Are you sharing too little of yourself? How to build trust to become a better leader

Checklist

• Do you tend to hold back on how you feel about tricky issues – a work challenge, or the performance of a colleague?
• Do you routinely withhold your innermost thoughts, feelings, and ideas from others?
• Do you find it hard to let others in for fear that their worldview may not align with yours?
• Do colleagues struggle to be honest with you, even though you might invite them to do so?

Four steps to building trust

If you answered yes to any of these questions, it sounds like a fear of appearing vulnerable is making you hold back, which gets in the way of building trust. Follow these simple strategies to forge better connections with your colleagues.

1. Disclosure

Through disclosure and revealing our vulnerabilities, we move beyond seeing each other as roles or figures of greater or lesser authority. By sharing something honest about ourselves – something personal, for example, or how we feel in the moment – we invite others to see us as humans with the same hopes and hang-ups as everybody else. However, trust isn’t unidirectional: for it to grow, we need reciprocal disclosure from the other person.

2. Honest feedback

Honest feedback can be painful to give and receive, and our fear of rejection or reprisal moderates it. Often, we soften or edit feedback because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or provoke anger. How many times have you watered down your assessment of a colleague’s performance? Few of us enjoy giving or receiving critical feedback, but if we over-protect the safety of the relationship, we risk neglecting its need for truth, which is where trust can start to erode. Honest, reciprocal feedback in real time is a lynchpin of building trust.

3. Challenge – but don’t provoke

If we want to leverage the full potential of our relationships, we must continuously test and challenge each other – but there’s a difference between provoking for the sake of it and asking hard questions to advance collaboration. Keeping our emotions out of our work is impossible, so if tensions arise, try saying, “Let’s reset.” This will create a space for more open and disclosing conversations.

4. Contain it when the need arises

Oversharing or revealing too much can undermine your authority, and there will be times when circumstances dictate that you maintain some distance. Leadership is about building self-awareness and knowledge to figure out how much vulnerability you need to share and when you should maintain distance and contain your feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Paradoxically, containing and keeping a distance can also lead to others trusting you. This is especially important as a leader, where you might need to contain or hold the anxieties of your subordinates, as well as your own.