Building a successful management system demands that your actions create a strong sense of employee trust. As I speak on management issues to corporations and school boards, around the country, my goal is to help create a friendly, professional and trusting work environment. Managers have the responsibility to make work interesting, challenging and fun. They have the responsibility to be trustworthy. Here are seven ideas that will help your management team build that much needed trust.

1. Predictability: There should be no surprises. Your reactions and positions on issues should be consistent. You need to stay on course. Your employees should be able to predict how you will react to a given situation. Unpredictability undermines trust. The self-motivation of your sales force will diminish when they are tense or unsure of how you will react to their actions. Make your expectations clear and your reactions to how a task is done easily predicted and you will have workers who will go to bat for you and build the business. Behavior will adjust to certainty. Behavior becomes erratic when predictability is erratic.'
2. Congruity: Managers cannot talk one way and walk another. Again, consistency of message and action are critical to build a strong sense of trust. Never ask a member of your team to do something that you would not do. The more team members understand that you understand their issues and concerns, the more support you will receive from them. The more they believe your experiences are similar to theirs, the more confidence they will have in your ability to lead them towards a more successful future.
3. Reliability: Can your people depend on you to back them in a crisis? Will you stand by them until they are proven wrong? It’s very important that you be there for your employees. If they can’t depend upon you to help, whom can they trust? Workers need to feel comfortable that you will tolerate mistakes and sensible risk taking. To assure yourself of this feeling by workers, you must train, train, train. The more you can make everyone knowledgeable of how their tasks should be performed, the less they have to rely on you and the fewer mistakes they will make.
4. Integrity: Is your word your bond? Can you be depended upon to honor your commitments and promises? Lacking integrity means you lack the central element for success in management. Can you afford this deficiency? Can you afford to lose employee trust because you lack integrity? By far, this is the number one issue with workers. If they cannot trust their leader, whom can they turn to? A lack of integrity will ultimately cause your downfall. You must, as the leader of your team, be impeccable on this front and a shining example for all to emulate.
5. Openness: Don’t treat your employees like mushrooms—keeping them in the dark. The more you can share about your business, the more employees can contribute to helping build the business. If you have dark secrets, you’re in the wrong business. Be truthful to yourself and others. People want to know what is going on in the company. Talk to them! Organize a consistent system of passing on information. It can be daily meetings or email messages. Perhaps you solicit questions from workers and provide answers on a weekly basis via email or memo. Regardless of how you do it, keep everyone knowledgeable about your business. Not knowing causes workers to make up their own ideas of how things are going. And, as you know, the rumor mill feeds on such attitudes and ultimately creates chaos that will reduce dollars on the bottom line.
6. Acceptance. In today’s work environment, diversity is the descriptive phrase of the day. As managers, we must learn to work with a diverse work force. As managers, we must treat this diverse work force with value and worth. Dignity for everyone is the only way to manage. Lacking this characteristic is the quickest way to lose employee trust and the quickest way to meet your employee’s attorney. I think you get the idea.
7. Sensitivity: Each worker has his or her own individual set of needs. Managers must be sensitive to them and make very effort to stay attuned to individual interests. By being sensitive to needs, you can better assign work and build productivity and pride. Need satisfaction motivates. By identifying worker needs and striving to meet those needs, you’ve created a win-win situation. There is no better way to increase productivity than to match needs with talents. No only should you be sensitive to needs, but also to talents. When you can satisfy worker needs with utilization of their talents, you’ve got a win-win combination that will strengthen worker and company alike.