Image: SAP Image Library
A leader becomes a key factor during changing times, driving organizations, and creating a sense of safety across their teams. A trusted leader creates a collaborative environment where people generate value sustaining the corporate strategy and making the work environment creative, supportive, and transparent.
A leader who acknowledges their weakness and development needs become closer to their team and creates a sense of flatness, where the appointed person supports the individual contribution and drives their team to accomplish the unit´s goals via collaborative decision-making. When the people in their team feel that a leader is closer to them with needs, aspirations, and challenges, they are open to sharing their requirements and then creating a strong and trustworthy relationship. Hence, getting closer to the team´s needs supports individual growth and improves confidence in individual members, a trusted leader is aware of their team´s feelings, needs, and dreams. Trust is the basis of leadership, and keep consistency about values behaviors, and performance.
"Getting closer to the team´s needs supports individual growth and improves confidence in individual members."
A trusted leader is consistent with their actions, supporting their reliability and predictability, hence the team becomes comfortable when their leader´s decision-making, establishes a sense of safety and consistency. The persons are prone to perform better where their work environments are healthy and feeling less internal pressures support a high performing activities, at the same time decreases the probability of stress-related sickness, whose consequences could be mental or physical illness, in the long run a healthy environment also produces company benefits in terms of productivity and people´s attainment, reflected on less rotation and better work-life balance positioning in the industry.
Leadership growth shall be observed as a process, where learning opportunities are available from different sources, it is fundamental to align the company expectations, the values and behaviors, and expected performance. Leadership awareness becomes fundamental to skill up trustability, especially when challenging situations that measure and snapshot a manager´s behavior. Since each action over the team creates individual career fingerprints, it is important to be consistent with all team members, avoiding preferences or differential reactions because a manager could create a distorted perception about the abilities of each person in their team.
Besides self-awareness, self-regulation becomes a natural consequence, where the leader´s adaptability to different situations produces reactions that require wearing the other´s shoes to avoid over-reactions. When a manager becomes exposed to the same situation and their reaction does not improve, their lead capabilities decrease and negatively affect the people´s interactions. Therefore, evolving conscious about the circumstances and improving the reactions, creates a sense of trust in the teams and stakeholders, for course acknowledging errors and being transparent about the corrective actions makes a leader closer to the team.
Building trust requires a bi-directional action, where the leader and their team members must be transparent, coherent, and trustable about their activities and actions. This combination supports the corporate strategy and ultimately contributes to the team´s performance, which is always perceived as a puzzle where everyone contributes to the common results, without higher weight and the leader is the person in charge of presenting those results as the unity for their team and not as a personal result while the leader is being accountable, each person is responsible for their contribution.
A trustworthy leader is a person who is always present, especially when there are issues or failures, passing the failure token to the team shall not happen. In difficult times the leader is the visible face of the team, hence confronting the situation and assuming responsibility is the natural action, without avoiding the confrontation, a corrective plan must be proposed, and the corresponding action to improve the situation. Recognizing achievements are public actions while addressing errors are private discussions with their team members.
Building trust requires an additional effort, while a manager holds several responsibilities, among those is the commitment to improve their team´s cohesion and sense of belonging, including diversity and inclusion. The natural process requires practice, observation, and continuous learning, where the leader´s awareness about their needs drives the learning path to set up specific skills development.
A leader who allows open communication and becomes approachable creates trust among their team, peers, customers, and stakeholders. While acting with integrity, the actions and performance reflect the company's values and behaviors. An empathic leader allows open communication with a strong sense of authenticity, avoiding despaired behaviors with upper management, pairs, and teams. A trustable leader openly communicates the expectations creating a sense of task ownership and the expected future accomplishments across their team members.
Nurturing an organic feedback process increases performance management while addressing requirements to achieve small victories, a leader promotes a trusted and consistent environment, where the team openly shares their toughs and challenges. The result of an organic feedback process becomes the foundation of realistic improvement plans with detailed and measurable actions in the short term.
A leader´s commitment makes people better and helps them develop further abilities required to accomplish their tasks via appropriate delegation and autonomy development through an accountable decision-making process. And, to help them to prepare for the next career movement. The coaching process requires empathy and a common understanding of the expectations, capabilities, and development willingness. A trusted leader takes care of the people and team, understanding their limitations and how each person in the group complements the requirements to make it successful.
Finally, to create a competitive company a trustworthy leader creates an appropriate environment to grow their team supported by transparency and accountability, where a shared vision nurtures continuous improvement to support personal growth while supporting organizational goals.
- SAP Managed Tags: