The Four Ways to Build Trust as a Manager

Need to Know

• Being a manager means leading people, not just managing work. Trust in managers is what enables you to influence, support, and engage your teams.
• The Trust Compass identifies four drivers of trust: Care, Clarity, Consistency, and Competency.
• Use the Trust Compass to diagnose and strengthen trust. Focus on the areas where your team needs more support and take consistent action to rebuild confidence and credibility.

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“I don’t like the people stuff.”

We hear this a lot from managers.

They like the work, but they struggle with navigating the different personalities, needs, preferences, and motivations of the individuals on their team. Everything would be easier if it weren’t for all the people, right?

We get it, people make everything more complex.

We all say things we later regret. Our emotions get the best of us. We feel left out of decisions. We struggle to give and get honest feedback. We get stuck in unhealthy behaviours or patterns. The list of challenging people-issues is long.

We agree, this is hard.

But it’s also the job.

While this may have come as a surprise when you first got that promotion, it’s now part of your reality as a leader.

You’re no longer just managing work, you’re leading people. 

To do this well, we want you to stay laser-focused on one concept:

Trust.

As managers, when we lose someone’s trust, we lose our ability to lead and influence.

When the ADP Research Institute studied the most engaged teams, they found that the strongest predictor of employee engagement was trust in the team leader. In fact, people are 12 times more likely to be engaged when they trust their immediate manager. (Yes, 12 times!)

As managers, when we lose someone’s trust, we lose our ability to lead and influence. We’re no longer their leader, regardless of our job title.

Thankfully, we believe you already know how to build trust as a manager, and how to rebuild it if it’s broken. We know how to do this intuitively based on our lived experiences, even when we don’t always act on that knowledge.

Don’t believe me?

Think about three leaders you’ve trusted throughout your career. What made them trustworthy? Chances are, your answers will line up with the mountains of research that have been done to study the concept of trust.

To bring together both your experience and the research, we’ve created a simple model to help you focus on what matters most.

The Trust Compass

Building trust as a manager is like finding your way with a compass.

4 Fundamental Points to Guide the Journey

Care

Do I believe this person cares about me and has my best interests in mind?

Nothing trumps care. You can do everything else right as a manager, but if your team does not believe that you care about them and their interests, you won’t have their trust.

Here’s the catch that we need to consider. The critical component is actually not about whether we care for our team members; it’s about whether that team member experiences care. There’s a big difference between those two. I have met very few managers who would say they don’t care about their teams. However, I’ve met many employees who say they don’t feel cared for by their manager. 

That’s the gap we need to address.

Wondering where that gap exists for you?  Have an honest conversation with your team to find out what you can do to better demonstrate care.

Clarity

Do I feel confused, ambiguous, or uncertain in my work or relationship with this person?

If you’ve ever driven through a thick fog, you know how stressful it can feel when the road ahead of you isn’t clear. 

The same thing happens at work. 

When we lack clarity about what’s ahead, it can cause us to slow down, become overly cautious, or even feel unsafe. None of this helps us perform at our best.

As managers, our job is to create the clarity people need to move forward. This means paying attention to wherever confusion and uncertainty are showing up:

• Roles and responsibilities
• Authority and decision-making
• Expectations and priorities
• Organizational changes
• Performance feedback

Not everything in a team or a relationship can be crystal clear, but if your team knows you will show up authentically and work to remove the fog that’s slowing them down, they’ll trust you to help them navigate future challenges.

Consistency

How certain am I that the other person will keep their commitments, act with integrity, and show up reliably?

Have you ever had a manager who regularly cancelled meetings at the last minute, didn’t respond to your emails, or failed to follow through on commitments?  

You probably remember how quickly trust disappeared.

Teams rely on managers for a great deal, so it’s imperative that they know you’re reliable. If you show up sporadically or inconsistently, teams are constantly left guessing, wondering if their work is valuable to you or if you can be a source of support for them.

If you want to build trust, prove to your team that you will show up consistently.

Ultimately, the people we trust at work need to be capable of delivering on what they’re responsible for – and this includes the manager.

Competency

Do I feel confident in the other person’s ability to do what they need to do in our work together?

While we’d love to say that the above three are enough to maintain trust, that’s just not the case. Ultimately, the people we trust at work need to be capable of delivering on what they’re responsible for – and this includes the manager.

Among many things, your team relies on you to:

• Share important information
• Advocate for their needs
• Secure funding and resources
• Contribute meaningfully to hitting shared goals

In other words, they really need you to be good at your job as a manager. Their success often relies on it.

This doesn’t mean you need to be perfect.

It does mean committing to continuous growth. 

Take your own professional development seriously and share your learning journey with your team. Far from making you seem incompetent, this demonstrates a commitment to growth.

As your capability grows, so does your credibility, and credibility strengthens trust.

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A Final Word on Trust

The four points of the Trust Compass are deeply interconnected. They overlap and reinforce each other, creating a spiral of trust that can either strengthen or erode over time.

If you sense that you may have an issue of mistrust with your team, use the Trust Compass as a diagnostic tool. If possible, share the compass with your team and get their honest take on which area you need to strengthen first.  

Then take action.

Building trust takes time. Rebuilding trust takes even longer. But it is the foundation upon which every team and relationship stand.  It’s one of the most important investments you can make as a leader.

For more ideas and practical tools to build trust with your team, check out our new book, You Can Manage: A Practical Guide to Becoming the Manager Everyone Wants.

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Key Takeaways

• Trust is one of the biggest drivers of employee engagement and effective leadership.
• Great managers focus on more than just the work. They invest in relationships with the people doing it.
• The Trust Compass highlights four foundations of trust: Care, Clarity, Consistency, and Competency.
• People need to experience your care; not just assume it exists.
• Creating clarity around expectations, decisions, and priorities helps teams move forward with confidence.
• Following through on commitments and showing up consistently builds credibility over time.
• If trust is breaking down, use the Trust Compass to identify where you need to focus your efforts first.

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Still Curious?

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