Five tests that accountable leaders do to achieve success
Ever wondered why some managers dodge those awkward performance conversations—and what to do about it?
In this lively chat, Graham Field and Ricky Muddimer dive into the art and science of giving effective feedback that sparks real change.
They walk through seven critical tests to pinpoint the root causes of underperformance, including:
The Expectations Test – Set the ground rules upfront on how (and when) feedback is shared.
The Holy Trinity Test – Ensure crystal-clear goals, a genuine understanding of “why it matters,” and confidence in what’s possible.
The Underperformance Test – Spot gaps in knowledge, skills, environment/tools, or mindset.
The Competence Test – Move beyond “tick-box” training and guard against the Ebbinghaus Effect by reinforcing learning fast.
The Psychological Safety Test – Create a culture where people feel safe asking for help and receiving honest feedback.
If you’re a middle manager, C-suite executive, or HR professional responsible for leadership development, you’ll pick up practical tips you can use immediately. Grab a coffee, sit back, and learn how to have those tough chats that lead to better performance and stronger teams.
In this podcast, Paul and Richard tackle one of the questions we have been asked a lot since the pandemic ended – How do you build trust between team members and teams that don’t spend that much time in the office. Building trust between individuals and groups is far more complex than many of us realise because we do it so easily when we are together. We build trusting relationships through the micro-moments we spend together: before meetings, over lunch, getting coffee and in quick informal interactions. We also build trust through working together. It is the combination of both these types of trust that forms the relationships that we need to work together. As leaders, we must change how our teams interact to ensure that the trust we need to achieve our goals is actively built so our teams can leverage trust when things get tough.
Over decades of leading large teams and coaching executives in renowned companies, I’ve learned that trust isn’t just a component of effective leadership—it’s its very foundation. Without trust, strategies falter, innovation stalls and organizations come to a standstill. Today, I want to explore how to build trust within teams from both a leader’s and a team member’s perspective, providing practical insights rooted in real-world experience to help you enhance trust in your own teams.
The Necessity Of Trust In Leadership
Trust acts as a stabilising force in large corporate environments where complexity and change are constants. It’s the invisible thread woven through every interaction and decision, accelerating progress and uniting teams toward shared goals. The impact of trust isn’t theoretical; it’s tangible and profoundly influences organizational success.
Frances Frei’s Trust Triangle
Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei offers a compelling framework called the Trust Triangle, consisting of three critical elements:
Authenticity: Being true to yourself. People can detect inauthenticity instantly; it’s essential to be genuine.
Logic: Having clear and sound reasoning. Your logic should be solid, and you must articulate it effectively.
Empathy: Understanding and sharing others’ feelings. Showing genuine concern for others is crucial in building trust.
These elements interconnect to form two essential types of trust in leadership: cognitive trust and affective trust.
Cognitive Trust: Trust Of The Head
Cognitive trust is the trust of the mind arising from belief in a leader’s competence and reliability. It thrives when team members perceive their leader as authentic and logically sound.
From The Leader’s Perspective
Demonstrate consistency. Align your actions with your words. Inconsistencies quickly erode trust.
Communicate the ‘why.’ Provide context for decisions to empower your team with understanding, not just directives.
Be transparent about challenges. Authenticity includes acknowledging obstacles and sharing your approach to overcoming them.
From The Team Member’s Perspective
Seek clarity. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if something is unclear; this strengthens collective understanding.
Acknowledge expertise. Recognize your leader’s experience, fostering mutual respect and reinforcing cognitive trust.
Affective Trust: Trust Of The Heart
Affective trust is the trust of the heart, cultivated when leaders authentically connect on an emotional level and demonstrate genuine empathy.
From The Leader’s Perspective
Invest in relationships. Take time to understand your team members’ aspirations, fears and motivations.
Show vulnerability. Sharing your challenges and failures humanizes you and creates a safe space for others.
Listen to understand. Focus on truly understanding your team members’ feelings and perspectives.
From The Team Member’s Perspective
Engage openly. Share your perspectives and challenges; building trust is a collaborative effort.
Support peers. Show empathy toward colleagues, strengthening team cohesion and supporting a trusting culture.
Practical Strategies For Leaders To Enhance Trust
Conduct trust audits. Regularly assess trust levels within your team, seeking honest feedback.
Lead with integrity. Uphold ethical standards consistently, even when faced with dilemmas.
Empower decision-making. Delegate authority, showing confidence in your team’s abilities.
Celebrate wins and learn from losses. Recognise achievements and approach failures as learning opportunities.
Empowering Teams To Build Trust Among Themselves
Foster collaboration. Encourage cross-functional teamwork to build trust naturally.
Encourage peer recognition. Implement systems for team members to acknowledge each other’s contributions.
Promote transparency. Facilitate open communication channels across the team to reduce misunderstandings.
Navigating Trust Erosion
Despite best efforts, trust can sometimes erode due to factors like organizational changes or external pressures.
For Leaders
Address issues directly. Confront trust issues with honesty and a commitment to resolve them.
Rebuild through actions. Restore trust through consistent, trustworthy actions | over time.
Stay committed. Continue performing at your best, contributing positively to the trust environment.
The Synergy Of Cognitive And Affective Trust
Authenticity links cognitive and affective trust. By aligning your genuine self with logical reasoning and empathetic understanding, you create a powerful trust dynamic that resonates both intellectually and emotionally with your team.
Case Study: Trust In Action
I once led a global team through significant organizational change. Initial trust was low due to past leadership missteps. I addressed this by:
Being Transparent: Sharing challenges and the strategic plan openly (Authenticity + Logic).
Collaborating On Solutions: Incorporating team feedback into implementation plans.
Over time, we not only navigated the change but emerged stronger and more cohesive, demonstrating the impact of building both cognitive and affective trust through authentic actions.
Conclusion: Trust As The Catalyst For Excellence
In the vast corridors of large corporations, trust humanizes the workplace. It’s the catalyst that transforms strategies into successes and groups into unified teams. As leaders, embodying authenticity, logic, and empathy is imperative.
Action Steps
Reflect on your trust triangle. Identify which element—authenticity, logic or empathy—you need to strengthen and develop a plan to enhance it.
Engage your team. Initiate dialogue about trust, encouraging open sharing and collective growth.
Lead by example. Your actions set the tone and embody the trust you wish to see.
Final Thoughts
Building trust requires consistent, intentional actions and a willingness to grow alongside your team. From my experience, the dividends of trust—in engagement, innovation and performance—are well worth the investment.
By focusing on both cognitive and affective trust and recognizing authenticity’s pivotal role in bridging logic and empathy, you position yourself and your team to exceed objectives, turning challenges into opportunities for greatness.
Embrace the journey of building trust. Your leadership will inspire your team and leave a lasting impact on your organization’s culture.
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on 3rd January 2025
Ricky has been a regular contributor to the Forbes Councils since 2023, where he shares his perspectives on all things leadership, change, culture and productivity, all with Thinking Focus’ unique perspective on metacognition, or as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking.
In this webinar, Ricky Muddimer and Graham Field discussed how trust is the invisible engine that drives high-performing teams. Without it, communication breaks down, innovation stalls, and performance falters. But with it? Teams collaborate seamlessly, make faster decisions, and achieve extraordinary results.
As a leader, how do you build and sustain trust in your team—especially in today’s fast-paced and often disconnected workplace? Watch ‘Trust: The Secret to High-Performing Teams,’ our final webinar of 2024, and discover why trust is the most critical factor in unlocking your team’s full potential.
This isn’t just another webinar—it’s your opportunity to gain actionable insights to set you and your team up for success.
Low trust doesn’t just create tension—it impacts results. In this highly practical session, we’ll explore:
The cost of low trust: How it shows up in miscommunication, disengagement, and slowed progress.
The benefits of high trust: Why it accelerates innovation, strengthens collaboration, and boosts team performance.
How to build trust: Simple, actionable strategies to foster a culture of trust in your team or organisation.
If you’re ready to tackle the barriers holding your team back and learn proven techniques to unlock their potential, this webinar is for you.
In this webinar, Ricky Muddimer and Graham Field discuss how trust is the invisible engine that drives high-performing teams. Without it, communication breaks down, innovation stalls, and performance falters. But with it? Teams collaborate seamlessly, make faster decisions, and achieve extraordinary results.
As a leader, how do you build and sustain trust in your team—especially in today’s fast-paced and often disconnected workplace? Watch ‘Trust: The Secret to High-Performing Teams,’ our final webinar of 2024, and discover why trust is the most critical factor in unlocking your team’s full potential.
