Building Trust After Team Restructuring: A Leader's Guide

Trust is the currency of leadership. Learn how to rebuild it after layoffs or transitions, spot early warning signs of erosion, and apply feedback framework to strengthen team connection and performance. In this episode I discuss 

• A real story of transforming a fractured high-performing team
• The feedback framework for trust-centered feedback
• Subtle signs your team’s trust is slipping, and how to address them

Chapters

• 0:00 Trust as Leadership Currency
• 3:31 Vulnerability Builds Team Trust
• 6:31 The Four A's of Feedback
• 9:27 Modern Leadership: From Me to We
• 12:49 Recognizing Trust Issues After Layoffs
• 15:10 Building Trust Takes Consistency, Not Perfection

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, I'm Jill Griffin, strategist and executive coach. I've spent the last 15 years helping individuals and their team achieve personal goals and team-based performance. This is the place where you get actionable insights on how to keep your career fresh, how to reinvent yourself and your team, and to create the workplace to success right. Let's create workplaces that work for everyone. So let's dig in to today's show. Whether you're leading a team that's remote, hybrid or anywhere in between, if you're leading a team and you're stepping into an organization because there's been a reorg and you're there to settle what's happening next, or you've been rotated onto a new team, trust is the currency that is going to determine how you lead. And again, there are leaders at all levels of the organization. Entry-level people are leaders, as much as the new hire, as much as the person with the title at the top of the org chart right. Everything ends up being around leadership and trust. So in stable times, there's this idea that what is truth becomes the essential right. It's a non-negotiable. If people don't trust each other, collaboration lacks. You're going to have people not being willing to share ideas and feelings and feedback. They're not going to take risks because taking a risk might mean sharp elbows or that they get outed at one point and I once worked on a team where it was some of the most brilliant people I ever had the chance to work with, but because of various let's call it leading indicators in the market and within the internal organization, these really sharp, really talented, very capable people, it was spicy, my friend. It was a lot of restructuring and we're talking, you know, hundreds of thousands of employees, right? So there was a lot of restructuring. There was a lot of you didn't know where you were going to be next and while this team was highly capable and functioning, you could start to see that those fractures of that constant restructuring without clarity of messaging, clear communication and then trust, things are starting to crack. I feel like clients could even sense it and our external partners could sense it. They would say things like what's going on over there? The vibe feels different, right? So that also means like our behavior was leaky and getting externally.

Speaker 1: 2:28

So here's what happened. One of our senior leaders sat everybody down, they brought us into a conference room and they said all right, we're getting it out today. And everyone was a little bit shifty-eyed like what are we talking about? Ooh me, right, there was a little bit of what are we talking about? I'm not really clear. And this leader went first and they said here's what I'm seeing, here's how I'm contributing to this and, as a result of this, this is what I'm going to stop doing, this is what I'm going to start doing and this is what I'm going to continue doing. And when they stopped speaking, they said who's next?

Speaker 1: 3:00

And you could see people at first were a little nervous, either because they have no self-awareness which is hilarious in many ways, right or it's because they were like oh shoot, am I going to say the quiet part out loud? And, little by little, everybody went around the table, including myself, and said hey, here's what I'm accountable for, here's what I can do better at, here's what my commitment is to you and here's what I can do better at, here's what my commitment is to you and here's what I promise. It's also brings me up to various workshops that I've done around team dynamics, where I do this exercise about how to communicate to me best, when you're going to get the best out of me, when you're going to get the worst out of me, and what I commit to you. And also here is signs that you could notice when I'm starting to feel overwhelmed and no, that is not your responsibility as a leader, but I would argue it's your responsibility as a human.

Speaker 1: 3:47

If I start to see that my colleague's a little bit overwhelmed and they're getting spun out a little bit, don't I want someone to help me? Don't I want to live in a world that's not just about competition but it's about collaboration and taking care of each other. I mean, that's the world that I'm shooting to live for, which is why I do this work. So when you understand that for me, like I might stop talking, I might get a little withdrawn, my body language and my posture might change. If I'm letting you know that now, then, as my manager or my peer, you can start to then check in with me and be like how you doing, jill, you doing okay, and I might you know. It doesn't mean I need to, like, as I always say, put my small intestines on the table. It doesn't mean that I need to expose everything that's going on, perhaps in my personal lives. Right, I'm hearing more and more people balancing the challenging of aging parents while they're also raising children and they're just feeling the squeeze right.

