Trust me, I'm a leader: looking beyond the leadership title

Introduction

One of the first tasks as a leader is to gain the trust of your team. Trust is not given automatically. Your leadership has an immense effect on their work and lives. Once your transition begins, questions and doubts will undoubtedly appear:

Studies define trust as a combination of two elements: character and competence. Character is about how your intentions match your actions, while competence is about the skills and technical knowledge you bring to the day to day activities. As time passes, your team will begin to adjust and redefine their understanding of how much they can trust you as a leader. Scientifically speaking, trust plays a quintessential role in leadership.

But how do we obtain trust?

Objectives

Subject

American neuroscientist Paul J. Zak has conducted a complete study on the neuroscience behind trust. He conducted a decade-long research study to prove his hypothesis that oxytocin levels in our brain affect how much we trust an individual.

Following the experiments on rodents and later on humans, his hypothesis held: our brain activity directly affects our trust levels in a situation or a person. Consequently, we now understand that increased oxytocin increases trust, while inhibiting it reduces trust. For example, high stress reduces oxytocin (and therefore trust). Moreover, empathy increases oxytocin (concluding that being compassionate increases trust).

From this conclusion, Zak continued with a new question: what affects our oxytocin levels, and how can we keep it at a high?

Framework

The answer to this question is his created framework for building high-trust cultures, a staple paper for any leader.

Zak’s research concluded with field data gathering, querying real companies on the relationship between oxytocin and their relationship with their workplace. The data is eye opening.

Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout.

Deciding to create a high-trust culture for your team makes you a dedicated leader. The aforementioned framework contains invaluable rules that one can follow to empower individuals and increase their satisfaction and productivity with their work. In the end, this does not reduce your responsibility as a leader: it allows you to hold people accountable without micromanaging them.

While your peers will analyse your ethical compass, your leadership style and character, they will also be taking into consideration your competences. Some questions that your actions will unconsciously answer for them are:

These questions are impossible to avoid. As a leader, you will need to nurture trust in your competences for your team. Audit your actions that you take within a week and identify whether you live to their expectations.

Final thoughts

Your actions as a leader will always have consequences, let them be positive or negative. Looking at nature, the decisions you’ll make will compare to the ripples a rock makes when you throw it into a lake. Irrelevant to the size of the rock, there are ripples. Small rocks, small ripples. Big rocks, big ripples. The ripples are continuous in any situation.

Coming back to leadership, any decision you’ll make will create ripples. When is the best time to think about the effect of our ripples? Once the rock has been thrown, the consequences are irreversible.

The frameworks of building high-trust environments and demonstrating your competences are preemptive actions you can always follow to ensure that your ripples have a positive effect. They place you in a position of leadership that understands their responsibilities, and does not micromanage individuals to reach success.

You will always be accountable for all of the rocks you throw in the lake. Moreover, you are fully responsible for every ripple, too. It’s imperative to gain as much information, act consciously and maintain trust at all times. 

Ensuring trust is not a question of slowing down taking actions, but rather of taking complete and correct actions to the benefit of yourself, every individual, and your products.

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Quality content

Today’s quality content comes from one of my greatest professional inspirations: Adam Grant. His books have completely changed the way I see business and product development. With a great focus on being ambitious and courageous enough to speak up and go against the currents, Adam’s books present you deep introspections on what it means to believe in an idea and in yourself.

One of his tweets last week reconfirmed one of my metaphors and I would love to share it with you too.

Be a lighthouse.

This is it for today! Thank you for reading!

Razzmatazz without the matazz.