If you want to build strong relationships and trust with your team, then you must develop yours and your team’s character.
You cannot influence your team to become better people, more productive, be inspired, be motivated, or trust you if you have a weak character. Without the trust of your team, you will be seen as a manipulator, not a motivator.
If you want amazing things to happen for you, your team and your organisation, then your influence needs to be on the increase every single day. You need to keep up the influence momentum every day. Momentum is a leader’s best friend. Stagnation is a leader’s worst enemy.
However, you cannot do this on your own. You will need the help of your team, and the support from your senior leaders too. So, to receive the support you need from your senior leaders, you must increase your influence with them.
1. Beyond Increasing Your Own Influence
When you have learned to increase your influence, it will then be your responsibility to teach every person on your team to do the same. By having a team who know how to increase their influence, will automatically increase your influence through them and with others throughout the organisation.
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Learning the correct leadership principles will enable you to increase your influence with anyone, including your senior leaders, even those at the very top of the organisation.
Highly effective leaders understand how critical increasing their influence is. Influencing and helping team members to buy-in to them, trust them, and follow them is so important to the success of the team and the organisation.
The important word I just mentioned….trust. Trust is the foundation of leadership and influence. If your people do not trust you, they will not follow you because they want to. They will only follow you because they have to, and that is not a good place to be in.
As highly effective leaders, we need to accept the responsibility of the team. It is up to us to deliver the results that our senior leaders want. Without the team trusting each other, and especially the leader, then they are not going to produce the results. Low performing leaders will avoid the responsibility of the team.
Low performing leaders who avoid responsibility for their team and the teams results, create distrust with the team and the organisation. A low performing leader’s influence decreases by the day when they are not trusted. Are you willing to accept the responsibility for your team, and the team’s results?
What you are learning from this article and my other articles will help you begin building new relationships with others, and also to make your current relationships that you have with your team, organisation, friends, and family to be stronger.
If you want the results within your team to improve, and continuously improve, then you must gain the trust from your team as soon as possible.
2. Building Relationships
When building relationships with others outside of your team, treat is a great opportunity to plan for the future. You may want to ask one of your colleagues in a different team to join your team.
So, when you have already done the work by building a relationship with this person, you will already have gained their trust when they start with you. This will make the process a lot easier and smoother.
When I was engineering technical manager, it took me a good while to start building trust with the team because I didn’t make it a priority right from the start. I should have went to every single person within the big team that we had, and built a relationship with them all.
Not just the select few. That was a mistake. Don’t make the same mistake as I did. Build and relationships and create trust with your team as soon as possible. Make it a priority of yours.
When trying to build trust as soon as you can with your team, look at it as a two way street. The more work you put in to building relationships and building trust, the stronger your relationships will become, and the more trust you will receive. You must give to receive. You cannot expect to receive without giving.
Much like when you go the gym. You cannot get into shape if you don’t work out and put the effort in. If you don’t put the effort in to build trust, you will not be trusted.
3. Putting The Effort In
When you put the effort in to build strong relationships, and build trust, your influence will automatically increase. It is exactly the same process with every single person you meet or come into contact with.
Including your senior leaders. You must first make the effort with your senior leaders to build trust. Don’t expect or wait for them. The longer you leave it, the harder it will be to build trust.
As you are increasing your influence and building trust, you will come across people who want to push you down. This happens in all walks of life. They may say something to one of your team members or colleagues that will automatically create distrust.
However, when this happens you will need to build on that relationship again until you erase the distrust, and create trust again. I have come across these people, and it is just out of jealousy that they do this. So take it as a compliment.
You will also come across people in your teams, or in the organisation who have been encouraged to be resistant in their careers. They resist the senior leaders, they resist change, and when you become their leader they will resist you.
4. Working With Resistant People
When I have worked with these people, it is much, much harder to build a strong relationship and trust with them. However, you must not give up. It will be a challenge and an obstacle, and you must overcome that obstacle to keep your influence increasing.
Other leaders within the organisation may say things about you to your team that may cause distrust, because they are weak and resist anything new to happen within their organisation.
They resist change, and they believe that talking you down will stop any positive change from happening. This has happened to me a few times. So, before I even started I was already distrusted.
Again, you will need to work a lot harder to build relationships and trust when this happens. It may sound unfair, but it’s reality. You must take the higher ground, and rise above those weak leaders by becoming a highly effective leader. You must become the leader that you want to see and who your teams want to follow.
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I found it extremely hard work to turn distrusting me into trusting me. But, I didn’t give up and I was able to do it with the people I put the most effort into. If you want the team to produce successful results, then building trust must be the priority, and you must do it as soon as you can.
Whenever you start leading a new team, they will initially have a skeptical mindset about you. That is just natural, you probably had the same mindset when you met your new leaders. They want to find out if you respect them, if you can help them, and most of call if they can trust you.
It will be up to you to change their mindset and prove to them that you do respect them, you can help them, and that they can trust you. How are you going to give them that proof?
If you want to implement a change, you must be trustworthy. You cannot change anything without having the trust of your people.
I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.
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All the best,
Hello Tom,
I so agree with you. Trust, efforts in building relationships…are of the utmost importance. And you gave some great advice that I’ll implement myself.
Thank you!
Hi Tanya,
Thank you for your comment. I’m so pleased that you agree with the article.
You are right, to build relationships with people then we must trust each other, and work hard on building that trust.