This isn’t just another webinar—it’s your opportunity to gain actionable insights to set you and your team up for success.
Low trust doesn’t just create tension—it impacts results. In this highly practical session, we’ll explore:
The cost of low trust: How it shows up in miscommunication, disengagement, and slowed progress.
The benefits of high trust: Why it accelerates innovation, strengthens collaboration, and boosts team performance.
How to build trust: Simple, actionable strategies to foster a culture of trust in your team or organisation.
If you’re ready to tackle the barriers holding your team back and learn proven techniques to unlock their potential, this webinar is for you.
Check out the Slides
These slides accompany the webinar and include the content on trust.
Use Cialdini’s six weapons of Influence for the B2B arena to supercharge your sales skills and close deals like never before. Ricky Muddimer dives into Dr. Robert Cialdini’s six weapons of influence, tailored specifically for the B2B arena. Discover how understanding human psychology and building genuine trust can transform your sales strategy.
Psychological safety is the cornerstone of high-performing teams and thriving workplaces, enabling open communication, creativity, and innovation. However, even well-intentioned leaders can unknowingly erode this environment through specific actions or habits. Whether dismissing feedback, micromanaging, or prioritising results over relationships, these behaviours can stifle collaboration and suppress team morale. The resulting impact isn’t just limited to strained relationships—companies face diminished learning, reduced creativity, and a decline in overall productivity. This article dives into the subtle ways leaders may undermine psychological safety and provides actionable insights to help leaders foster an atmosphere of trust and openness where employees feel empowered to contribute and take risks without fear of judgment.
The concept of psychological safety is pivotal in today’s corporate environment, as highlighted by Amy Edmondson’s influential work The Fearless Organization. While its benefits are clear—fostering innovation, engagement and a no-blame culture—leaders often hinder the implementation.
Understanding Psychological Safety
Psychological safety creates a corporate culture that values transparency and sees mistakes as learning opportunities. It encourages individuals to voice concerns and share ideas freely, which is crucial for driving forward-thinking and innovation.
Consider the alternative: a culture of fear and shame that drives problems underground, misses learning opportunities and increases the risk of systemic issues. It is human nature to avoid looking foolish and being shunned. So mistakes are hidden and we let things slide.
Learning From History
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the global aviation industry faced substantial safety issues, declining consumer confidence and air travel numbers. They had little choice but to tackle their safety issues head-on. This required airlines to come together with a common goal to make everyone who flies as safe as possible.
Introducing a nonpunitive reporting policy required pilots to share incidents and near misses within an agreed timeframe. This policy was pivotal to improving standards, making air travel one of the safest forms of travel.
Why Do Businesses Choose To Focus On It?
Businesses now see psychological safety as a beacon for high engagement and empowerment, unlocking hidden potential while making an environment less risky. This pursuit is admirable and noble, but it needs the courage and conviction of leaders to see it through. It is also a journey, not a destination.
What Causes Psychological Safety To Fail?
Teams constantly change, and therefore, dynamics shift. Our primal responses see new people as threats, unknown entities that cause uncertainty and anxiety. Much of this is subconscious, so we might not even realise it’s happening. When you add in internal competition, ego and misaligned goals, the cracks soon appear, and performance levels drop.
Egotistical leaders who place their needs above the group destroy psychological safety. Their obsession with winning causes people to feel unsafe. A more selfless leadership focused on performance—that faces the facts, sharing thoughts, good and bad—can lead to a better future.
How leaders react is crucial, too. When things happen, is their response disproportionate? Or are they balanced, calm and methodical? The personal pressure level will determine a leader’s response, and their feelings can influence whether it’s in proportion.
The leader’s intent may be to tackle the challenge a-on, embrace the learning opportunity and come together to work through it. However, add in the complexity and demands from boardrooms, stock markets, media and the workforce, and that intent may waver. The scale and nature of these pressures can easily bias any leader’s decision-making.
How leaders intellectually spar with their people can be dangerous. It can be healthy to stretch, test and explore with their people, but if they have to “win” the argument, they will likely intimidate their people, who will probably then stay in their lane and play it safe.
