Build trust in a team
You can probably think back to a time in your career when somebody questioned the quality of work you produced or some other aspect of how you performed your job, and while it may have been frustrating to experience that, how your boss responded probably made it better or made you feel worse about the situation.
As a leader, it’s important to make sure you’re supporting your team members, which is one way to build trust with them and build a good place to work.
“I go to bat for my team first of all,” Eisenlau says. “If their performance is challenged or the profitability is challenged or somebody wants to pull somebody off of one of our projects and move them on to one of our [other] projects, you need to look after your people.”
It’s important to seek out truth in those situations and back your people. It also helps to get to know your people.
“As a leader of your team, you have to stay very close to your people,” he says. “You have to sit with them, you have to be with them, you have to laugh with them, you have to go out and have a drink every once in a while. It’s very important to get to know them.”
Eisenlau is baffled by people who work remotely, because it’s too hard to do this very thing.
“Being with your team and being connected to your team yields the best success,” he says.
If you’re not sure how to start building relationships with people, start with a basic question.
“I’ll often start with what they’re working on,” he says. “Are you comfortable doing what you’re doing? Are you heading in a direction with your career that you want to go in?”
These kinds of career questions can lead to learning if they’re satisfied or not in their current role, but they also open the door for more personal questions as you build that trust.
“I don’t think you should, as leaders, ever underestimate the importance of the environment that you work in,” he says. “Recognize people. Be kind to people and recognize them and talk to them. Make them feel like they’re part of the whole. People get disenfranchised really easily when they just don’t feel like they’re part of the team.”
Beyond that, the last part of building trust is to make sure you’re sharing information with your employees.
“You need to reveal information — that’s one thing I’m learning as a leader,” he says. “Transparency of thoughts and ideas is very important. People want to know. People want information. This is an information-based world. You will not get people to trust you if you are hoarding information and not being honest about the information. I don’t care if it’s good news or bad news — put it out there.”
It’s also important to put it out there in a timely manner and not after the rumor mills have already begun to spin.
“Put it out there quickly and make sure you have your facts straight,” Eisenlau says. “People admire you for that, and they trust you for that as long as you’re clear and honest. It’s the people who hold information at bay and don’t disclose it — that’s where the trust, certainly in a creative environment, really starts to break down.”
This is particularly important if your work force is composed of younger people, as the new generation of workers wants to know information.
“People want information, and they want to know what’s going on,” he says. “They want it accurate, and they want it quickly, so if you’re running around hoarding information or you don’t have all your facts straight or you’re too fearful to put that information out there, that’s not a good success story.”
