Why Trust Is Crucial for the Next Normal of Hybrid Work.

If you think back to early 2020, the biggest shock you faced as a leader was the sudden loss of control.

In the office, you were always available for the impromptu chat to discuss a team member’s challenge or have a casual catch-up on a Monday morning at the coffee bar.

Like a baby being ripped away from its security blanket, you were suddenly yanked from your safe space and plunged into the deep depths of remote wok.

When we feel uncertain, our tendency is to exert more control over our external circumstances. This need to control can lead to undesirable behaviours such as neglecting your self-care and micromanaging.

So where to from here?

The golden thread to bring things back into harmony is trust. The future of hybrid work is predicated on trust. Depending on how you have navigated remote work so far, your objective may be more focused on restoring trust.

The good news is that you can always behave your way back into trust. Consider the following questions to restore trust on three levels:

· What will it take to trust myself?

· What will it take for others to trust me?

· What will it take to extend trust?

1. What will it take to trust myself?

When facing challenges and stress, you tend to neglect your self-care because of a perceived lack of time. The problem with this approach is it leaves you in an energy deficit and derails your productivity.

What’s more devastating is every time you don't follow through on your commitments and hit the snooze button, you dent your self-esteem. The truth is if we can’t trust ourselves, we’ll have a hard time trusting others.

How can you restore trust in yourself? It begins by keeping the promises you make to yourself.

Don’t think in hours.

Don’t think in terms of hours, as this is what prevents you from starting. You convince yourself you couldn’t possibly take an hour to exercise, read, paint, bake or go cycling when you have so much to do.

Instead, think small. Can you find 15 minutes a day? Or if that’s too much, how about chunking your exercise down to 5-minute microbursts throughout the day? When you go to a restaurant, the waiter doesn’t bring you the starter, main and dessert all at once. It is spaced out so you can enjoy each dish.

Equally, you don’t have to do all your self-care in one session. How about microbursts of 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at lunch, and 5 minutes at the end of the day?

If that waiter brought all the food you ordered at once, you would feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume. It’s the same when it comes to your energy management; break it down into manageable sections so you can make progress.

Your confidence is directly promotional to the promises you keep to yourself. I know you are excellent at keeping your promises to other people, but if you want to master the next normal of work, you need to permit yourself to show up on the calendar and honour those commitments.

Beware of making promises that are too bold. For example — I will go for a run every day after work. If you are not used to this level of intensity, it’s going to be challenging to keep this promise and even worse, you may get despondent if you don’t keep it up and miss a day. Then the inner critic shows up and encourages you to ditch the whole idea because you failed.

Consistency is the bridge between feeling like you don't have enough time and making progress on your goals. Those 15 minutes may not feel like much in isolation but consistency compounds. First, establish a consistent routine and then you can begin to expand it.

Choose one thing you want to focus on and make daily progress as micro wins are the antidote to inaction.

The missing ingredient.

Perhaps you started walking or replaced the cool drinks with water but haven’t seen a tangible difference yet. As we are all instant gratification junkies, you figure it’s not working because you want to instantly download your new body or stream your learning curve.

The missing ingredient to keep the promise is trust. It is trusting the process of creating these daily wins despite not seeing the tangible results initially and turning down the volume of the inner critic reminding you that you should be further by now.

By trusting the process of daily micro wins, you will experience the rewards of your perseverance — your body gets stronger, you are excelling in your hobby, or you are less emotionally reactive.

When you restore the trust in yourself, you can begin to restore trust in others.

2. What will it take for others to trust me?

The return to the office needs to be strategic. It must be about innovation, problem-solving, collaboration, and connection. It is not another location to check emails.

For office time to reap its rewards, creating a climate of psychological safety is paramount. A culture of psychological safety means there is trust among team members where people are comfortable sharing ideas without fear of judgment.

Hiring talented individuals is not enough to create results. For knowledge work to be effective, the workplace must allow people to share their ideas and innovate openly in a trusted space.

Despite the culture in the company, you have ownership of creating this within your team.

How does psychological safety affect productivity?

The Fearless Organization — Amy Edmonson.

