How to rebuild trust as a marketing team leader

In the fast-paced world of marketing, having a trusting, cohesive team is an essential catalyst for driving impact and achieving goals. When that trust begins to erode, it creates major barriers that can cripple a marketing team's productivity, creativity and ability to execute great campaigns. As a marketing leader, ignoring a loss in team trust sets you up to fail. Here's why regaining trust needs to be the urgent priority if it's been damaged, and how to go about repairing it.

Low trust comes at a great cost!

When members of a marketing team lose faith in their director's motives, competence or reliability, it significantly hinders their ability to stay focused and do their best work. A lack of trust means they are less committed to big marketing initiatives, unwilling to take calculated risks, and less open to coaching or constructive feedback. This makes it incredibly difficult to get extraordinary effort or fresh thinking behind major launches, rebrands or campaigns. And in the FMCG world, this is a major competitive disadvantage if this is your case. 

The skepticism also poisons creativity and collaboration across the marketing team:

• Marketers start hoarding information and ideas rather than sharing freely. 
• Meetings become unproductive venting sessions rather than forums for problem-solving (and this may even spread to the x-functional team quickly!)
• All the dysfunctional team dynamics make it near impossible to consistently produce innovative, integrated marketing that moves the needle.

Ultimately, ignored erosions, dips (whatever you call them) in trust send the marketing team into a downward spiral:

• Top performers become disengaged and leave. Which makes other members start wondering why they're still here...
• External perceptions of the team's capabilities plummet, and the marketing department starts to be less influential across the board
• Leadership's credibility and influence is marginalized

More often than not, agencies notice the weird vibes, the new dynamics. It never just stays within the marketing team, it's felt across all stakeholders. 

This makes hiring great marketers difficult while slowign down results across all channels and initiatives.

The benefits of rebuilding trust

On the other hand, proactively working to rebuild trust as a marketing leader pays massive dividends. It reenergizes the team, reignites creativity, improves knowledge sharing and campaigning thinking. This creates the open collaboration and ensemble mindset required for brilliant marketing.

A trusting team is also more resilient and able to weather storms - and boy, do we know that they come by the dozens in our brand world! Whether that's navigating an economic downturn, a brand crisis, competition growth or major strategic shifts. They'll be more bought-in and committed to executing fresh initiatives versus checked out and quite frankly resistant to change!

For the marketing leader, regaining trust restores credibility, influence and the ability to rally people around a clear vision. Which is you top job. It becomes far easier to drive alignment, secure resources and get the entire team operating as a united force towards lofty marketing goals.

How to do that, then? 

So what are the key steps for regaining trust if it's been damaged? Here are some essential actions:

1. Seek honest feedback to pinpoint root causes behind the deterioration of trust - whether it was poor communication, unreliability, betrayal of confidences, erratic behavior or other issues. You can do that on a 121 basis, group workshop, anonymous survey, whatever will suit your circumstances and the state of the team. 
2. Take full accountability. Oh really don't deflect blame or make excuses. A sincere apology for violating trust, admitting mistakes and failures of leadership is crucial. It will feel very, very uncomfortable at first, and you'll fear being judged as incompetent but you'll be surprised how many emerging leaders will in fact respect that openness. Only if it's genuine. 
3. Collaboratively develop a clear action plan for changing behaviours and addressing shortcomings like being a better listener, overcommitting clear goals, operating with more transparency, etc. There is a fine balance to strike so it doesn't make the team lead your PDP, but instead co-plan a team's ethos, ways of working, that all (including you, the leader) will adopt. 
4. Consistently follow through over an extended period. Regaining trust takes time and steady behaviour. It can't happen through words or a single grand gesture. Remember you can get support from peers, coaches, mentors during this journey. 
5. Proactively overcommunicate every step of the way. Provide frequent updates on progress against public commitments so team members don't have to connect the dots themselves.
6. Seek opportunities for quick wins to demonstrate changed behaviours and make trust rebuilding tangible. Celebrate small victories along the way.

Rebuilding trust is one of the most difficult challenges for any marketing leader. I absolutely realise it. But given how vital an engaged, confident, cohesive team is to brilliant marketing, it's an absolute must. Your department may still perform, but cracks will show at one point or another, cracks don't disappear unless they're dealt with. Following a thoughtful process and doing the hard work allows you to reap immense benefits in team performance, creativity and impact. 

Speak soon,

Magali