Leadership Development and Team Building Program - Part 2

By Larry Bonino of Excellence-In..., LLC

In Leadership Development and Team Building Part 1, we concluded by taking a look at the three performance arenas in which our entire work experience takes place: Individual, Departmental and Company. When we perfect the coordination of activities and interactions between and among employees and departments, these three arenas come together and form an interior junction. It is within this interior junction that we experience Excellence-In-Performance.

Performance Arenas:

As you can see in the above diagram, this interior junction forms a "shield" composed of eight critical components of leadership and team building:

1. Trust and Respect: Developing Unity and Character First
2. Effective Communications: Empathy and Understanding Personality and Behavior Styles
3. Establishing Common Goals
4. Planning and Execution
5. Defining Roles and Responsibilities
6. Coaching: Employee Development
7. Best Practices
8. Continual Improvement: Exceeding Expectations

The first component of any strong relationship is trust. In the workplace, trust is critically important for supervisors to develop between themselves and their employees. They must also apply their talents and skills to developing trust between the members of their team.

To accomplish this, leaders will need to focus their attention of the following five factors that strongly influence the development of trust.

1. It Must be Earned: First and foremost, we must accept the fact that trust must be earned. It is the responsibility of each individual to do what is required of them to become trustworthy. Second, we must also accept that trust is freely given — you cannot demand to be trusted.
2. Understanding: Learning how to correctly interpret the core motives, actions, intentions of others. At BEI each member of the leadership team has completed a program to understand the four basic personality types and their corresponding behavioral styles. The program is called The Color Code and will be explained in more detail in Part 3 of this series.
3. Respect: As we begin to better understand the core motives of other people and gain insights to their behavioral styles, we give ourselves the greatest chance at successfully interacting with them. As the quality of our interactions increases, we naturally develop new levels of respect for the people we work, play and live with.
4. Honesty: This element of building stronger relationships is described in BEI's Character First personality traits as "Truthfulness" and is defined as "Earning future trust by accurately reporting past facts."
5. Competency: Becoming a master at your trade and the "go-to" person in matters concerning your area of expertise are two of the most important elements of earning the respect and trust of your employees and fellow team members.

In summary, trust is: Reliance on, and confidence in, another person or entity. It involves accepting the responsibility for taking care of somebody or something. Trust is created when we develop belief in the competency of another person; and their reliability to be depended upon to always do what others expect of them.

My closing thought and recommendation is this: if you are seeking a guaranteed way to become Trustworthy, focus on developing the personality traits that you learned about in BEI's Character First program. Determine to master one trait per week (there are a total of 49). This will carry you through nearly an entire year, with three weeks left to work on the traits you found the most challenging.