I sympathise with those in public roles who are particularly susceptible to this; the risk of failure is so high personally and professionally that adopting a psychological safety culture, while intellectually sensible, can be risky as mistakes and failure are spun in the public eye by the press with a witch hunt as they demand someone to be held accountable—that’s not conducive to psychological safety and definitely a need for strong leadership.
What Happens When Psychological Safety Is Failing?
The absence of psychological safety causes decline, whether it be an existential problem that causes the leader’s downfall or a slow decline.
Without learning and growth, people don’t innovate, take risks or be creative. People who previously felt safe can now feel exposed and seek new opportunities elsewhere, which means losing talent and recruiting becoming harder.
Employees can become less engaged and feel undervalued, marginalized and underappreciated, so delivering organizational goals becomes much more challenging.
Increased stress and anxiety directly impact decision-making. People play it safe, looking for ways not to lose instead of playing to win. Playing to win means being prepared to lose, but knowing failure means learning and growth. In other words, you either win or learn.
The irony is that a psychologically safe culture surfaces issues and allows for debate, discussion, shared learning and more collaborative problem-solving. All of which raise standards across an organization, decreasing risk and driving up performance.
Why You Need To Hold Your Nerve
The alternative to psychological safety doesn’t bear thinking about; a false harmony pervades, and blind spots grow. It makes no sense only to hear what you want to hear; the reality is that bear traps are lying in wait!
Psychological safety doesn’t guarantee a worry-free journey, but the issues can be in plain sight, and your people will be more likely to want to be a part of the solution.
It takes real effort to remain rational and calm when things around you are failing. However, we can train ourselves to look for the learning in the chaos over time. But you must fight your body’s natural fight or flight response, develop strong self-talk and create a narrative that finds the learning once you let the emotions dissipate.
As Kipling said, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.”
Being human means making mistakes. Being superhuman might just mean having the courage to embrace and learn from them.
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on 27th February 2024
Ricky has been a regular contributor to the Forbes Councils since 2023, where he shares his perspectives on all things leadership, change, culture and productivity, all with Thinking Focus’ unique perspective on metacognition, or as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking.
Purpose: why your success depends on it dives into the concept of purpose and its critical role in driving success both personally and professionally.
Discover how understanding and aligning with your purpose can transform your approach to work, motivate teams, and lead to remarkable achievements.
Have you ever wondered if there’s more to your job than just tasks and deadlines?
Uncover the power of purpose and how it can turn routine into passion, driving you and your team towards success.
Journey to Success: Follow my journey as a Manager, where starting from scratch with a new team, we achieved our annual goal in just ten months. Learn how a clear purpose and a compelling vision inspired my team to overcome challenges and exceed expectations.
Purpose is our driving force; it’s why we do what we do. From global charities like Oxfam to iconic brands like Coca-Cola, we explore how purpose fuels dedication and inspires contributions beyond the ordinary. Discover why purpose is a frontline manager’s secret weapon for motivating teams, making strategic decisions, and fostering a culture of resilience and productivity.
You will gain practical tips and strategies for embedding purpose in your leadership style. Learn how to articulate a vision that resonates, recruit team members aligned with your mission, and continually reinforce the importance of purpose in achieving organizational goals.
Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your team?
Dive into our latest video, “Rock Stars vs Superstars: The Secrets to Managing Stellar Talent and Building Unstoppable Teams!” For Every Leader and Manager.
This video is a must-watch for every leader and manager seeking to understand and nurture their team’s diverse talents. Learn about the unique attributes of Rock Stars – the dependable, consistent performers who form the backbone of your team, and Superstars – the ambitious, visionary change-makers driving innovation.
Ricky explains how these two types of performers can transform the dynamics of your workplace. Join Us on This Enlightening Journey!
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to transform your approach to team management. Watch now, and let’s rock and roll towards a future where every member of your team shines brightly!
Remember, understanding and nurturing your Rock Stars and Superstars is key to creating a universe where every star shines.
Learn how to focus on your goals and why your work goals must pass this test.
In this video, we unpack the holy trinity; the secret to focusing on your goals is the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘can I’. These are three hugely important components of any goal. Without these three solid foundations, you will learn how weak your goals are a major issues and how you are leaving the success of you and your team to chance.
Get your holy trinity in check, and you will not only make your planning more effective but also significantly increase your likelihood of success.
Look out for a terrible joke, too; my apologies! What are you waiting for?
Dive in and learn how to make your goals more robust.
