Trust is essential to leadership. Without it, it would be difficult to work with others, having no assurance that they would keep their word. It is important to make sure that the people you put your trust in are trustworthy, but sometimes, past hurts and disappointments can cause you to become distrusting of everyone. If left unresolved, trust issues can damage your leadership.
While most leaders know that they have to gain the trust of their team, the value of trusting others is often overlooked. Offering trust to others may feel difficult and make you feel vulnerable at first. However, overcoming that initial discomfort can help you grow and build deeper relationships, and is an important step in getting to know and understand your team, which is necessary to be an effective leader.
Here are four reasons why distrusting others can hurt your leadership.
Isolates you.
When you refuse to trust, you create an emotional barrier between yourself and others. Always doubting and disbelieving your team makes it difficult to collaborate with them. They’ll be left to wonder why you don’t deem them worthy of your trust, and eventually, distance themselves from you.
Isolation is a major obstacle to leadership. When you separate yourself from others and don’t interact with them, you become unaware of what is happening within your team. You’re more likely to be out of touch with their needs, which leads to poor decision making. Learning to trust others allows you and your team to have open communication so that you can make decisions in their best interest.
Destroys unity.
Distrust can hurt your team’s group dynamic. People are responsible for following through with their word on the basis of trust; without it, your team will have no internal accountability and no basis for a working relationship. When you don’t trust others, you may be inclined to slander or gossip about them, which is harmful to individuals and the group. A team that distrusts each other is easily susceptible to divisions and can fall apart unless trust is established. When others know that you already don’t trust them, what difference would it make if they don’t follow through with their promises?
Leads to micromanaging.
You might find yourself feeling that your team can’t finish their work correctly on their own, causing you to obsessively monitor them or consistently redo their tasks. Micromanaging like this will chip away at your relationships over time. It gives the impression that you doubt your team’s work is adequate, leading them to have a lack of confidence in themselves and decrease their efforts. After a while, they may lose their trust in you, too.
Micromanaging also takes a toll on you. When you don’t trust others, you may struggle to delegate tasks and feel like you have to do everything yourself. As a result, you might take on others’ work and find yourself experiencing stress and resentment, even if you initially chose to do the extra work. Learning to trust your team to handle their own responsibilities can save you the stress of an excessive workload and the anxiety of feeling responsible for everyone else.
Alters your team’s self-perception.
You’ve most likely gained your team’s trust as a leader, but it must go both ways. Think of the people who have believed in you and how much they have positively impacted you. Similarly, your team needs to have someone who believes in them and trusts them, not someone who doubts them.
Without encouragement from others, it can be easy to have a lack of confidence and feel unable to do what’s required of you. When people perceive that they aren’t trusted to meet their requirements, they may lose trust in themselves and start to give up.
People will act the way you consistently treat them. Distrusting others reinforces untrustworthy traits, like dishonesty, divisiveness, and unreliability. If you want them to act with honesty, reliability, and loyalty, then show them that you trust them. They will have confidence and a stronger drive to be the best version of themselves and achieve better results. You will be amazed at how building relationships on mutual trust benefits your leadership.