I was recently asked what I thought the most important aspect of management was and, when put on the spot, my answer was less than stellar. I felt the need to come here and clarify my thoughts for myself, as much as for the person who asked the question to begin with.
Why is trust important?
There’s no question in my mind that the most important aspect of management is establishing a trust relationship with your employees. Trust is the foundation of everything you do. For your employees to have psychological safety, they need to trust you. For your employees to give you difficult feedback about the state of a project, their own abilities, or their daily challenges, they need to trust you. For you, as a manager, to have an accurate understanding of the state of the work you’re ultimately responsible for, your employees must trust you.
If your employees don’t trust you, then it doesn’t matter how good you are at communication, or feedback, or coaching, or organization. None of it matters because your directs don’t believe a word of it. If they don’t trust you to give them proper accreditation for those impactful ideas that you bubble up the chain, they’re going to keep those ideas to themselves. If they don’t trust that you’ll help them out of a difficult situation, then they’re going to keep that to themselves until it’s absolutely too late to do anything about it. If they don’t trust you not to throw them under the bus as soon as things get difficult, there’s no way they’re going to open up and admit their own vulnerabilities, which could ultimately have devastating impacts to the work you’re all doing.
How do you establish trust?
Trust is built slowly, you can’t rush it. One of the first ways to establish trust is by setting clear expectations, and then consistently meeting those expectations. If you tell a direct that you’re going to do something, then do it. If you don’t know if you can do it or not, then don’t make the promise and be open about your limitations and constraints. This is the first, and easiest, step in establishing trust.
Another way to establish trust is to be vulnerable. I hate that I even have to say these words, but when you mess up, acknowledge that you messed up, apologize, and let your employees know what you’re going to do differently in the future. I have worked with entirely too many leaders who do not have the capacity to admit fault with anything. Your employees aren’t stupid, they know when you’ve messed up. If you lie about it, you just make the situation worse. Everybody messes up sooner or later. You need to understand that you’re judged far more harshly by how you respond to your mistakes than the mistakes themselves.
But trust can be destroyed in an instant.
While trust can take a long time to build, it can be destroyed in an instant. One broken promise, one instance of taking credit for someone’s work, one time throwing a direct under the bus in a leadership meeting and you’re back to zero.
Rebuilding that trust is harder than establishing it in the first place, if you even can. It will take many repeated efforts, and you may never fully get there. Your best bet is to not end up in this position at all.
There’s a lot more to say about trust and what you can build with it, and what you’ll miss without it, but that will have to wait. For now, if I’m lucky enough to get asked about the most important aspect of management again, I’ll be ready. It’s trust. It was always trust. It will always be trust. Everything else is secondary.