imapMyTeam Blog

Building Trust is Job #1

I just came across a short history of slogans used by the American auto industry. When I read the very popular Ford Motor Company slogan that was launched in the early 1980’s - “Quality is Job 1” – I was inspired to write this Tuesday Tip. For 17 years Ford used Quality is Job 1 to counter the perceived gap in quality between Japanese and American (Ford) made cars.

That slogan made me think about how I would adopt it for today’s business where relationships are so essential to success.  Building Trust is Job 1 is what I came up with.

The very first job of a leader is to inspire and build trust.

Trust is the single most essential element to our ability to deliver results. Certainly nothing extraordinary gets accomplished without trust.  Trust is integral to building high-performance because it enables people and the organization to work with the necessary energy to achieve great things.

If you believe in the old adage that a ‘good defense is the best offense’ then it is trust that is a defense against dysfunctional relationships and teams.

To continuously improve your leadership, you must continuously improve trust.

imapMyTeam has a report titled Trust Requirements to help you understand what you need to do to build trust with another person.  

Run that report today. Get people together to talk about what that report means to them and then make sure you as a leader of a team, or you as a teammate, pay attention to what others say is most important to them from the report. Act on it and you will be rewarded.