Build a Culture of Trust, Not Negativity

Nine Steps Leaders Can Take to Build Trust

Important steps leaders can take to earn the trust of their employees.

Trust is key to building a solid team. Our own Don Tennant has written extensively on building trust in an organization. And it starts at the top. If employees can’t trust their leaders, it breeds a culture of negativity that can affect everyone. Just last year, Tennant laid out the findings of a report that looked at how incivility in the workplace affects productivity.

A new addition to the IT Downloads library, a chapter excerpt from “The High-Heeled Leader: Embrace Your Feminine Power In Life And Work” from author Katie Day, helps women create a culture of trust and sustainability. While the excerpt is geared toward women, men, too, can find value in its contents. After all, many of us can identify with working in a toxic work environment.

Below are a few more resources from our library to help you build a culture of trust in your organization:

‘Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust’ Excerpt: Authors Watts Humphrey and James Over explain concrete and necessary steps for reshaping the way in which software development is conducted to gain competitive advantage and realize remarkable returns.

‘Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive’ Excerpt: Security technologist Bruce Schneier interconnects concepts from biological and social sciences to describe how society engenders trust and security. Schneier shows how society suffers in the absence of trust, whether examining the microcosm of social settings between two people or the world at large.

‘The Trustworthy Leader’ Excerpt: Using real-life examples from “Best Companies” research, Lyman explains that trustworthy leaders display the commitment to the value of trust, rather than imitate the practices of others, and describes six characteristics that demonstrate a leader’s trustworthiness: engaging followers, sharing information, developing others, inclusion, honor, and getting past uncertainty and difficulties to seize opportunities.