In the model from Amy Edmonson’s book, The Fearless Organization, you can see that a lack of safety in a high-performance environment results in the anxiety zone where people experience interpersonal fear.

Have you ever been in a situation where you knew there was a problem or disagreed with the team but felt too inhibited to share it because you were scared of judgment or sounding silly?

Interpersonal fear results in a pandemic of silence. When people don’t speak up with their views or suggestions, it is happening under the radar and so cannot be course-corrected in the moment.

How can you create a climate of psychological safety?

The starting point is being candid about what leadership means to you. If you believe you need to have all the answers, you won’t invite feedback from your team.

Sometimes the most powerful phrase your team needs to hear is ‘I don’t know.’ In order to restore trust, your ego needs to take a backseat and allow humility to take the steering wheel.

Are you willing to shift from a leader who tells to a guide who enables their team to show up and bring their whole self to work? Entrepreneur Eileen Fisher has a culture defined by “A leader in every chair”. She believes that ‘we can only think smarter if others in the room speak their minds’.

Reframe failure.

“What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning, it’s a feature.” — Rachel Simmons

People who don’t feel safe will do anything to hide mistakes or blame others.

Companies like Pixar are famous for their Braintrust process, where team members sit to watch the first version of a movie and share feedback candidly. The golden rule is to critique the problem, not the person. This approach has enabled movies such as Toy Story and Frozen to become runaway successes.

Author of The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier, suggests the following questions you can bring into your feedback sessions to create a climate of safety and learning:

· What was supposed to happen?

· What did happen…and why the gap?

· “What worked… and what didn’t work?”

· What would you do differently next time?

· What is the one thing to do more of next time?

By adopting a learning approach to failure, you create a culture of ownership.

3. What will it take to extend trust?

Going back to your loss of control, you took comfort in being the fixer and solving everyone else’s problems.

The issue you face is that people have given up their need for autonomy, and you are solving your problems in addition to everyone else’s and have little time for the work that matters.

The way forward is to adopt a coaching style of leadership. This does mean you need to add to your existing list of responsibilities or dedicate additional time. It simply means adopting an approach to make your team more resourceful.

Adopting a coaching style of leadership means asking powerful questions instead of defaulting to advice. As Michael Bungay Stanier says, “Can you stay curious a little bit longer and hold off your advice monster?”

You don’t have to do anything to adopt a coaching leadership style; this comes through in your approach to everyday conversations.

Practically, when someone comes to you with a problem, ask them a powerful question to help them become more resourceful and create a culture of listening. Here are some examples from the Advice Trap:

• What’s the real challenge here for you?

• What obstacles do you expect to face? How will you approach them?

• I’ve got some thoughts, but before I share my ideas… what are your first thoughts?

• What might we be missing?

• If we could focus on only one of these, which would have the most impact?

• Which one, if we solved it, might make some of these other challenges go away?

• What are your concerns?

• What support do you need to accomplish it?

• If we could wipe the slate clean, what would you do?

There is nothing wrong with giving advice, but your objective is to encourage your team to trust their ideas first and give them the space to share them in a safe environment.

“Leadership is about check-ins, not check-ups” — Shirley Zinn.

Role-model self-care.

Adopt a role-model mindset regarding self-care and make it safe for people to look after themselves. People are overwhelmed with stress and as a result, they neglect themselves and grind through their days with little care for their well-being.

Have a weekly session dedicated to checking in with the team on a personal level. Ask what are they doing to manage their energy and what are they doing to relax? You may be surprised by what you hear. Share with them how you manage your day and what you do to manage your energy optimally.

Being a role model means you may need to show up to yourself to make sure you have something positive to report. If you are also sleep-deprived and not taking time to recharge, then you are out of alignment.

Final thoughts.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” — Yoda

As creatures of habit, we tend to cling to our routines and desire to control our external world. Sometimes, we have to question our process — and even unlearn our process — to flourish in this next normal of hybrid work.

· What do you need to unlearn to trust yourself?

· What do you need to unlearn for others to trust you?

· What do you need to unlearn to extend trust to others?

So what next? In the words of Ernest Hemingway: