How you can hold onto trust when mistakes are made

Trust is critical thing for a leader. Without it, employees are less likely to share their thoughts and ideas, less likely to trust your leadership, and less likely to follow your vision. Lack of trust not only slows work, it erodes relationships.

Unfortunately, many people have the idea that if they portray themselves as a perfect leader, their team will have more trust in them. This strategy, however, often leads to less trust – not more.

What does build trust?

Honesty and vulnerability.

I had just been promoted to a leadership position, and our organization had recently launched a new strategic vision for the whole department. The management team and I were actively trying to get buy-in from our front-line employees. To do so, another supervisor and I set up a joint meeting for our teams to discuss the new vision and ask questions. I had a conflict and assumed the other supervisor would lead the meeting. Unfortunately, the other supervisor assumed I would lead the meeting and had scheduled another meeting for herself during this time. The result was as obvious as it was painful for us and for our teams: Neither of us showed up for a critical meeting when our teams were looking to us for guidance and leadership.

Oops.

We had to do some damage control, and quickly. I crafted an email to both teams, admitting to the error, taking ownership of the mistake, and encouraging both teams to hold us to our new vision moving forward – it applied to supervisors every bit as much as it did to front-line employees. At that moment, that was the most honest answer I could give them.

I braced myself for some very upset responses (and rightfully so). Instead, the responses I received were shocking. They were filled with praise, thanks, and even encouragement. I was confused. I had made a huge mistake in a key moment for our team. Why were they not angrier with me?

I asked that same question to one of my employees, and her answer surprised me. “I’ve never heard a supervisor actually admit to a mistake,” she said. “I’ve seen them make them, but they’ve never actually admitted it was a mistake. The fact that you owned what happened was huge.”

When people are elevated to leadership roles, they want to do a good job. All of us do. Unfortunately, many equate “doing a good job” to being completely perfect and free from mistakes. Leaders are human, too, and they will also make mistakes. When leaders do not acknowledge these shortcomings, they lose the trust and respect of their teams. It is not the mistake itself that is the most harmful for those teams; it is the cover up.  

On the night of the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, 1986, President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation about the tragedy. He didn’t make excuses for what happened. He spoke about the dangers inherent in space travel, and the bravery of those that take on such enormous risks. He mourned with the American people. Surprisingly, trust in the nation’s leadership and the space program rose in the wake of this event, even though a failure of this magnitude could have easily led the American people to lose trust in the nation’s leaders. President Reagan took ownership of the failure, and because of this, he strengthened the American people’s trust in the nation’s leadership and in the space program. 

No one expects perfection. Those who pretend to be without error aren’t fooling anyone. If people can’t trust you to be honest about small things, how can they possibly trust you with anything else? Because I was honest with my team, I was able to continue to build trust with them, and they had faith in me to do better moving forward. Building trust requires a level of vulnerability. Trust isn’t about being infallible; It’s about how we handle failures when they inevitably happen.