What is Trust?

I believe that becoming more visible to your employees is the best place to start building trust. Experience has proven to me that getting out of my office and mingling with employees is a simple solution to the common problem of trust. When I start with a new organization and I ask employees what (if any) was the biggest barrier to improve communication and trust with management? More often than not, my response was “I never saw them, they were always in a meeting.”
When employees believes a manager has their best interest at heart, it motivates them to give their best performance

I'm On It

One thing leaders can’t do is communicate from their offices. Sure, meetings, conference calls and reports are important but they are the things that keep us in our office and are nowhere near as important as open communication to our employees.
At a time where productivity and creativity are more important than ever, your company cannot afford lukewarm employees. More to the point your company cannot afford leaders who don’t lead and managers that don’t manage. Lead what? Not projects. Manage what? Not a spreadsheet. But PEOPLE.
Take for example, DHL, the world’s largest express carrier. It decided to focus on “Legendary Customer Service” as their core strategy and introduced the “I’m On It” campaign. Getting people involved ensures that everyone understands the goal and is accountable for the outcome and shares in the successes.
Open communication is key to achieving goals and becoming an industry leader.

Communicating

A senior leader's job isn't to have all the ideas or even most of them. Their job is to communicate corporate goals to associates and motivate them to achieve them. The same applies to any manager. This is a paradigm shift for many of us, requiring a level of trust in employee abilities.

Jack Welch, Former CEO of General Electric said it like this “I think any company that's trying to compete, has got to find a way to engage the mind of every single employee… If you're not thinking all the time about making every person more valuable, you don't have a chance.”

So it goes without saying, great leadership starts with communication.