In last week’s installment, we discussed four proactive ways that managers can utilize to forge trust with their teams at work:  be sincere and understanding, use honest and open communication, make realistic promises and keep them, and be predictable. This week we will discuss four more great steps to consider, so that you can take your team to new levels of performance and fulfillment.

You should strive to be the caretaker of confidential and private information—be “the vault.” When we protect the confidence of those who seek us out in the workplace, we convey the same respect and trust that we are trying to build with others.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t commit to keeping someone’s confidence unless you can agree to the terms.  Blind promises do no one any favors, and you never want to put yourself in a position where you’re protecting someone engaged in criminal or unethical behavior, detrimental to themselves or the health of the business.

Thus, you should establish a mutual understanding of the confidence, what’s expected from both parties, and only make agreements to which you can remain true.

One of the most proactive ways that managers can build trust is by also building a reputation for being responsive and available to their employees.  When employees feel that the relationship is a two-way street—where the manager grants them access and also seeks their feedback—their confidence in their own ability to perform to expectations increases exponentially.

To pave this two-way street, managers should use an open-door policy that welcomes and respects the honest feedback of their employees. They should also proactively offer timely guidance and help their teams accomplish tasks and solve problems.

Great managers are candid as they share information, advice, and suggestions to their employees for being more successful in their work.  And last, but probably most important at times, the very best managers identify problems early and proactively engage their employees to solve them before situations mushroom into major conflicts.

The most underused concept in building trust is through setting and sustaining high performance standards.  Teams derive their self-respect, as well as the respect and trust they have for their managers, based to a large degree on the expectations and the example set before them.

There’s no better way to complement high performance standards for your team than with high standards for your own performance.  This not only extends to constantly exceeding your own metrics-oriented goals (sales revenue, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction rating); it also extends to embracing your own professional growth and development through a commitment to learning and getting the coaching you need to be more effective. It almost goes without saying that your team, when they see these exemplary behaviors, will follow suit and trust you on an even higher level.

This also means that managers should stay committed to availing themselves of external issues that can affect their team’s performance, such as staying current on economic conditions, regulations, or customer trends that can affect the company and its results. This consistency of staying attuned to your own professional and personal credibility, with regard to the business and its performance, is contagious.

The final area where managers can have a tremendous, proactive impact on forging trust with their teams is in demonstrating character and concern for others.  Managers should always be thinking, “How can I define and clarify my core values for my team?”  In our fast-moving, constantly evolving times, many elements—economic conditions, technology, politics, and the law come to mind—can influence our core values and character—but only if we let them.

Managers need to keep their character and concern for others consistent, even when these elements come to bear in the workplace.  You should think about how you treat people and address your own past inconsistencies in both good and bad times and learn from them.  That’s personal evolution in order to build trust.

Also, a measure of character is your ability to have faith in those around you. Just as you may believe in your family and friends, you need to extend this core belief to your colleagues at work.  Seek to find common ground and earn cooperation with a minimum of pushback by exhibiting character and concern.

Finally, give serious thought, each time you make a decision, on the impact it will have on others.  Consideration of others is easy when times are good, but we all know that managers often have to make hard decisions—“that’s why we get paid the big bucks” is the old cliché that comes to mind.  Have the character and concern for your team to let them know your level of consideration, and share with them the negative impacts as quickly and honestly as possible.  When the going gets tough, show people that you’re equal to the task.

Effective interpersonal communication is the foundation for successful performance and growth in both your career and personal life.  Communication skills enable you to better lead, influence and build relationships with others by developing trust, reducing conflict and misunderstanding, and improving productivity. 

Through our work in leadership development, talent management, and coaching executives, managers, and employees at dozens of profitable, sustainable companies, we have determined a mix of seven keys to effective communication in the workplace:

1. Focus and be clear
2. Listen to understand, not to respond
3. Value and respect different perspectives
4. Identify communication preferences of your audience
5. Adapt to non-verbal and behavioral clues
6. Address or avoid sensitivities and hot buttons of your audience
7. Always be open, honest and accountable

In today’s post, we’ll discuss the first three keys.

