How to make employees feel trusted and empowered

Trust will be critical to unlocking the productivity across our organisations. With time and attention, we can create trusting environments allowing everyone to feel fairly treated and appreciated, says Amrit Sandhar

We’ve all felt the emotions that are evoked when we trust someone, but this shared understanding of the emotions we experience, can often cloud how we define the causes, creating an assumption that we have a shared definition of trust itself. Whilst we all know what trust feels like, how can we be sure we’re describing the same thing?

According to Kent Grayson, faculty coordinator of The Trust Project of Northwestern University, trust is made up of three components: honesty, benevolence and competency.  Honesty tends to be the first thing many of us look for when deciding whether we can trust someone. When we sense someone is lying, it makes us question their motives; why are they lying? This behaviour doesn’t make us feel secure with these individuals, which is a critical element of trust. Through his research into Oxytocin, Paul Zak identified that when we find commonalities and relatedness in others, it causes the release of oxytocin, which he called the empathy hormone. When oxytocin is released, this removes the natural wariness we have towards strangers who we perceive as potential threats. The best relationships we have are often centred around a deep understanding of each other, shared interests, or shared values and beliefs, saving valuable mental energy in deciding if someone poses a threat.

Trusting competence

But while honesty and benevolence might seem obvious in shaping how much we trust others; competency isn’t always as easy to deal with. There may be people we trust implicitly as individuals in terms of their nature and personality – not to lie to us or have any ill-intentions towards us. That doesn’t always mean we are confident in their abilities. This can be the cause of many managers and leaders not acting in addressing poor performance because as a person, someone can be caring, kind, well-intentioned, but just not competent in their role. It makes having challenging conversations that much harder.

Consider the other side of the spectrum; the relationships with trusted individuals, where honesty, benevolence and competency are beyond any doubt. We want to work with people we can trust and when we come across them, it allows us to feel secure with them, willing to let go and empower them to undertake some of the most complex tasks we might be grappling with. In a world where creativity and innovation are critical, it’s important that we are constantly evolving our skills and approach. This means that for those who are extremely competent in their roles, for whom we have huge amounts of trust in their character (their honesty and benevolence), that very competence may not be enough over time, to ensure we are delivering the very best for our organisations. At some point, unless the individual goes off to learn new skills or knowledge, there will come a point where the competency may be less relevant. Does this mean we suddenly mistrust that same individual? Far from it. Whilst the three dimensions of trust as outlined by Grayson might seem equivalent in importance, the ability to trust someone’s character is paramount.  

Reframing competence

We often hear phrases such as ‘recruit for attitude, the rest we can teach them’. As soon as we question someone’s honesty or benevolence, it prevents us from being able to trust them at all. This doesn’t mean we cannot be professional and recognise their competence, but it means we’re likely to reframe that competence, looking for underlying motives. We might perceive short-term competence as a tactic which isn’t sustainable because we don’t trust them!

Paul Zak went on to share eight management behaviours that drive trust, including providing autonomy. Empowering employees to make decisions, and to decide how best to undertake their work, requires clarity of the task, why it’s important, the standards required, and by when. When we have absolute faith in someone, in their character and competence, there is a risk that firstly we overly rely on them, after all, it’s sometimes hard to find people who can get things done in a world of ever-increasing demands. Secondly, there’s a risk that we stop spending time with them, after all, it’s not like they need help or support, and if they did, they’re competent enough to ask for it. Some of the most trusted employees can suffer from a lack of support or attention because they are competent and herein lies the challenge.

Where a manager sees a trusted individual – a safe pair of hands, it’s easy to see this from the employees’ perspective as being taken advantage of – constantly targeting them with the work as opposed to sharing it equally with others. The manager may be satisfied, knowing whatever needs completing will be to the standards required and within the deadlines set, the exact opposite may be true of the employee, who will be questioning the fairness of why they’re doing all the work. Employees in this situation may feel taken advantage of, and resentful that their competence and hard work has been unfairly ‘rewarded’ by extra work for the same pay as other team members.

Building a back up

Then there’s the additional challenge of when trust breaks down – how do managers go about building this back up? If we begin questioning someone’s character – their honesty and benevolence, especially if there have been repeated examples that have reinforced this view, it’s unlikely that we can rebuild that trust quickly, if at all. This doesn’t mean there’s no place for a professional relationship, but it will impact on working dynamics, with individuals considering and being overly cautious with how much they can share and be open with others they mistrust.

Questioning someone’s competence might sound like it would create an unpleasant place to work but consider those individuals with a vast amount of experience. We should be challenging them to strive to do better, to constantly improve. Reviewing competence in a safe and supportive environment should be a normal aspect of work overtime. An organisation that creates a psychologically safe space allowing people to have honest conversations about their competence, can help focus on effective personal development plans, minimising disruption with people having to ‘fake it’ until they’re found out. Creating a growth mindset where learning is a core part of the culture, can help towards constantly improving the competency of the organisation, allowing it to evolve and innovate.

Finally, how about the many hybrid or remote workers – how do they get to feel trusted and empowered when trust is built on relatedness, commonality, honesty, benevolence, and competence, when having little contact with the rest of the team and manager? And then of course you may have people who work remotely who may experience ‘impostor syndrome’ because they have less regular check ins and may put any good results down to chance or luck, rather than their own efforts. Impostor syndrome is more common than we might think, with an estimated 70% of people experiencing this at some point in their lives. Those employees who do not believe in their own abilities, may believe they do not deserve to be trusted and/ or are not qualified for the positions they are in. This is where a great relationship of trust between managers and employees will help overcome these feelings of inadequacy. By recognising individuals’ contributions and using a coaching approach, managers can support employees, showing them the value they add to the organisation, whilst also helping them to recognise and overcome negative internal dialogues.

How then do we build trust?

This comes down to spending quality time with individuals, where we can get to know them, find areas of interest, allowing for relatedness, and where we can have honest conversations about the workload, how fairly it’s distributed, and how we support their development in areas where they want to improve their competence. This approach will mean we’re consistently receiving feedback about how those individuals we trust, feel about their workload – do they feel they are being taken advantage of, or are they happy with the challenge. Opportunities to have quality reviews allowing employees to focus on the key challenges, gaining clarity of what needs to be completed, and allowing for autonomy and empowerment, for the individual to decide how best to make it happen, with their skills and experiences, are essential. After all, it makes no sense to recruit talented individuals with huge amounts of experience, to then go on to tell them how to do their jobs.

Trust requires time – often our biggest enemy at work. Yet investing time in getting to know people, can help put in place the foundations of great relationships, understanding people’s character and competence. It’s not an accident that the people we spend the most amount of time with, happen to be those we tend to trust the most. Trust will be critical to unlocking the productivity across our organisations. With time and attention, we can create trusting environments allowing everyone to feel fairly treated and appreciated.