MBA Application Leadership Qualities - Trust

This is part of our Leadership series that emphasis qualities that should be highlighted for your MBA Application. Today we will focus on ‘Trust’, a key quality that allows you to influence your team members.

If you have read books on leadership that came out during the 50s and 60s, it often focused on body language, tone of voice and other external factors that you can easily control. It no longer works to focus just on them, instead an inside-out approach works better.

So how do you build trust?

1) Maintain Consistency of Standards

This is the most important quality. The consistency of standards should not just be limited to what you apply for your team members but also for you. If you are never on time in any meeting, you don’t have the authority to ask someone in your team to be on time. Another common conflict seen in a team is difference in standards applied to close friends and other team members. Friendship is good for maintaining a good morale in a team but when it comes to measuring performance and taking action, the standards should be clear and applied consistently for everyone. When you are partial in implementing the performance standards, the trust in your leadership abilities drop drastically.

2) Competence

A leader cannot be good at every functional skill but there should be at least 1 or 2 skills that the leader is competent. If a leader had a background in marketing, the ability to guide the team when required should be evident for the team members. If all that a leader does is planning and resource allocation, then the team might respect the leader’s managerial skills but they will not trust the leader, completely.

3) Be Trusting

Often forgotten aspect of gaining trust is giving trust. What you give, you will earn it many folds in return. When a leader starts trusting the team members, and gives them the autonomy to make decisions, it changes the team dynamics. There is no better incentive in a team-based project than autonomy to complete a task that includes making decisions required to complete the task. No vacation time or bonus at the end of the year can compensate for autonomy in a project.

4) Be Visible

Being visible means coming to office before other team members and leaving after everyone has left. It is not easy to maintain such visibility but a leader who is there to handle crisis is often trusted higher than the virtual leaders, who works at home, and makes a guest appearance during Friday meetings.

5) Don’t Be Opportunistic

If you remove a team member for reasons other than achieving the project goals, then you lose trust. Team members don’t respect leaders who flip-flop principles based on opportunities. They know that the success of the project is the common goal for the team. Remain consistent, and take actions that are towards that goal.

6) Don’t Gossip

The worst thing that a leader can do is to speculate or gossip about a team member with other members. In the short-term that might help the leader get some valuable feedback but if a process that anonymizes feedbacks is not followed, soon the word will spread in the team, and the morale, and trust of the team will go down. Team members will start speculating about the mole in the team.

7) Over communicate

There has never been an instance when a project has failed due to over communication. Not everything that you will do will be understood by the team. Make sure that you communicate the intent behind a decision if it is a complex one. The regular ones might not require an explanation. Otherwise, your project will be filled with a series of boring meetings that 90% of the team will be waiting to get over with.

You cannot motivate strangers to pursuit a goal without gaining trust. Do you remember instances where you have shown the above seven qualities. If you have then you have enough material for your leadership essay.