First, you must focus and be clear.  This key speaks to the notion that you value your own time, and thus you should value the time of others you deal with in the workplace.  Get to the point when providing information, while avoiding lengthy, unnecessarily-detailed answers.

You should also remember to stay on message, being absolutely clear with regard to the ideas you need to express, especially within the expressed purpose of the conversation. To this end, you should answer questions directly and provide important information only. Just as the best writers distill thousands of words into the hundreds of words that pack the most punch, you should do the same with how you speak with your managers, colleagues, and reports.

Next, you must listen to understand, not to respond.  This concept is pretty difficult for even the smartest among us.  To make this happen, you need to apply common sense—listen more than talk.  Also, avoid urges to interrupt or object on the fly, without hearing out the other person’s thoughts in their entirety.

This should go without saying, but in order to properly listen, you should be engaged in the conversation.  Stop what you’re doing—put away the gadgets (smartphones, TV), minimize the potential for interruptions, and remove physical barriers such as desks, walls, and doors between you and the other person.

As you give the other person more opportunity to speak, be careful to pay attention to not just what is being said, but what is not being said. There are many of us who edit our thoughts quite a bit, never completely sharing what’s on our minds—a good listener can read between the lines and pick up these unspoken thoughts throughout a conversation.

Think through your responses to others after taking proper time to listen. Focus your attention on understanding someone’s message instead of formulating your response.  Being unafraid to give proper consideration, not only to what others have to say but also how you express your own thoughts and reactions, garners respect in professional environments.  Be patient in the process and remember that many people mistrust quick answers.

You must also value and respect different perspectives.  First, you must recognize the value of what others say and their reason and right to say it.

If you’re really seeking to value and respect another person’s perspective, you need to focus on understanding that perspective, not on agreeing or disagreeing with it.  Involve that person in even more conversation than you normally would somebody with whom you share much agreement, asking more questions versus making more declarative statements.  We’ve found that people tend to normally make statements at a rate eight times the number of questions they ask!

Ultimately, do you understand the other person’s perspective, or what they’re even trying to say?  If you’re not sure, simply ask more questions. Remember, your message is not about you or what you may want in a given situation—you want to know what the other party values and why their message is important to them.

In next week’s post, we will cover the four additional keys to effective communication.

Today’s successful, respected managers understand that developing relationships at work is critically important to their individual and team’s success.  Unfortunately, one of the attributes we see in poor performing managers is a lack of caring about their peers and direct reports and, more importantly, a streak of unconscious arrogance regarding their own abilities to “read” people.  This whole context—the notion of reading people—is out of place in today’s business world, as we now know that working with people is a continuous process of understanding them, not just some kind of gut-check assessment upon the first meeting or review session.

And understanding your people at work—your colleagues, direct reports, and your own managers—is, as we discussed in a recent blog post, one of the core foundations of building high performance teams at companies, along with trust and openness.  High performance has a direct correlation with employees’ ability, no matter their role, to develop relationships and earn credibility, whether that credibility lies with their supervisors, colleagues, or the people who report to them.

If managers and employees are seeking to improve their performance through strengthening relationships at work, then they need to ditch the reading people mindset and get down to the harder work of really understanding them.  And in order to gain this understanding, they must focus on the journey, not certain events along the way, like a certain project, recent mishap, windfall, or performance reviews.

Understanding people is a process, and the process is defined by multiple interactions and perceptions on the part of the people involved.  To begin our process for understanding others, we must first understand ourselves.  As people, we tend to understand ourselves in terms of the things we value, our own strengths, skills, and positive attributes, as well as what we see as our own shortcomings, flaws, or liabilities.  For example, you may see yourself as gregarious, creative, and driven—all fantastic traits. But you may also recognize that you are a procrastinator, lack confidence in high pressure settings, and tend to be defensive when others don’t immediately warm to an idea you think is your most brilliant yet. Thus, you’ve distilled yourself down to these three positives, along with corresponding negatives.

Once we understand ourselves, it’s much easier to see how we can understand others and develop relationships accordingly.  A natural law of attraction—speaking purely in the professional context here—is that we will gravitate toward people, more specifically toward characteristics or behaviors that mirror or complement our own.  This is what separates the good managers from the arrogant ones, the ones who assume they are great at reading and influencing people.  Good managers are willing to engage themselves in the introspection required to have a baseline understanding of themselves—in both relaxed times and high pressure situations, as well as individual work and collaboration with teams—to have that same understanding of others.

What it boils down to, ultimately, is that managers must seek to understand their own greatest strengths and weaknesses, and then seek representative qualities in their employees that provide either amplification of the things they like about themselves or provide a nice counterpoint to the manager’s own weaknesses.  For those arrogant managers, even admitting they have a weakness is a huge first step to better understanding.

So, if you’re an extrovert that tends to be very expressive, but lacks an analytical perspective, you may uncover, through listening and observing, a team member at work who mirrors your extroversion, chooses fewer words, and leans heavily on information-gathering and analysis to make decisions.  In the end, to defeat the unconscious arrogance that’s so rife in management in many companies, managers must be challenged to have humility about their own abilities, re-contextualizing reading people into understanding them, knowing themselves first, and then listening to others to gain perspective on their value to the team and organization at large.

TM Solutions created the Mobile Manager with the demands placed on today’s manager in mind.  Our new software tool combines multiple elements needed by today’s managers in order for them to execute on multiple fronts.  This multi-channel understanding of managers’ needs matches our own understanding that managers must play multiple roles in executing corporate strategy in the following areas:  leadership, coaching, collaborating, and team-building,

We’ve created the Mobile Manager as a one-stop hub for companies to leverage all of TM Solutions’ coaching, training, and development offerings in a user-friendly space optimized for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, since we know that many managers must interact with remote employees or simply need these devices with them at all times to deal with the high speed of business opportunities these days.

Within this hub, we’ve built several core components to help managers execute in the field. First, managers have with them at all times a dashboard organizational view of all of the people within their chain of command and company work groups. Within this dashboard, managers can link to two important tools, Talent Cards and Peer Cards, for each person they interact with, take orders from, or manage on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Talent Cards and Peer Cards play a vital role in helping managers execute in the field.  Quickly-accessible Talent Cards help managers understand their employees and provide a predictive model for how they will react in certain situations, whether it’s a high pressure environment or a fun team challenge. Managers will have the psychometric foundation, via the Talent Card, to understand their employees’ motivations and get a quick refresher on each employee’s preferences, sensitivities and hot buttons, both in terms of their work-related values and interests and any relevant personal information that feeds into the greater understanding of that employee as a person.

The Mobile Manager exploits the genius behind Peer Cards in much the same way.  Many organizations call upon their management groups to collaborate on initiatives that they can then roll out within their own respective silos.  Sometimes these groups can come from the same function—as with regional managers at financial services companies—or they can be cross-functional,  as with government task forces represented by leaders from multiple agencies.  Regardless of function, in order to execute in collaborative situations, managers need to build understanding of their colleagues.  And often, due to the speed of opportunity or the urgency of the challenge they are asked to address, this understanding must be built quickly, and the Peer Card is there to do it.

With a perspective geared less for management and more for collaboration, managers can work together and execute corporate strategy through understanding their colleagues’ communication preferences, interpersonal expectations, strengths, and motivations through the Peer Card.

The Mobile Manager also incorporates other tools and services to enhance leadership and coaching as execution areas for managers.  TM Solutions has delivered live (as well as recorded) learning sessions through topical webinars aimed at areas such as engaging teams through effective leadership and communicating effectively. 

