The Elusive Advantage
Why building engaged teams is harder than it looks
The importance of creating positive culture in the workplace is not a novel concept. Leaders inherently know how crucial it is to engage people within their companies, regardless of what a given business does. Heck, there is an entire industry dedicated to helping people achieve this. So, why do leaders keep facing challenges related to “culture”, disengagement and workforce turnover? The answers to this are both simple and entirely complex.
The truth is that this all ties back to people and relationships. Nothing mind-blowing there but, as we all know for our own reasons, people and relationships are wildly complex. And sometimes hard. Successful relationships often rely on something intangible to help hold them together over time and the same thing is true in the workplace. Solutions to culture challenges faced by any company must account for that reality and, if they expect their teams to band together, leaders must give a better reason than “just because.”
The key to achieving this sometimes-nebulous seeming goal is having leaders who truly model and reinforce the behaviours we know to exist in “good teams.”
I’m sure you can list things that consistently come up in searches for what builds strong company culture:
1. Trust & trustworthy leadership
2. Purpose & meaning
3. Relationships & a sense of belonging
4. Empowerment & opportunity for growth or advancement
5. Communication & accountability
There are thousands of resources that will give you a list like this, and trust is almost always at or near the top. So, let’s start with trust.
Trust is a veritable mix of tangible and intangible things. We all have relationships in our lives where it is at the core of the closeness and openness we feel, as we’ve likely all experienced the sensations that come with its absence. I’m also willing to bet most of you have sat in a meeting room – whether as a leader, as an employee, or both at different points in your career – and heard somebody (maybe even you) talk about how important trust is at your workplace. So what gives. What is preventing something so widely understood from existing consistently in more workplaces? How do you create and sustain trust?
The challenge is, as it always has been, taking words on a page (or a poster or a plaque) and translating them into lived experience.
Developing and maintaining trust is a lot like managing our physical health. For starters, in both cases, our words must line up with our actions if we’re going see the results we want (I too think I could eat healthier and exercise more). To steal from George RR Martin and William Shakespeare before him, “words are but wind”.
People need to hear the right things, sure. And communicating your company’s goals, vision and values is an important part of this puzzle. But to truly get there, people need to see those values in demonstrated in real life. Played out on repeat, over and over again. If you make this is a priority and make your decisions – big and small – with those values in focus, trust starts finding a way to creep into your teams. From there, it’s a question of endurance and tenacity.
When we’re younger and newly into our professionally journeys, it’s easier to see a simple arc. Learn, grow, develop, get promoted, etc. Many of us take certain things for granted (kind of like our metabolism and an ability to climb stairs without feeling winded), accepting that career growth will take time. Over time, however, we all experience things that don’t sit well. Things that sometimes shift our trust in our employers, our teams, ourselves, etc.
These moments can alter how we participate in certain dynamics, and not always for the better. And, sadly, we don’t pay attention to the reality that – as with our cardio – it takes way more work to regain trust than it does to lose it. Where it goes from there varies. But many of us start realizing that building and maintaining trust takes intentional effort. We have to exercise behaviours that reinforce it if we want it to be there in the moments that really matter.
Things change quickly and life moves fast. We all know that but, as we navigate our day-to-day, we often hold ourselves and others to unrealistic expectations. And this is only more true when trust is lacking. Perhaps that looks like getting upset when someone doesn’t do something they said they would, letting it fester, and eventually snapping about it or unrelated things. Maybe it’s holding yourself back from saying what you actually think in a meeting. Maybe it’s lying to a colleague or boss, saying you’ve got time to do something when you know you absolutely do not.
Whatever it is, we are all guilty of holding ourselves and others to ideals that are unrealistic. We often respond to these moments in ways that do not truly communicate what’s really going on, what’s actually important, or how things can improve. We erode collective goodwill and miss out on opportunities to build rapport.
This is why creating and sustaining trust-filled workplaces is so hard. Trust is built over hundreds, thousands of little moments. Like owning you don’t have the capacity to do something and communicating that to a boss who understands and accepts it. And when that same boss works with you to ensure you’re still getting enough quality work done for the company to achieve its goals. Or when a coworker falls short on something initially but holds themselves accountable to the standard they know exists, and makes up for it. Repeating these behaviours over and over is what takes something elusive and makes it real. Tangible. Tactile.
Getting this right all the time is not possible and goes beyond every human’s bandwidth. You, me, everyone. Doing these things right enough of the time to have an impact? That is possible. It is a standard worth holding to and I guarantee it will positively impact employee engagement and workplace culture.
There are rewards to be had when you keep exercising those trust muscles. Fragile teams that vacillated between false harmony and conflict start creating something special. People believe, deeply, that you have their best interests at heart and buy-in to what you’re doing. Future successes will be built, block-by-block, on a solid foundation that can withstand the inevitable shocks and surprises that come about in life and in business.
And if you don’t work to create this type of environment for your business and your teams? If trust and engagement aren’t at the core of your work as a leader? Soon enough you’ll be standing at the top of a flight of stairs, wondering how you could possibly be so out of breath.
By the Numbers:
Only 32% of employees are highly-engaged at their job
96% of engaged employees trust their management/leadership
Only 46% of disengaged employees feel the same way
Source: A Great Place to Work – workplace study of Fortune 100 Businesses (2016)
Parting Questions:
If you and your employees described the level of trust in your business, would you answer in the same way?
If someone made a mistake tomorrow, would they be more likely to keep it under wraps or raise their hand and bring it forward?
If trust is built on one interaction at a time, what did today’s interactions build?