Hi there, Russell Stratton, President and Leadership Champion with Bluegem Learning. I work with organizations just like yours to help managers improve staff engagement and increase individual and team performance.
Now what I was talking about in the previous Vlog, the importance of team and getting our team being cohesive so we can deliver objectives and deliver value to our customers. As always being a primary importance to me in the work that I've done as an operational manager, but also now working as a consultant with organizations helping other managers by using our value cards,we were looking at three of the elements that to me where values that were most important around ‘Team’.
Now last time I talked about ‘Transparency’ this time, I’d like us to move on to talk about the element of ‘Trust’ and why trust was important. What I saw is that ‘Trust’ was key and in building trust with our employees in a number of ways. One of the first things I found was about being open with people, being as honest as I could be with them about what the situation was, what was going on for our team, for our organization.
And secondly, being prepared to have that straight conversation with them,
which I'll come onto in our 3rd Vlog about being having ‘Candid Dialogue’, telling people straight how things were.
Thirdly, the other part was about making sure that I took time to understand people as individuals. That I take time to find out who they were as a person, what was important to them. And that's the whole purpose around the idea of our exercise with values, getting people to exchange stories about why these values are important to them, because I found if I could understand who my people were, what motivated them, what made them them, if I could understand and be prepared to be open
and honest with them about what was going on, be able to have a candid dialogue with them and also be able to demonstrate that I knew what I was doing as their team leader that that would help build trust between me as the team leader and them as the team and I was setting some example and role modelling, that enabled them to build trust with each other.
In my work in more recent years,I've always been a big advocate, a fan of Colin Powell as a former Secretary of State in the US and head of the US Armed Forces. In one of his 18 Tenants or Lessons in Leadership, he talks about, one of these is about ‘Trust’,
when asked about what was the most important thing he felt as a leader and it was about having people having trust in you and he tells a wonderful story about being at the Infantry training school in Fort Benning, Georgia, when he was training to be a First Lieutenant.
He was told by the Drill Sergeant there that one of the most important things was to have people to be able to trust him, if his team did not trust him, then he wasn't going to get much done. And this idea that he would have to be showing that he knew
what he was doing, that they realized that while he had a job to do, he wasn't going to put them in harm's way unnecessarily. He had their interest at heart. He said that one of the things he found was that if you could build trust with people as his Sergeant had told him at Fort Benning then 'people will follow you even just out of curiosity'. I always love that thought that people would follow you just out of curiosity,
because they trust you and they believe that you're going to take them somewhere, physically or metaphorically, that's going to be interesting and they believe that you have their interests at heart.
So that's my thoughts are about ‘Trust’ and why I feel like that's important and some of the things that I've done to try and build trust with my team's. If that sounds interesting to you, you like the idea of exchanging stories around the values
and what's important to you and others then why not join my colleague Ken and I for our upcoming lunch-and-learnwhen we look at the Value shift deck and how we can use this to motivate our teams.
The Lunch and Learn, live online, taking place on July 15th, 12:30 p.m. To book tickets, click on the link below and at the great price of only $19, why not invite a co-worker or even your boss to come with you.
So click on the link below and we'll see you on the other side.
Book Here- 'What the F&%$ is Wrong With Them? Motivating your employees through values'
Well that's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed the blog and I'll be back next week with more, until then ... be a leader not just a boss!