Trust smooths the way for collaboration, conflict resolution, and influencing. But how do you build this asset? And how do you repair it when you’ve missed a series of important deadlines or otherwise messed up? Organizational psychologist Ruchi Sinha talks with a listener who’s struggling to restore skeptics’ confidence in her and her team. Ruchi shares the three elements of trust and how to convey each one. She also offers advice on what to do if you’ve failed to acknowledge a broken promise and how to communicate practically when confidentiality prevents you from being totally transparent.
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You'Re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review.
I'm Amy Gallo.
In this series the Essentials, Amy B.
And I cover key career skills by bringing together experts on those skills and audience members of ours who are looking to get better at them.
The thing we like about grounding these episodes in the specifics of individual women's experiences is how it makes management principles less theoretical and and practical advice more realistic, not only for that one woman participating in the conversation, but also for listeners in all sorts of industries.
How much do your colleagues trust you?
Maybe that's an impossible question for anyone to answer with certainty, but I tried it anyway on a listener named Jen who volunteered for this episode.
Here's what she said.
Well, I hope they trust me a lot.
Do I know for sure?
I don't.
Not without asking.
Of course.
This question has been on her mind, though, long before I asked.
Jen works at a manufacturer in its Continuous Improvement division, managing the data and technology that the company's supply chain runs on.
Her success there rides on how well she sells ideas for change to her peers, and some of them haven't seemed terribly receptive.
Deep down, she senses that she's fumbled communication enough times to have either not established trust or to have weakened their faith in her.
So she's here to learn how to go back and rebuild those relationships.