Is Your Team Underperforming?
If Your Team is Underperforming, This is Why
During a recent Zoom meeting with a team I've been coaching through some organizational change, I scanned my computer screen and realized that only about half of the folks were paying attention. At one point, I asked everyone to stop working, look at the camera, and tell me what the heck was going on.
After a few moments of embarrassed silence, one nervous team member said, “I have back-to-back meetings all day long. I’m doing work now because it’s my only chance.”
Lack of Compassion Leads to Lack of Trust
I realized right then that none of my clients are slowing down right now: they’re speeding up. They’re overworked, frustrated, and so damned tired. And the cherry on top is they don’t think leadership cares. “There’s this sense that we've been in the Covid work-from-home reality for nine months now," one employee explained. "So we should be able to work just as hard, or harder than we were pre-pandemic."
The reality is that Covid is still killing people, the election is hanging over us like a dark cloud, and everyone is working too hard. Even with multiple vaccines on the horizon, the world is still weird. If you’re in a leadership position, you deny that at your peril. Your people need to believe that you care. If they don’t, you’ll lose their trust, and without trust, you’ve got nothing.
Trust Will Save Your Team and Your Company
The benefits of establishing trust are well documented. Compared with employees at low-trust companies, people who work for organizations where trust is high report:
74% less work-related stress
106% more energy on the job
50% higher productivity
13% fewer sick days
76% more engagement
29 % more satisfaction with their lives and
40% less burnout
A recent Deloitte survey found that 48% of U.S. workers plan to look for a new job as soon as the economy improves. The main reason? They no longer trust their employers.
How Do You Know When Trust is Missing?
It’s not always blatantly obvious that lack of trust is your primary issue. In The Thin Book of Trust, authors Charles Feltman and Sue Annis Hammond describe five critical indicators of low trust in organizations and relationships.
Low Energy and Initiative: People overpromise and underdeliver. And they make excuses for failing to follow through on their commitments.
Unhealthy Competition: Employees manipulate facts and spin the truth. They also hoard information to gain advantages and openly resist or stifle new ideas.
Defensive Behavior: When people make mistakes, they hide them or immediately shift blame to someone else.
Active, Inaccurate Grapevine: When trust is low, there is an abundance of gossip and water cooler talk and no honest conversations.
Unproductive Tension: When bad things happen, the mandate from on high is to deny. Off-limit topics abound, as do whispers and assumptions.
Conversely, when trust is present, employees are more likely to ask for help, accept responsibility, give each other the benefit of the doubt, offer and accept apologies, and admit their mistakes.
Your team members want to trust you and each other, but they're smart enough to know that choosing trust is always a risk. When we decide to trust another person, we make ourselves – or something we value, like a job or a promotion – vulnerable to their actions. We have to believe that those actions will support us, or at least do no harm.
In my work with leaders and teams, I break trust down into a handy acronym that I will explore in detail over the next month. So, get ready for a series of blog posts aimed to help leaders like you: build T.R.U.S.T. and get your team humming again despite the particular challenges of this moment.
If you lead a team that could use a trust reboot, but you’re not sure how to get started, let’s talk.