Leaders who don’t prioritize building trust risk overlooking struggling workers, and potentially promoting a culture of secrecy that can lead to missed deadlines and lagging effectiveness. They may also fail to detect workers who abuse flexibility. Steve van Zuylen, Managing Director, Head of Global Markets at YSC Consulting, contributed to CIO Dive: Information and Enterprise Technology News’s column, “The Remote Playbook”, where he discussed the two types of trust that come into play in remote team dynamics:
- Cognitive trust: To build cognitive trust, people must deliver on their word. Cognitive trust can quickly erode if people over-commit and don’t follow through on what they said they were going to do.
- Affective trust: To build affective trust, leaders must nurture relationships within the team, which is possible even when teams aren’t co-located, it just requires more intention. Flexibility is a key component of trust.
In the context of our current environment, managers need to earn the trust of employees by showing empathy and making employees feel their company is worth the extra effort under these challenging circumstances.