When done well, with follow-up to ensure that the actions desired of listeners are under way or completed, communication with employees and colleagues have power to build trust. Leaders inform, inspire, and can even improve performance when trust is nurtured. Leaders who score high on both trust and communication skills ranked in the top quartile for employee engagement, according to research among 400,000 employees who reported to 75,000 leaders [i]. 

This research also showed that leaders who scored high in trust but low in communication skills ranked in the 45th percentile on engagement and leaders who scored high in communication skills but low in trust ranked in the 52nd percentile on employee engagement. It’s evident that, when it comes to employee engagement, which is a strongly correlated with organizational performance, it is not enough for leaders just to be trusted or simply to be strong communicators if they want to have a measurable impact on performance. 

All communication, however, contains risk. As much as strong communication skills can build trust, poor communication can undermine trust. In business, what matters is to produce results. 

Business professionals must be very good –– not just competent –– at designing, preparing, managing, and closing effective communications that generate the right actions by employees.    

The Sources of Most Business Problems

Distrust that emerges because of poor communication practices in an organization can be the consequence of one of several missteps in communication:   

• Insufficient definition of commitments (roles and responsibilities)
• Poor design of commitment processes (coordination) 
• Inefficient practices and tools to support coordination
• Badly conceived measurements and incentives 
• Insufficient alignment between different areas (priorities, work practices, sensibilities, etc.) 
• Absent or insufficient practices to build and keep an environment of trust in the team  

Commitments fundamentally create a partnership where all the partners agree to bring about some mutually beneficial new future. That commitment may be existential such as to quality of care for patients in a hospital or it may be more mundane such as to agree to daily check-ins on progress toward a team goal. Distrust happens because a blindness to how existing communication practices or habits is failing to produce behaviors. 

Trust can be rebuilt by paying attention to how leaders communicate. In every interaction, every promise, every moment to build something with someone, leaders can be producing uncertainty for the listener or reducing it.