Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

The Key to Trust in the C-Suite: Building Psychological Safety

Trust is the goal in any relationship, and it is the emotional capital sought after by business leaders. We cannot achieve much without it. It is hard to build, easy to lose, and once lost, hard to regain.

To build and sustain trust, organizational psychologists tell us, there must be psychological safety. This means freedom to speak one’s truth responsibly without fear of retribution. The NASA investigation of the Columbia crash found that a key reason for the failure was the fear scientists had to tell their truth to top leadership; it had disastrous consequences.

How do we create safety?

For individual leaders, it means self-awareness about how leadership behaviors impact others—trust or fear? It’s an awareness of one’s leadership style and philosophy, and how they affect the motivation of others.

For senior teams, safety requires confidentiality, candor, collaboration, mutual respect, and supporting each other, especially in adversity.

For organizations, it means an ownership strategy that engages the workforce, transparency and openness, rewarding team accomplishments, and recognizing the value and gifts of every individual.

The goal is to replace fear with trust as the organizational culture. The benefits will be found in increased morale, productivity, innovation, speed, agility, pride in the workplace, value to the customer, and sustained high performance.

Creating a trust-based workplace is not about leadership training, habits, or tools. It is a commitment from the inside out. It’s not always easy, but the view from the mountaintop is worth the climb.

I hope you have enjoyed this next sneak peak into our second book. If this brief look behind the door has been helpful, follow this link to order both of our books online.