When you start your business and get it up and rolling, you may find yourself needing a little help to make it thrive. Building a team is all about finding people with the right skillset and shared perspectives to fill the labor gaps in your business. However, your job as a leader doesn’t end there. You have to keep your team motivated, productive, and engaged, which means that you need their trust. Break that trust and you can easily lose them. Here, we’re going to look at the common mistakes that can lead to that issue and what you can do to prevent or fix them.
Avoiding Accountability
As the boss, it is important ot understand the buck stops with you. If you deflect blame or leave your team to assume the blame by disappearing from the conversation when things go wrong, it will cause trust to collapse. Many make the mistake of assuming authority but avoiding accountability. Admitting a mistake doesn’t weaken your authority; it strengthens your credibility. If you expect your team to be accountable, you must lead by example. Create a culture where your team is able and willing to pull you up on your mistakes, and you show that you’re able to learn from them just as you expect them to learn from their own.
Not Paying Them Reliably
One of the most easily preventable mistakes, but one that a lot of employees make, costing them the trust of their team. Not being able to pay them consistently on time signals disorganization and a lack of respect, but it also is more likely to make them think that the company is plagued by financial instability, which may cause them to start looking for other places of employment. Missing a deadline with pay even once can have profound impacts on your employees’ lives, so using software like a payslip generator to automate and make the process easier can be very valuable indeed. Timely, accurate pay reinforces your reliability as a leader. It shows your team that you consider them a priority, which is vital for their sense of worth in the workplace.
Micromanagement
If you want your employees to trust you, you have to show that you trust them, as well, and micromanaging them can undermine the message more easily than just about anything. Micromanagement stifles creativity, slows productivity, and breeds resentment. It signals a lack of faith in your team’s abilities, leading to a toxic loop of employees disengaging because they expect you to pick them up on every little detail, which in turn may make you more likely to do so. Regular check-ins are fine, and you can use productivity tools to keep an eye on the process of projects and what each employee has done for the day, so you don’t have to constantly pester them.
Maintaining the trust of your team is vital if you want to be able to trust them to help you grow your business. Keep that in mind and put the right systems in place to maintain their needs.
*This article was contributed and now written by JHW.
0 Comments