Trust—it’s that little bit of secret sauce that makes the difference between a team barely missing a goal and hitting it out of the park.

A foundation of trust is one of the fundamental virtues of great leaders and influences the amount of discretionary effort your talent will expend to meet business goals.  If you expect your team to go above and beyond, they have to believe you would do the same for them.  It’s that simple.

We’ve come up with a set of eight proactive ways for managers to take action and forge trust with their teams. We’ll discuss four of them today, and the other four in a future installment.

The first block in the foundation of trust is to be sincere and understanding.  This involves several components, including taking your time to listen and think through your responses to others.  Many times people mistrust quick answers to tough questions. Also, you should never be judgmental or argumentative, keeping an open mind to the ideas and feelings of others.

Finally, you should exhibit thoughtfulness and consideration of others. A great way to accomplish this level of trust is to make a practice of doing something nice or of value for a peer or team member for no apparent reason.  Offer your help on an important project, take them to lunch, your treat, or ask about their plans for the upcoming weekend. 

Second, you should always use open and honest communication.  The best communicators consistently let people know where they stand. They never put customers, peers, or managers—much less the teams they manage—in the position of guessing what they want or need from them.  They don’t play games, strategically withhold information from some while disclosing to others, or seek out political maneuvering as a means of gaining political advantage over others in the company.

The honesty piece is every bit as key in the building of trust.  Trust-builders don’t stretch the truth, even when they know they may face consequences.  When they make mistakes, they admit them and take responsibility. When they miss deadlines or don’t finish a project, they are up-front about falling short of expectations and seek to do an honest re-set of those expectations.

Third, you should make realistic promises and keep them. This is one of the first lessons that most of us learn as children from our parents and teachers, yet we still need to revisit as adult professionals!  Yet, we find ourselves, in pressure situations or, just out of a need to think we’re doing the right thing for someone, make promises we can’t keep.

You should avoid over-committing and under-delivering—manage the expectations of others realistically.  Sometimes, “no” is the healthy answer to give someone, and they will respect you for giving them the honest truth instead of a later, unfulfilled promise.

And from a more simple perspective, don’t be that person that misses calls or meetings—meet your commitments, and be consistent about it.

This next concept is the most fun—be predictable. Many of us equate predictability with being boring.  Yet, when people are seeking out others they can trust in a workplace, they aren’t looking for a rollercoaster ride of responses, reactions, and moods. They want predictability.  Predictability equals dependability.

Remember, respect comes from your consistent, trustworthy actions, not from some title, status, or supposed power or authority you hold.

Predictability cuts back to keeping promises, of course.  But it also means exemplifying a “what you see is what you get” mentality.  You show the same mentality in relaxed situations as you do high-pressure environments, so people always know where you stand.

And predictability directly translates into integrity. You walk the talk, unbending in your advocacy for what you believe to be right, even under political pressure from others.  You never send mixed signals, so that those who want to trust you can come to your side and stay there.

In today’s complex world, you have to learn to work with people in positive ways to achieve organizational and personal success.  You need to be able to analyze situations and adapt your personal and interpersonal style to any situation. 

In our company’s work in leadership development, coaching, and talent management for some of the most progressive, profitable, and sustainable organizations, we have identified six key areas where people can make small steps that have a huge impact on their professional influence.

First, understand that your relationships are “give and take” by nature.  Just like building trust with others, you must trust them before they will trust you.  There is simply no difference with seeking to influence others.  You must give before you can take.  In order to achieve this, you must find out what others want or need from you. Is it recognition, help on a project, a willing ear, or something more tangible?  Finding out what others want is the key to getting what you want, ultimately expanding your own influence in the workplace.

Second, take a genuine interest in others.  Don’t just take an interest in theory—invest in each conversation by doing the little things. Make eye contact. Be present in the conversation, actively engaged, avoiding distractions or potential interruptions.  Ensure that you not only ask questions, but make yourself genuinely open to the answers and opinions you may receive in response to them.

Third, you need to understand unique differences in others.  In order to completely grasp these differences, you need to give them proper consideration. Pause and think before you respond—avoid hasty judgments and reactions.  Try to genuinely understand the other person’s perspective, not simply amplify your own by a line of questioning. Diagnose before you prescribe—understand how the other person may be approaching a problem before you try to solve it yourself in another way that seems more comfortable to you.  Be sure to ask follow-up questions, and be conscious of your own response by sharing your own opinions thoughtfully and asking more questions.

Fourth, you should be less judgmental and be more empathetic.  Winning doesn’t always mean being right!  Avoid instant output or sharp reactions that immediately evoke agreement or disagreement with the other person. Also, avoid advising others based on your own experiences—instead, ask questions versus making declarative statements that may alienate the other person by invalidating their own experiences in the area.  For example, avoid these responses – “I think you should,” “If I were you, I’d”, “That reminds me of the time,” or “That’s interesting, but.”

Fifth, you need to adapt to different situations.  Read your audience.  Do you understand what behavioral clues and expressions, both verbal and non-verbal, you are seeing?  You should monitor the body language of others, and be aware of your own, that it’s not out of place in the particular conversation you’re having.  Next, keep a proper gauge of the tone and pace of the conversation, ensuring that your own delivery doesn’t overstep or bog down the other person in the process. Finally, just make it easy for the other person to ask you questions—open up!

And here’s one final area for expanding your professional influence—meet your commitments and be consistent.  Do what you say you’re going to do, and do it when you say you will. Following through on commitments to others shows respect.  Meeting your commitments shows honesty, integrity, and that you desire trust, which builds from meeting commitments with consistency.  Genuine respect and trust removes barriers to understanding others.  When people can see, in their own behavior and the behavior of their leaders, managers, colleagues, and reports, a modicum of follow-through and consistency, the conversations come much easier.

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.

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.