Building trust with people at your workplace

If you are interested in growing your career, then I bet that you are interested in building trust with people, especially at your workplace. Trust is not a matter of emotions; it is not given away out of kindness or as charity. Trust is earned and built. It is a product of character and behavior. Trust is everything; everything is trust. Relationships, businesses, and every other thing are built on trust. The certificates issued by educational institutions say that that the holder should be trusted to have been trained at the institution, in a particular area, for a stated period of time and also shows how they have rated the performance of the holder. When a cheque is issued to a person, the issuer is telling the financial institution to trust the person that has been issued the cheque, and give him the stated amount of money on the cheque.

It is not a really simple thing to build trust, especially in a business environment. People find it difficult to trust others for some reasons. Stephen Covey and Greg Link highlighted some in their book- Smart Trust:

·         Trust is risky. The cost of being wrong about someone is expensive. People have learnt this from past experiences and even current happenings.

·         The rule of the game these days does not allow people to trust. People and things are not really as they appear or seem. Packaging and branding have affected originality. Before the World War I, people focused on the originality of their person, organizations, products and services. After the war, the attention shifted to packaging and developing techniques in order to win friends, do better in business, and in other areas of life.

·         There are misleading schools of thought about trust. Some years ago, I was reading an article by a supposed world expert on trust-based relationships and sales, and I just said to myself, “if people follow what this man has written, they will definitely find it difficult to trust anyone, even the Creator”. The effect of not trusting people does not always take long to begin to manifest.

·         Misleading body languages. No matter what you say, people will always believe your body language more. For example, you can’t say you trust your employee or subordinate at the office, and keep hovering around the person when you give the person a task. Also, when your body language says you are over ambitious, self-centered or a politician, it does not matter what you say or what your intentions are, you cannot be trusted.

There are so many more challenges with trust at the workplace. But trust is important to business growth, career building, and everything. Warren Buffett once said that trust is like air we breathe in- when it is present, nobody really notices; when it is absent, everybody notices.

In building the trust of people in your workplace, the following are important:

1.   Develop a strong character: There are rules that naturally govern human effectiveness, knowing and living by these rules are termed as having character. There are a very few people who possess strong character, but these people are loved, and trusted by others. These set of people are always calm, courageous, empathic, confident, polite and respectful. Even to your subordinates or employees you don’t need to show hierarchy, treat them as equally important people for the organization’s growth.

2.   Learn and practice your workplace ethics and policies: I am separating this from developing a strong character because I realize that some people, who ordinarily lack character, can learn workplace ethics, practice them and grow their career. What happens is, they become successful career people and other aspects of their lives are not as fantastic.
Companies have their policies. It is best you learn your company’s policies. This way you remain in the good books of the management and other members of the entire ecosystem of your workplace. A friend of mine that works in one of the big 5s in consulting shared with me that it is against their company’s policy for any member of staff to be found on a motor cycle on the high way. The simple thing to do is to keep to the rule.

3   Be accountable: Being accountable is for your own success. It is a skill-set that anyone can learn. Be accountable to yourself and everyone else in your workplace. If your actions or inactions as a superior have affected someone that works under you, the person needs to know, needs to be apologized to. He or she deserves an explanation.

4  Create personal rules and hedges: People trust people with personal rules and hedges more. It is usually not enough to create personal rules and hedges, it is important to let people know your rules and hedges. This will not only keep them from treading on your rules but you also earn their trust and respect.


5     Be intentional about building trust: There is a difference between having good intentions and being intentional. People cannot see good intentions but being intentional involves doing the right things you need to do to be trusted. When there is a controversial situation, let your intentions be known, and be sincere about it. Honor your promises. Be consistent. Volunteer useful information. Keep secrets. Show commitment to your job and relationships with people at your workplace.

6.      Associate and connect with people: People don’t easily trust people who keep to themselves. In many situations, the quietest is usually the suspect if anything goes wrong.


7.     Be competent on your job: If you are good on your job, people will tend to trust you more.

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WORKING WITH A NEW BOSS

People spend more time thinking about how to work and be close with their bosses than any other business relationship (often times more than the customers or clients who are supposed to be ‘the king’); still they manage to get the relationship very wrong. Instead of making their careers, the relationship actually breaks it.

 Even if you have had a sour or not so-good relationship with your former boss, a new boss is an opportunity to get it right, and begin a rise to the top of your career. If you want a good relationship with your new boss, here are some useful tips:

1.  Be loyal: Disloyalty is an unforgiveable character flaw and you cannot and will not be trusted. People that cannot be trusted by their bosses cannot be recommended for promotions or even assigned any special duty or responsibility. This is because loyalty is more important than competence. Samuel Godwyn once said that he will take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty. Loyalty shown publicly also results in leverage privately; when the decisions that will bring about your promotion in the office are made, they are usually in private when you are not there, and the truth is, people always want their own man on the top job.
2.   Keep the boss informed: No one has ever lost a job because they told the boss too much. Do so till he says stop. This quality is known as communication skills, and it is a major quality that everyone that must rise to the top of their career must possess. Your communication with your boss doesn’t have to be formal always, sometimes, it is better to make it tactfully natural; a good sense of humor but don’t tell unkind stories and silly jokes. Keep your mails and texts well-crafted too; this is a way of positively selling yourself.
3. Embrace changes instigated by your new boss: The ambition of every new boss is to bring change. Sometimes, they don’t even know what change or how to go about it; they want to make a change anyways but please dear reader, just make sure you are not resisting change that is instigated by your new boss, especially if it is not part of your job to do so. Helping the new boss in driving change to the organization, whether or not he is coming from the organization is very important for a career-building relationship with your boss. You can help by supplying useful information and resources. You can do this by mailing him useful materials you find online or linking him with people you know can help him achieve his goal for those few that have one and a strategy.
4.   Respect the boss’s time: If you need thirty minutes with him, don’t take sixty, better yet take twenty. The truth is, the more time you spend talking with your boss, the more you give him chance to weigh you and rate you, which is not very good for you because he might realize things he naturally does not like about your person. No need for irrelevant talk.
5.     Don’t tread his turf: ‘oga’ stay on your lane. He must give you permission if you must enter his lane. Treading the turf of a new boss especially when he has a superior or superiors he has to impress is ‘dan-ge-rous’. This is not to say that you should become a robot or you should not be proactive, what I am simply saying is that even if you are the next in line in authority, let him exercise his authority every time.
6.      Deliver in time: I always teach people that work with me in any organization my personal work strategy, “please deliver remarkable results in the shortest possible time”. Bosses don’t pull out a stop watch when they assign a task to you, but their internal clock is ticking. When you are competent, you will n0t have to do so much to win the love and trust of your new boss. Competence makes the office assistant closer to the new boss than even his assistant.
7.  Pray without ceasing: Funny isn’t it? I have learnt from experience and by studying very hard about relationships; I tell you the truth, when you pray, your mind is conditioned to function better and relate better with God and man. As much as many people will not like to consider this point very important, you must know that you have not done anything about any situation until you have prayed about it. This point is something I wish we could exhaust in this article, but E.M Bounds has written a very good book on this topic called ‘The possibilities of prayer’ and I recommend the book for you.                                                                                                                                                                                              If I was to write one more point, it will be the most important part of the article, and that is for you, my reader to be careful to observe to practice the seven points above. There is so much value in information, but the reward of applying knowledge is priceless.