Speaker 1: 4:38

These are also the leaders that are on the front lines often dealing with this level of digital transformation and the impact of AI. It's a lot, everything everywhere all at once. So where can we give each other space and grace through this? Where can we find a place where, if we're saying to each other, listen, if I start getting like this, you'll notice that I'm getting overwhelmed and I might not see it for the first second. So here's what I need from you I just need you to not snap back at me. Maybe give me a breather, maybe say you know what? Let's go take a walk, let's get coffee, right. Those are the kinds of things that we're talking about. When you show that level of vulnerability and you're in an environment there's nothing you can say about me then that I haven't already acknowledged in myself. I know that that's the way when I get stressed and all frothy and whipped up, that that's the way I behave. But if we're offering that to each other and we're putting the best intention, aren't we starting to build trust? This is where people start to give constructive feedback, have real conversations.

Speaker 1: 5:38

In that team specifically, in a very few short weeks of time, trust was starting to rebuild. You could even hear laughter in the hallways. People were starting to have fun again, enjoying their work. Yes, it's hard. This is work, it's not, it's not playtime. But can't we have fun? Can't we have a good time? Can't we have a couple of laughs with our colleagues while we're getting it done? No-transcript, be specific. It is making sure that it's actionable. Those are the two A's. Aim, it make it actionable. The second two A's are appreciated I'm going to come back to that because I know you have thoughts. And then the fourth A is to accept it or discard it. So the appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 6:47

If we want to create a culture with better team dynamics, then getting the constructive feedback in a way that is forwarding and it's not harmful, it is not jerkish, right, that's what we want to be striving for, that we're getting feedback, that you know what. Someone was able to slow down and say, hey, jill. The next time we do something like this, I think it would be really more effective if you touched on X, y and Z, because I noticed that in the room people seem to be asking a lot of questions and are confused. Right, that is specific. It's to me. It's telling me what to do and it's telling me why. Confused, right. That is specific. It's to me. It's telling me what to do and it's telling me why. And it's actionable. It's telling me what to do next time.

Speaker 1: 7:30

I have the choice, with my professional leadership and my professional identity, to accept and appreciate that. When I say accept, I don't mean you're right, I'm wrong. I have to do it that way. I appreciate it by saying, okay, I appreciate the feedback and there's probably some truth there. The accept or discard. If it's in the language that I just gave you, I can accept that and implement that in the future. If it's language that really reads more like you're not doing it, like me, therefore, I want you to do it differently. That might be the feedback you discard. But let me be clear If you're giving a directive to somebody and it's in a hierarchy and this is a non-negotiable well you need to do it. But there are some times where the feedback is a little squishy, so you get to again accept or discard that. But if you're following the four rules and you're aiming and making it actionable, it wouldn't be squishy. So if you're on a team that's able to rebuild and think of themselves this way and actually starting to have that all about you right, or if we're doing our pronouns, it's all about me.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Old school leadership means that I need to make sure that it's about my credibility, my reputational risk, my mission, my vision, my, my, my, my right. I'm an opposite, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye right. We want to get out of that old school style of leadership. Modern leadership is where we're creating capacity for others to get the job done. It's making sure that work works for the people on the team.

Speaker 1: 9:17

And how are you customizing your messages so that people can hear you, so that people can hear you? What's happening very often right now is no one is hearing each other over their frustration and anger. So, while you may be an expert communicator, when you get frothy, when you get hungry, angry, lonely, tired, I call it halt. Sometimes your communication can be really hard to understand. So, as a leader, if my job is to create the capacity for others and I have someone on my team who loves to have the casual drive-by but then loves to have a follow-up in writing, is it that big of a deal for me if I follow up with them in writing or suggest to them that they write the notes and send them back to me and I'll quickly eyeball them to make sure that we're on the same page.

