Leaders must develop trust in their team.

But sometimes, they confuse harmony or a sense of comfort with trust. Unquestioned followership is another sense that can be confused with trust.

It happens when leaders have not taken the time to assess for themselves what trust is for them, nor how they give and receive trust. Such lack of clarity leads to a confusion of trust with some sense of comfort while being with the team. Trust then has become a function of comfort and discomfort.

By clarifying to themselves what they trust their team with and what they want to be trusted with leaders set themselves a standard they seek to achieve. To develop some comfort with the trust they are giving away, the leader needs to find a way to hold his team accountable. A benefit of such trust is that it helps his team know what they are asked to do.

To avoid a sense of being aggressed when the team asks the leader to be accountable, the leader also finds himself supported by his accountability standards. Using his standard, he’ll develop a way to become proactive in informing his team. This standard will also help him learn about his blind spots. Questions that had not been anticipated remind him of uncovered information needs. In taking the time to explore the background of such unexpected questions the leader allows himself to learn more about how he’s seen by his team and what support his team needs from him.

None of this gets a universal answer. As teams evolve, they change, and the relationships within the team change. The same happens with the team’s project as it is transformed by circumstances. Both changes impact the presence of trust in a team.

As a result, there is no linearity between the time a team exists and the trust it experiences.