Everything is moving faster today. Trust is the critical element to succeeding in a global market! It is also the foundation to developing a high performing team. Trust increases organizational agility and speed. These strengths are critical to creating a winning business culture.

How do you develop a stronger team culture for the people with whom you work? It all starts with the leader knowing how to trust themselves as the foundation of trust across the organization.

Self-trust is critical to being effective as a leader. Most of the great leadership books in the past several years point out people must become more self-aware. You may be completely self-aware, however, until you learn to trust your inner voice, you may miss the chance to seize great opportunities.

Self-confidence is the missing element to so many leaders’ success. They invest their time and resources struggling to build credibility with others on their team. From my experience, it is because leaders fail to share ideas in a way that different generations find interesting. They have failed to share their message in a way that resonates with their key stakeholders.

Credibility is critical to other people on your team. Millennials expect congruency from their leaders.  Past generations might have given you a pass if you weren’t prepared for a meeting as a leader, millennials want to know what you are going to do, not what you say you’re are going to do. You must develop the skills required to make better decisions faster. Many times, you must learn to trust your intuition when looking at increasingly complicated people decisions.

Building self-trust is being transparent with your agenda. Many high performing teams are put together to meet large challenges for their organizations. They tend to be made up of specialists who can help an organization make better decisions faster. Successful leaders must become crystal clear about what they need to from their teams and themselves.

When I talk with clients about their agendas you can see many of them cringe with the mention of the word. Agenda gets a bad rap today, but very few successful leaders function without one. Your team needs to understand your agenda. Better yet, you should consider having them help you create a shared agenda that they can support.

Consider how your agenda can be shared with the other team members to increase their buy-in by letting them bring their own agendas to your projects. Create a shared vision that allows all the team members to reach their goals, as well as yours.

Strong leaders know their own capabilities. How do your skills compare with other people on your team? What should you delegate to others to remain more effective? Are you creating synergies between the different members of your team?

One of the skills I work with my high performing team leaders on is developmental delegation. Many times, there are people who can do things much better and faster than you because they are constantly doing them. If you can’t do something well, learn how to manage the people who can.  Notice I didn’t say micromanage.

Finally, what are your results? We live in an interconnected world today. Do you have a good track record for delivering successful programs? If given a choice, people tend to go with organizations that have a reputation of delivering outstanding results. People like to be part of a winning team!

Do the projects you work on create opportunities for others to learn and stretch?  Are you engaging your people?  You need to balance both short term growth with longer term profits. You must prepare for your unknown future today.

This means did you go the extra mile to provide your people with new opportunities to develop new skills? Successful organizations understand they must grow their people today for a more successful tomorrow.

See you next week.