Trustworthy Leadership: Where Team Engagement is the Key

Recently, we underwent an Intrapreneur Training Program to groom us all at #ARM to be 'In-house Entrepreneurs' and to grow at a faster pace so as to take a step towards leading the organisation to desired results. The series of activities there helped us understand how leaders and their trust motivates employees and affects performance.

Leaders as trust-builders

It's very important for the leaders to engage with employees in order to build trust through their behaviour. In a personal experience, the leader builds trust by behaving consistently over time and situations to increase parity, communicate the valuable information, engage in decision making with followers and explanations for decisions and openness. A leader shows concern for the team, act in a way that supports employees' interests while not exploit others. Trust grows between a leader and a follower, where the leader makes a decision to trust based on the follower’s behaviours and their perceived level of trustworthiness. The four key pillars of trust are, Ability – Expertise of Leader in doing a job and carrying out their role. Compassion – Show interest in employees’ needs and being approachable whenever required. Integrity – stick to set of principles acceptable to others encircling fairness and honesty. Uniformity – Consistent actions by Leaders helps in building trust amongst followers.

From trustworthy leaders to trustworthy leadership

The sense of independence, trust, relationship, responsibility, engagement, uniqueness leads to trustworthy leadership and at #ARM I experienced this kind of leadership from the top management. The practise of trustworthy leadership can be summed under four themes.

1. Putting relationships at the heart

Leaders encourage their followers to interact with co-employees within the team as well as beyond as making connections with people in other teams helps to understand business as a whole and generates respect for each other’s work. It helps to work more effectively as a whole and not as an individual resource. Putting relationships at heart is important because it let people to look beyond their job and get instead a whole lot visibility into the big picture.

2. Recognising and developing uniqueness

Leader gives followers a belief that they can achieve things and that they can progress from where they are. Followers must feel a willingness of their leaders and intend to develop them further in their work and capabilities.

3. Enabling mutual responsibility

Leader establishes an environment where responsibilities links both leader and follower, as they share accountability for their work and its outcomes. He/She can induce trust in followers by recognising the shortcomings and accepting the responsibility to address them.

4. Engaging with people

Employees need to feel their leaders are ‘real’. This can be achieved by leaders sharing their personal experiences with team. It’s important for the leaders to connect with their followers on personal and develop a sense of trust. Sharing thoughts, aspirations during casual talks allows real person to emerge and sense of trust among their followers.

“Leaders need to bring to the surface what has remained hidden in order to be perceived as human, personal and relational.”