1 Easy Way to Build Trust with Your Technical Team

Leading a team of technical skeptics?

You actually know some hidden magic that can help win them over.

Here’s how to reveal it.

🎯Report out on the leadership meetings you attend.

Pick one high-level meeting you attended in the last 2-4 weeks.

For your next staff meeting, prepare one slide that highlights the following elements:

🔷The key topics discussed

🔷The decisions taken

🔷HOW the decisions were taken

🔷The impact you expect it to have on your own team

🔷When you think you’ll have more information.

That’s it.

Why this strategy works.

To your staff, the leadership meetings you attend are mysterious.

The decision-making process is opaque.

🪄It might as well be magic.

Like you, technical folks like to understand how things work.

When they don’t understand, they make assumptions and fear the worst.

This leads to skepticism and lack of trust with the organization and, by extension, YOU.

Most leaders are HORRIBLE at cascading information down the organization, let alone the PROCESSES BEHIND the information and decisions.

By contrast, if you share at least SOME of these, you will be seen as a caring and transparent leader.

💜Do that on a regular basis and your team will love you.

⚠️A couple of pitfalls to avoid:

1️⃣Make sure that you are authorized to disclose the information (personnel changes and operational changes with significant financial impact are typically no-no’s). When in doubt ask, “What parts of this can I share with my team”

2️⃣If the decision is likely to be unpopular with your staff, resist the urge to commiserate with your team or bad-mouth the leaders who made the decision. Your role is to inform and execute.

🌟You can instantly start to build more trust with your team by systematically reporting-out on the leadership meetings YOU attend. Describe both the DECISIONS and the PROCESSES used to make them.