Trust: Why Talent Alone is Not Enough for Greatness

If people in our organizations don’t trust, they will not work together by embracing their differences and leveraging each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

How do we build trust amongst teams?  Oftentimes organizations make the decision to source the very best talent money can buy. They search for the best of the best and they spare no expense. Such initiatives are expensive and time-consuming. Eventually we select our candidates and the team is assembled. This is the key to a high performance team that can accomplish anything! Right? Probably not! Even with the best talent money can buy; a company must not overlook the need to build real relationships amongst their teams. Relationships based on trust and mutual understanding. I assure you that talent will not make up for the lack of these types of relationships.

If people in our organizations don’t trust, they will not work together by embracing their differences and leveraging each other’s strengths and weaknesses. In fact, they may even look down upon one another because they can only recognize weaknesses and they overlook strengths. This leads to a very toxic culture and will fail over time.

It all starts with servant leadership. At Dowding Industries we have a saying; “If you want to lead people, go wear those shoes out.” This means to get in the trenches, smile and go talk to people. Ask how they are doing. Ask what they like about their job. Better yet, ask what they don’t like and help them find a solution! Most importantly; watch for them to do something right and thank them for it.