Keep returning, keep engaging and keep leading.
All the best,
Tom
Hi Tom,
Great article about the importance of trust!
This must be gained first in every kind of relationship, not only on the working floor.
I also encounter a lot resistance on the working floor. It’s not always easy to break through that.
Can you tell something more about how you worked with resistant people and what made them gain trust in you?
Thanks a lot!
Catherine.
Hi Catherine,
Thank you for your comment. I’m really happy that you found the article helpful.
Thank you for sharing your experience of feeling resistance.
Great question. How I gained trust with people who were resistant with me was to just involve them in all our decisions/changes. They were the ones who really made the decisions, and they were the ones who wanted the changes we implemented. It wasn’t the top leaders wanting these changes, it was the people I worked with on the shop floor. When they feel heard and listened to, the resistance breaks down and they are happy to be involved. We just needed to show them that we cared. We needed to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
Thank you for your question and all the best,
Tom
Hi Tom,
It is a very good article. I totally agree that a highly effective leader is someone who wants to build trust within and without his team. There are not many leaders who are willing to accept the responsibility of the team. When something goes wrong, many so-called “leaders” will find someone in the team to bear the responsibility. That’s the kind of “leader” who I will not trust forever.
Therefore, you’re right. Those who are willing to accept responsibility and build a good relationship with others will be a highly effective leader. And that’s the kind of leader who I will trust and willing to work with.
All the best,
Alex
Hi Alex,
Thank you for your comment. I’m so pleased that you found the article valuable.
You are right, there are not many leaders who want to take responsibility for their team. But, I want to help leaders change that way of thinking and I want to help them to become highly effective leaders.
Keep returning, keep engaging and keep leading.
All the best,
Tom
I love your articles Tom, as every single of them can be applied on so much more than just work. Whatever group of people you can think of-friends, relatives, various communities – they all go with your thoughts and advices.
Yet, this one reminds me of a working environment case from my past.
Back in my home country, we lived through some very difficult times, with the currency hyper-inflating, so, whoever actually had a paid job at those times, absolutely wanted to keep it at all costs.
We worked in teams of 11 people and our success or failure influenced our wages. We had a lovely team-leader, a middle aged woman, who we all considered a bit like our Mom.
One day, we had a visit from the senior leadership, a big shot, you’d say today. We were sitting in a conference room with four other teams, listening how this big shot talks and talks disparagingly, downplaying everything we’ve done lately.
We were pretty astonished, as we’ve worked our butts off to bring some results which we considered very good, given the circumstances in the country.
Still, it seemed not to be enough and he even mentioned that anyone not satisfied with his words is free to leave the job. We couldn’t believe our ears.
Our team-leader, our “Mom” quietly rose up from the chair and said; Let’s go, kids. And we all did. We knew we are not getting the next salary, but, still we all followed her through the exit. That’s how much we trusted her!
She quickly partnered with a small company who asked her many times before to become their partner in business. This time she accepted on condition that she can take us all to work there. Needless to say, we all ended up there, much respected, partly because of our leader.
I hope this also gives a good example of the importance of trust which you wonderfully described above.
Thank you!
Hi Minaher,
Thank you for your amazing comment and your kind words. I’m so pleased that this article really resonated with you.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences of increasing influence with trust. It sounds like your Team Leader “Mom” was an inspirational leader and knew how to positively increase her influence and build trust with you.
I’m pretty sure that people who visit this article will take so much value from your story, and I am truly grateful for that.
You really are an inspiration.
All the best,
Tom
Phew, especially point 4: I thought it was really hard to work with resistant people. And I must say, when I was younger, I didn’t have enough patience to try to look at things from their way. This might have build more trust between us.
Great stuff, Tom, thanks!
Hi Hannie,
Thank you for your comment. It’s great that you found the article helpful.
Thank you for sharing your experiences when you were younger and your patience. I was pretty similar when I was younger, but it’s something that we have to work on.
Keep returning, keep engaging and keep leading.
All the best,
Tom
Hi Tom,
That is a very insightful piece of content. I also believe that building relationships is important even though I find it hard to build relationships with people that I don’t like or that I don’t care about. It’s surely something I need to work on.
Hi Asen,
Thank you for your comment. I’m pleased that you found the article insightful.
It’s great that you want to work on building relationships with people. If you need any help on building these relationships then please let me know.
All the best,
Tom
Hi Tom,
So many leaders would benefit from the advice here. Most of the times , leaders are not trustworthy. And if we don’t trust our leader, the dynamic of our work changes completely.
You are always giving the best advice on how to be a great leader. I wish everyone who is in a managerial role will read your articles.
Kind regards,
Yoana
Hi Yoana,
Thank you for your comment and your kind words. It’s great that you find the article valuable.
I really hope lots of managers read my articles too. I want to help them to become highly effective leaders so that they can help other highly effective leaders.
Keep returning, keep engaging and keep leading.
All the best,
Tom
Great article on Increase Your Influence With Trust. I agree you need to build trust in people and you can’t change anything without the trust of your people. Please keep sharing these helpful articles for everyday challenges when dealing with people. I’m going to implement today!!
Hi Alyse,
Thank you for your comment. I’m so pleased that you found the article helpful.
I agree that we need to build trust with others especially if we want to influence them. I will definitely keep sharing these articles for you and others.
Keep returning, keep engaging and keep leading.
All the best,
Tom