Celebration is Free

I want to talk about trust as well because building trust is essential to success. Can you identify three concrete things a leader can do to build trust among her or his team?

Yeah, so I think the first one ties into what I just said is like, “can you show that you actually care about people’s opinions?” That’s the first thing to foster trust, and that means usually kind of putting the lid on your opinions.
That’s if you’re the leader, right? Because you inherently have all the power, whatever you say is going to go, if you speak first, no one else. It takes a very brave person to disagree with you after you speak first.
So, one is to be a really active listener and do what you can to encourage voices, especially the quiet voices who you know have lots of ideas, they might need permission from you and just a little encouragement to share.
The second one I think is important is to celebrate people’s wins. That’s kind of the easier one. I do often hear people say, “I did this project and I did it really well, and then my manager took all the credit.” So just make sure to pass that feedback down and make sure to celebrate and it’s free, right?
Celebration is free, credit is free so acknowledge the people who let it, acknowledge the people who contribute, support it. Everybody wants to win, and if you win together, it’s actually even better. But I think the part that is a little bit less intuitive is also celebrating when people don’t win. And this is something I’m still working on, so let’s say…

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so let’s say someone had the case to do a project and you green-light it and they do, and they work too hard and they take a risk, and let’s say it fails, right? Can you celebrate that they still did it and they took a risk? Because what that will do is that will show everybody else that winning is not the goal, it’s being not scared to try, which is what is respected.
And that’s a little bit harder to do. Sometimes you are disappointed in the results and you don’t want to, but yeah, I think that’s really important because I can see how as I consciously try to do this more, I can see that there’s more trust in the team as a result.

Yeah, that’s a great one because if you don’t risk failure, then you are also hampering innovation. You can’t innovate unless you try and try again.

Or maybe you could do a postmortem and say “Here, instead of just because the result if it fails, it will cloud the entire effort.” But if you postmortem and you say, “Okay, this didn’t work, let’s call it fact, it didn’t work.”
But these are the things that did work, right? “Maybe it didn’t get the result we wanted, but I like how fast we moved, I like that we were objective, I liked the teamwork,” like there are a lot of things you can still celebrate with the failure.