Early in your career, you know the details of everything you’re working on. You have to, because you are generally responsible for those details. That is the core of being a frontline worker. You are carrying out key tasks that are central to the work of your organization. You may not have the full perspective on why the work is being done the way it is, but you do know a lot of details about what is happening.

The cost of this elevated perch is that you are further from the details of how things are being accomplished. You are not having the same kind of day-to-day interactions with the frontline work that you did earlier in your career. As a result, you may not be aware of important elements that might be crucial for strategic decision-making.

In order to have the detail you need to be effective in your leadership role, you need to have regular conversations with those people who are responsible for the details you don’t know, and you need to become a really good questioner and listener.

LET OTHER PEOPLE TALK

Promotions come with additional responsibility, but they also come along with more prestige and status as well. It is tempting to use these roles as an excuse to dominate the meetings you’re in by sharing your opinions and beliefs early and often.

There is certainly some need to share your thoughts on strategy with others, but great leaders let other people talk—a lot.

Many employees excel in hybrid or even fully remote work settings, outperforming expectations to deliver outstanding results. Others in the same roles struggle to work effectively outside the office, even if they have the same home office arrangements and are deemed equally talented by their managers.

Having helped 21 organizations figure out successful hybrid work arrangements and written a book on the topic, I can confidently state that employee personality differences represent one important driver of these seemingly random performance differences. My consulting clients found that by matching hybrid work arrangements to the relevant personality traits of their workers, they can optimize employee performance, resulting in a win-win for everyone involved.

MEASURING EMPLOYEE PERSONALITY

In assessing personality, it’s vital to use the right measurements. Avoid using tests that research shows poorly predict job performance despite their popularity, such as DiSC and MBTI. As the Harvard Business Review reports, “due to limited predictive validity, low test-retest reliability, lack of norming and an internal consistency (lie detector) measure, etc.,” they fail to predict job performance effectively.

Most executive teams engage in annual strategic planning sessions focused on improving their business the following year, but trust is rarely on the agenda. It’s a shame, because in many cases, the key to success lies not in creating an entirely new strategy, but in dismantling barriers to trust within a given organization.

As an executive leadership coach, I’ve spent over a decade coaching leaders on how to build trust in themselves, with others, and throughout their organization.

So what are the barriers to trust, and how can we dismantle them? Here are five of the most common trust issues I see in companies and what high-trust organizations do differently.

BARRIER #1: THE EXECUTIVE TEAM LACKS TRANSPARENCY

When leaders don’t explain the decisions they make, they leave room for employees to fill in the gaps themselves. Unfortunately, it is human nature to fill those gaps with fear. This can lead to a lack of trust.

A lack of transparency recently cost a client of mine some of its top talent. The executive team announced changes to the bonus structure for their general managers without explaining the reason and timeline. Managers left the call wondering what drove the decision, whether it was permanent, and how it would affect their overall pay. A week later, I was speaking to one of their biggest competitors when an executive told me three of that organization’s top restaurant managers applied with them just that week.

High-trust organizations understand that trust is valuable and are therefore restlessly committed to communicating the “why” behind decisions. High-trust organizations know that’s how they create clarity and gain buy-in. High-trust organizations refuse to leave people second-guessing.