In today’s rapidly changing work environment, developing trust among team members is crucial for success. Yet, many organizations struggle to foster an atmosphere of collaboration and understanding, often resulting in communication breakdowns, conflicts, and a decrease in productivity. The inability to trust can be the result of misunderstanding, conflicting values, or misjudging others because they trigger us and remind us of a negative situation or experience in our past.
Building our emotional intelligence can help us increase our awareness and become less prone to building up barriers to trust. “Trust isn’t built through charisma or authority—it’s built through emotional presence. Leaders who create environments where people feel emotionally safe, seen, and respected accelerate not just connection, but performance,” says Dawn Christian, the CEO of BeLeadership, a leadership coaching community.
Emotional intelligence means we become more effective at recognizing and managing our own emotions, as well as understanding and influencing the emotions of others. As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, I’ve found that by boosting emotional intelligence, leaders and employees can build a culture that reduces and eliminates many of the barriers that lead to a lack of trust.
Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five major areas: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through developing these areas, employees and leaders at all levels can become more adept at navigating through all the areas that build barriers to trust.
1. Self-awareness
The first area is being able to reflect on situations. At the end of the day, everyone needs to take an inner journey and consider why they reacted the way they did to a situation. In hindsight, we could ask ourselves how well we managed our reactions in the moment. Would another way of interpreting and reacting have been more effective? Would the outcome have been more positive? Journaling is a known way to aid in the process of self-reflection. It helps us track emotions and reactions and look for patterns that keep coming up that we may want to work on changing.
2. Self-regulation
We need to practice self-regulating our emotions. When we notice strong emotions emerging, we need to keep ourselves from reacting. For example, when we have a strong desire to act out from our emotions, count to 10 or remove ourselves from the situation. After taking time to think things through, it is unlikely that we would choose the same response we would if we reacted purely from our emotions. When we continually practice this, we will feel more confident that we have mastered our emotions and won’t react in a manner that we may later regret.
“Busyness doesn’t just drain our energy—it erodes our emotional capacity . . . Breaking up with busyness isn’t about doing less—it’s about clearing the space where emotional intelligence, trust, and leadership actually take shape,” Christian points out.
3. Motivation
A good practice is to always view a situation through the lens of how our reactions will serve us. Once we have a firm understanding of our goals—professionally and personally—it becomes easier to motivate ourselves. Once we have a clear picture of what we want from life, and where we are going, we are better able to hold ourselves accountable and not deviate from actions that prevent us from moving in the direction of our goals. With this comes a strong realization that we have to be able to collaborate and work as part of a team to succeed. This makes us the kind of person others trust and want to work with.
4. Empathy
Practice active listening and empathy. Most of the time when someone is speaking, we are thinking of a response rather than really listening. Everyone has a need to feel that they have been heard. When others are speaking, pay full attention and let them know by your posture and body language that you are engaged. After they have spoken, ask questions to clarify that we have understood them correctly. Even if we do not agree with their perspective, it is crucial that they feel heard and respected. This is a major step towards building trust.
5. Social skills
Continually build our social skills through activities that encourage collaboration. Any type of team-building activity is a good way to engage with others in an authentic and supportive manner. Activities in which people share both their successes and their struggles help show that we all have strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Whenever we engage in activities that bring out more of our human side, we build stronger bridges between people and deepen trust.