Your Path to Business Success #14: Improving Performance by Creating Psychological Safety

Do you find yourself working harder to manage your employees than you feel you should? Low trust negatively impacts organizational performance in two ways. First, it creates a situation where your employees are scared to make mistakes. Secondly, it can produce situations where employees hide errors and information to protect their status. Both waste valuable time, money, and resources that should be put towards solving customer issues or improving business efficiency. One of the best ways to make work more manageable is to reduce the inefficiency that low trust creates in your organization.

Why Psychological Safety Matters.

I recently worked with a small business owner who grew frustrated with his team due to how they responded to his leadership. He felt their slow response to direction and lack of engagement negatively impacted sales. He sought coaching to understand better how his current behaviors were getting in the way of driving results. Through coaching, we discovered that low trust was the primary issue. The solution? Creating more psychological safety within his organization.

4 SIgns of Low Trust

Sign 1 of Low Trust: Unasked Questions

I helped the business owner see that some new employees felt uncomfortable coming to him for guidance. During meetings, he would set expectations for the week. He thought they understood his expectations, but there frequently were gaps between what he said and what they understood regarding key tasks. For him to improve team performance, the employees had to become comfortable asking clarifying questions and proactively asking for help when needed.

Sign 2 of Low Trust: Lack of Collaboration

Low trust between employees made the situation even worse. Competition for status, advancement opportunities, raises, and bonuses created an environment where employees did not share tips and best practices outside group meetings. This meant that most communication and talent development fell on the business owner, which slowed down employee development and created incremental stress for the business owner.  For employees to develop faster, he needed tenured employees to help newer employees learn new skills and how work is done within their organization.

Sign 3 of Low Trust: Lack of Feedback

Through coaching, he also identified that employees hesitated to point out business improvement opportunities. When he started hiring staff, he envisioned them helping him develop new ideas for growing the business, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. While all his employees had opinions about how things could be improved, it was rare for employees to suggest ways to improve. This stagnated organizational growth because the owner did not have time to ponder and evaluate potential changes. Instead, he spent too much time following up with employees who were not executing tasks to his expectations.

Sign 4 of Low Trust: Feelings of being Unvalued

Finally, we identified that some of the employees felt undervalued. They were unhappy about certain aspects of the job but did not feel comfortable voicing those concerns. The business owner only heard complaints when employees were under a lot of pressure and would overreact with emotional outbursts. This typically made the business owner furious at the employees because of their poor communication and failure to emotionally regulate themselves.  

How Did We Improve Trust?

We teach business owners the Power6 Leader framework's success equation: process multiplied by culture equals results to help them improve trust within their teams.

Processes help employees and bosses manage the complexities of work by reducing the number of decisions that must be made before action is taken. For example, if a status meeting is held every Monday, employees know that at least once a week, they will have an opportunity to discuss what is and is not working well within the business.

Organizational culture is essential because everything cannot be managed through processes. When novel situations occur, having norms, guiding principles, and values helps guide decision-making. For example, if a norm within your company is to challenge the status quo, then employees know that it is safe to question why a task is being done a certain way and suggest alternative ways of completing a task.  

Make Meeting More Meaningful

Few things are complained about more than meetings. They can take up a lot of time. They pull people away from doing other work, and most leaders never go through effective meeting training. Within the Power6 Leader coaching program, we challenge business owners to evaluate:

·       How frequently are meetings held?

·       How to generate more engagement?

·       How to gain feedback to keep them fresh and valuable?

There are four types of meetings we encourage all business owners to have.

1. One-on-One Meetings: designed to build relationships, provide opportunities for support, and ensure employees are getting the direct feedback they need to perform.

2. Group Meetings: designed to build relationships between team members, facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, and ensure that group members are focused on shared goals and understand interdependencies.

3. Business Reviews Meetings: These meetings are designed to ensure key stakeholders are aware of key performance indicators and variances to goals and to develop plans to close performance gaps.

4. Quarterly Strategy Reviews: designed to get key stakeholders to pause, consider current priorities, and evaluate whether they align with long-term organizational mission and vision.

We discussed these types of meetings, who should be invited, what the agenda should be, and how to ensure that they help to support trust. Every business is different, and you need to customize the approach that will work for you and your current stage of business growth.

Reinforce Organizational Cultural Expectations

After optimizing the meeting cadence, we focused on defining the norms, guiding principles, and values employees should use when making decisions. We discussed how each meeting should reinforce the organizational culture the business owner desired to build. Through consistent discussion of organizational culture, the seeds of values, norms, and guiding principles take root.

What was the outcome?

At first, the employees were skeptical. They thought the business owner was going through a phase and things would revert to normal. After 6 weeks of the business owner focusing on improving processes and organizational culture, the employees started to accept that this was the new way they would be doing business. They became more engaged and trusted the business owner and their peers more. The business owner noticed employees asking more questions, collaborating, and providing suggestions for improving the company; many communicated that they were starting to feel like valued team members.

What you should do next?

Consider the four signs of low trust. Identify if you see any of these signs within your organization. If they are present, develop a specific plan for addressing the issue. Start first by looking at your meetings. How can they be improved? Make minor tweaks and ask your team about the impact of your changes. Next, reflect on how you want your team to treat one another, customers, and other stakeholders. Make your expectations known, and consistently find ways to help your team understand how things are done here.

Thank you for reading the latest version of Your Path to Business Success. Over the last 14 weeks, we have shared tips and best practices that small business owners can use to make 2025 their best year yet. If you have any questions about this or any other business topic, email Executive Coach Dorian Cunion at dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

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