Speaker 1: 10:01

I'm not saying you have to do these things. I'm saying this is how you build modern leadership. This is how you move a team forward to create the goals or to achieve the goals that are set in front of you, moving from the me to what's best for the team. How are we moving people forward so that we can achieve together? Is the modern leadership that is going to build trust in an organization?

Speaker 1: 10:29

When you have come through layoffs, making sure that you are listening for tone, the passive, aggressive, looking for cues, looking for interactions, feeling the way people are expressing themselves. Are they holding their neck a lot? Are they playing with hair? Are they doing that shaky thing with the leg? Those are the kinds of cues. I'm not telling you to call anyone out on it. I'm saying look for the cues and then check in with those people individually and say like how'd you think today went Right? We want to remove questions like did you or do you? We want to say tell me what you heard in today's meeting, tell me more. What did you hear? What might you implement after today's meeting? Give them an opportunity to chat. Those might just be behaviors that they do, or it might be because they were anxious and stressed based on what you were saying, or they couldn't understand, and it's a moment for you, as a leader, to check in with them. Right, your leadership needs to be personal to yourself, but you need to also make sure that it is not self-centered.

Speaker 1: 11:29

From people. Was that no one trusted her? Was that they trusted her data, the ability to be a subject matter expert in her job, but they didn't trust her as a person and she was getting feedback that people didn't want to work for her, and a lot of her mentality was well, I'm in charge. And a lot of her mentality was well, I'm in charge, so get in line and do it. When I was at your level, when I was at your age, I had to do it this way, so you can suck it up and do it too. That was a lot of, even if she wasn't saying those words thanks goodness but that was a lot of her tone and sentiment that was coming out and that becomes really obvious to people.

Speaker 1: 12:21

So, under the surface, she was anxious, she was defensive, she was afraid, she wanted to be seen as confident, but she kept stepping on it. So we built a framework together where she was working around trust pillars, reliability, relatability, accountability, integrity, finding ways to be nonjudgmental and then often finding ways to be in reciprocity. How can she help others and therefore, they may help her. Guess what? Her team over time. It took about 90 days, three months or so, but people started to soften. She was softening, people were trusting her performance had improved and she was really showing up in a different way.

Speaker 1: 13:05

So, as a leader and again we are all leaders, regardless of our title the ways that, after layoffs or restructuring, to be witnessing your teams and seeing if any of these behaviors are happening, that people are mentally checked out on Zoom meetings or in face-to-face meetings, that people may be sort of feeling chaotic or they're using a lot of buzzwords and no one really knows what they're talking about. They may keep their camera off in meetings. You're on your phone, you're scrolling, you're half listening, you may interrupt, dismiss, eye roll, sigh, all of those kinds of signals, of signals You're chasing the limelight or someone's chasing the limelight. They're chasing significance, and the way you create significance is you make somebody else significant. It's also a reciprocal trait when I shine the light on you and say how great of a work job you're doing, that person now realizes that Jill is noticing them and I'm significant to them. The way you create significance is you give it away and you focus on somebody else. So these types of patterns are things that I want you to be aware of, both in your own behavior and in others. And again, we are not calling people out in public, but we are checking with people and seeing how we're doing, Because those types, if you're missing those patterns, you're going to be missing and there's a blind spot with you leading your team and what's going on with your peers.

Speaker 1: 14:29

So listen, if you've just weathered a layoff and you're now in a newly struggling environment or you're leading in a newly structured environment, I want you to remember this that trust is not just like nice to have. I frankly hate the word nice. It feels very performative to me but it is about the foundation that makes the collaboration, the feedback and overall performance possible. It doesn't happen by itself and you need to make sure that you're taking awareness, you're being aware, you're taking action and, where possible, you're having honest conversations that feel supportive and asking people and checking in to where they are. You do not need to be perfect in this, you just need to be consistent. All right, all right, before I go, I always want to know how are you getting your support? Who are you getting your coaching from? If I can help, you, see the show notes, see what we can do together, both individually and your teams. So, friends, find ways to build trust, build relation, relation, relatable strengths. Right, be intentional and always, always, always, be kind. All right.