In addition to highly interactive content that sparks immediate new execution abilities based on coachable areas, TM Solutions has also brought into the Mobile Manager its extensive library of training and development content, from best practice solutions to leadership coaching and talent assessment knowledge bases.  As you can see, TM Solutions has quite literally tried to think of any challenge that managers can face in the field and optimize the answers to these challenges through vital technology made for today’s mobile, fast-paced setting.

When you want your people to execute the plan, you leave them no excuse for failure. You want them to have every platform to succeed, and the Mobile Manager can be that platform to drive organizational and individual success.

When you take a look at the DNA of successful companies, you notice that high performing teams within the company drive success, whether it’s in areas like sales and marketing or operations, customer service, and manufacturing.

While there are many aspects to building great teams that continuously take their companies to new levels of success, defined by increased revenues and profitability and managing expenses and resources effectively, there are three fundamental traits that we see over and over again in the highest functioning organizations. Leaders model these traits, and their associates emulate them.  And the very best organizations systematize them.

These fundamental qualities necessary for building high performance teams in business organizations are trust, openness, and understanding.  Let’s start with trust. As with any of these qualities, the success of the team depends upon how managers interact with their employees and how the employees interact with each other.

In a recent Inc. Magazine article, Geoffrey James discusses the work environments and results produced by teams with average managers who motivate by fear and demand that their employees simply follow orders, versus extraordinary managers who motivate through vision and give employees freedom to have fun and take action and responsibility.  The foundational concept here is trust—if managers trust their employees to make their own decisions,  then employees will, in turn, empower each other.  Trust not only heightens performance—it simultaneously drives engagement.

Many managers and workers struggle with the concept of openness. We have gotten so trained in our society on the concept that “knowledge is power,” and, in our weaker moments, we feel that we need to concentrate knowledge in our own hands to control our professional destinies.  Time and again, though, we see the worst performances out of teams led by secretive managers who only give their employees the nuggets they think they need to drive their performance.  James addresses this concept as well—it smacks of a patriarchal approach where managers see their employees less as peers and more like their own children.

A lack of openness results in many types of negative behaviors. Among them—employees finding themselves working in lowest-common-denominator fashion, doing the bare minimum to get by, and looking to stay out of trouble versus achieve. To the contrary, the most open managers—those who freely share business challenges and obstacles freely with their teams—are able to bring more minds to the table to effectively solve problems.  Openness creates a “rise to the occasion” mindset from employees with regard to how they see their leaders and the business, and they want to pull together for each other as well.

As if trust and openness weren’t hard enough for many business managers to achieve, perhaps the hardest nut to crack is that of understanding.  While we regularly train and coach our clients on concepts like trust and openness, to truly create understanding among one’s employees, you either have to be a psychological savant or have the right tools.

That’s where companies like ours come in with solutions to get to the core of who people are as unique human beings through a combination of psychometric, values and interests, and competency assessments.   

There’s a perception out there, no doubt harbored in many low performance organizations,  that companies use this type of front-end screening to weed people out of hiring processes and then utilize manipulative management tactics with employees once they are hired.  We turn these notions on their respective heads—to the contrary, we think that these types of evaluations are best used to plug people into the right functional roles to optimize teams, and we also believe that they provide a critical roadmap for understanding.

This roadmap for understanding is two-fold and best understood by a couple of our products, the Talent Card and Peer Card. Each of these cards is simply a set of outputs and recommendations, one for managers and one for peers, to promote ongoing understanding and better team results.  It almost goes without saying that if people understand what you value in yourself and others, how you operate in stressful situations and react to conflict, and where you find your motivation and passion, they will meet you in the right place.

Promoting understanding among managers, employees, and colleagues is ultimately what building high performance teams is all about. High performance teams deliver sustainable success to both organizations and the individuals who drive them.