In the first post of my trust series I talked about the costs and benefits of trust in your sales organization, including how trust erosion can impact performance as well as the way that impact trickles down to the customer.

Now, let’s talk about how to assess the trust levels in your organization. As I mentioned in the previous post, you can’t take trust for granted. It isn’t the default status of your sales team, and if you aren’t actively nurturing it, then you probably don’t have as strong of a culture of trust as you may think. That’s why…

Assessing Trust is a Continual Process

Assuming you already have practices in place for gaining insights into employee satisfaction and performance, you may simply consider whether you’re gaining insights into the trust levels on your team through your existing cadence of reviews. If you aren’t getting those insights, then you can add some layers to your existing performance conversations. Or if you aren’t currently asking and listening to your team on a consistent and regular basis, here are some things to implement:

Anonymous employee surveys: These are great ways to get straightforward, honest feedback from your sales team. You’ll want to make sure that the surveys are truly anonymous (think third party collection/aggregation) and that your team understands that. Then, in addition to anything else you want to learn, add 1-3 questions about trust such as:

-How would you describe your trust in your manager?

-How would you describe your trust in the organization?

-How are you cultivating trust with your customers?

One-on-one check-ins: Ideally, you have a cadence for performance reviews, whether they be bi-annually or annually. These are a great opportunity to have conversations about trust. But don’t underestimate the significance of the informal, day-to-day conversations. Sometimes you learn the most about people through these simply, daily interactions.

360º Feedback for Team Dynamics: This is a formal method for collecting feedback from everyone who works around the subject of the review. That means, if you’re trying to evaluate a sales manager, you’ll send anonymous feedback requests to people they report to, people they work alongside, and people who work for them. This ensures you get a well-rounded view of the team dynamic. 

Who Owns the Task of Evaluating Trust?

The easy answer to that question is…everyone. But for the more formal reviews and assessments, it is the responsibility of upper-level sales leadership as well as human resources.

Ideally, you’ve established a cadence for review and communication among these leaders, and during those established meetings, you can add “trust assessment” to the agenda. Consider allowing each member of the team to give a red-yellow-green light rating to the trust levels to determine whether something needs to be addressed or if everything is going well. Start simple and build from there.

Additionally, it’s important to begin fostering a culture of open communication so that your salespeople feel comfortable coming out into the open with any of their concerns. Ultimately, this is the most sustainable way to cultivate trust. Having the psychological safety to openly share is one of the most important aspects to productive and trusting work environments.

Trust Red Flags

If you spot any issues throughout your regular assessments such as:

• An unexplainable drop in performance
• An increase in turnover
• Less employee engagement
• Increased customer complaints
• Escalating conflict levels

Then you may have some trust-based issues to address. In part three, we’ll talk about ways to correct problems and rebuild trust.