How Strong is your Bridge?

Does your Bridge look like this?

Leadership and teams need to be aligned in a partnership that enables them to build bridges to cross whatever difficult paths they may travel.

Image by Margit Wallner from Pixabay

Today’s world is moving faster than it ever has, and that’s not changing anytime soon! What’s within your control is how you deal with the speed of change and how you manage the outcome. The help of a highly engaged and motivated team can make all the difference. The key to building that team is creating a trusting environment.

Alignment, vision, expectations, goals and accountability are all things that any good leader strives for when leading people, however most teams fail in achieving many of these or have difficulty sustaining a cohesive environment. Why is that? When you think about leadership and the amount of responsibility put on someone who is accountable for a group of people it can become overwhelming and at times, extremely stressful. But it doesn’t have to be this way, in fact, leadership can be the exact opposite and it all boils down to the one thing - the level of trust between the leader and the people they are leading. Many of us spend our days in a leadership position mainly trying to serve the needs of our boss, forgetting that we should be serving the needs of our teams.

Trust is a value that cannot be instructed, it must be earned. Trust is developed when two people build a relationship. When a relationship starts to flourish in a very positive way, trust is being established. This is the same within the workplace, where it’s important to recognize that the responsibility to create this trust lies with the leader. It's the leader who sets the tone and is responsible to foster and grow a trusting environment. I view leadership and teams as an aligned partnership that enables them to build bridges to cross whatever difficult paths they may travel. When the trust is strong, those bridges cannot be broken no matter the size of the challenge they are dealt.

Too often these bridges can be destroyed by a push to increase the bottom line at any cost. This type of thinking fosters individualistic needs and the teams and leaders go into survival mode. When you enter into this atmosphere of self-preservation, it inherently weakens the organization…your bridge has crumbled and the foundation that carries leadership and teams in a common direction has been destroyed. However, it’s not to say a bridge can't be rebuilt or repaired if you recognize the problem early enough. This responsibility solely lies with highest level of leadership in the organization. These leaders must have enough courage to recognize and admit that the bridge has been destroyed and create the vision for what lies ahead after trust is rebuilt.

The job of the leader is to create a safe environment in which people are motivated and inspired to look after one another. This can only be done when the leader of the organization sets the vision, then follows and supports the team day in and day out. What does your bridge look like? Is the foundation of trust rock solid, allowing your teams and leadership to travel freely and take on insurmountable challenges? Or is your foundation of trust destroyed and it is now time to construct a new and stronger bridge that will carry your teams and leaders for many years to come. Don’t wait too long, in today’s world you will quickly get left behind.