When a highly effective leader has trust with their people, that is when changes for the better can be made.

Influence is leadership, and leadership is influence. Trust is the key to how effective a highly effective leader really is. To increase your influence with your people, then you must firstly increase your level of trust with them.

1. Influence

The more influence you have with your people then the more positive impact you will have them. The more positive impact you have then the closer you will be to becoming a highly effective leader, but first you need that trust. Trust is the foundation of leadership.

Most managers, especially the managers I have worked with do not even think about building trust with their people. They don’t feel they have the time to build trust and build a relationship with each team member they are responsible for.

So, to get the results they need from their people they use their authority, they use the position they have as manager, and they use the power they have as manager.

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But, to increase your positive influence with your people, you need to build a relationship with each of them, and there must be trust within that relationship.

2. Trust

If you want to grow from a manager into a highly effective leader, then you need to learn how to build trust with people.

Building trust is a skill and you must deliberately work on yourself every day to build trust in all the relationships you have, especially with the people you are responsible for as a manager.

When you have trust with your people, they will be far more likely to help you achieve the results you want and achieve the vision & mission you have for the team. If you don’t have trust, then your influence will be negative and fake.

Would you prefer your people to follow you because they want to, and go the extra mile for you, themselves and the team? Or would you prefer your people to only follow you because they have to, and do the bare minimum required to get a job done every day? I think I know the answer to this.

For you to start building trust with your people then you need understand that the foundation of trust is intention. How you feel is what intention is all about. You have feelings, I have feelings, your team, your organisation, the whole world has feelings.

When you first met your team and your work colleagues, subconsciously you will have wanted to know what their intent was when they came near you. We all do this, and sometimes we do it consciously, especially when we meet people who look intimidating.

3. Your Intentions

We think to ourselves, “does this person want to hurt me or cause me any harm?” We do this very quickly, and we know what a person’s intent is. So, we don’t even realise we have had these thoughts a lot of the time.

But if we know that the person’s intent is to hurt us, then we prepare ourselves for that, and if we know that the person’s intent isn’t to hurt us then we know that the extra preparation isn’t required.

When you know you are physically safe, and the person doesn’t want to hurt you, you can move on and find out what their next level of intent is.

Does this person want to manipulate you or motivate you? If they want to motivate you, then their intention is to benefit themselves, but they also want you to benefit also. If they want to manipulate you, then their intention is to benefit themselves only.

When people do want to help you through manipulation, it is because they want to get something out of helping you. So, it is about them, not you. The way you know this is that you can feel it within yourself.

If you feel within yourself that the person has a positive attitude towards you, and they have your best interests at heart then you can start to build a relationship with that person. This is the same when you start to lead a new team of people.

If you feel within yourself that that the person has a negative attitude towards and is trying to manipulate you for their own benefit, then that is where you must end the relationship. If this is one of your people, then you must address this with them immediately.

If this is your boss (I have been manipulated by my boss before), then really you should leave your job and move on to something better. But it is not as easy as that, and most people will live with their boss manipulating them, I was one of those people.

So, what I did was I started to perform worse in my role, as did my colleagues who were also being manipulated because this was the easier thing to do.

Eventually the bosses who are deliberately manipulating their team for their own benefit will start to lose the most talented and the best performers. The people who are developing themselves and have more options to choose from are the ones who will move on to something better.

So, the bosses who lose their best performers will be left with the team members who don’t perform at the same level. They are left with the team members who come to work, do as little work as possible just to get the job done so they get paid, and then go home on time.

They don’t have any team members who want to go the extra mile and do more than is expected because of their manipulation. So, this leads to a toxic work culture, micromanagement and frustration from everyone on the team.

Right now, thinking about the boss you work with, do you feel their intentions are to motivate you or manipulate you? If you feel that your boss wants to you to serve them every day, they look down on you and talk to you as if they are above you, then I am sure you feel manipulated by him/her.

If you feel that your boss is in their position to serve you and the rest of his/her team with compassion, empowers you, they look at you and talk to you like you’re on the same level, then I am sure you feel motivated.

4. Your Responsibility

With the team you have responsibility for right now, how do they feel with you as their manager?

By applying the leadership principles and experiences that I am sharing in my articles, it won’t be difficult for you to start getting noticed by others within your organisation. You will start to see and feel your own and your team’s performance improve.

What you are learning will help you to improve how you serve your team. What you are learning will help you to grow into a highly effective leader and associate with other highly effective leaders who will recognise you as one of them.

What you are learning will help you in building new relationships and strengthening the current relationships you have right now with the right people. By doing this you will build trust with the right people, especially your people.

Since I started my website highlyeffectiveleader.com in January 2020, writing articles, creating content for LinkedIn and YouTube and most of all self-publishing my books from January 2021, I have been sharing many stories about building trust, developing our character, and being deliberate in everything we do for others.

The feedback I have received from people who have engaged with my content and my books has been such a privilege to me, especially when I have been asked by others to speak at their online events.

In 2023 I was speaking at an online event, and my main topic was building trust, and that trust is the tread that goes through every team in every industry in the world. That is the most common thing that every great team has in common…trust.

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This is the thing that turns good teams into great teams. Then from great teams into highly effective teams. So, what can you do to make your team trust you?

One of the things I mentioned during this speech was to share your weaknesses with your team and have humility. How would you feel if your boss shared his/her weaknesses with you? A highly effective leader with humility would be happy to do this, but a manager with a lot of ego will not.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, you already know your boss’s weaknesses, I know I knew the weaknesses of every boss I had even if they didn’t tell me.

However, if you were to share with your team your weaknesses (which they already know), it will show them that you know your own weaknesses too, and you want to develop them. If you start to do this, then trust will build. If you don’t do this then trust will start to reduce.

When you build trust with your people, your strengths will help them to feel better. If you don’t build trust your people, your strengths will feel like threats to them.

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,

Tom (Lead, Grow, Influence)