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The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check Wally's Three Star Leadership Letter

Find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.

Find out more about Wally's coaching services.

Kevin is the kind of young many you hoped your son would become. He's intelligent, courteous, and hard working.

As a new manager he cares about his people, and they like him. But they don't trust him.

Actually, they trust him just fine as a human being. They don't trust him as a boss.

We build trust when we deliver on our commitments. You can't have leadership without trust. And trust has more than one dimension.

There's the personal dimension. I trust you if you communicate with me, if you seem to care about me at some level and if you keep your commitments and tell the truth. You trust me if I do the same.

And there's the professional dimension. That's where Kevin has problems.

His people wonder if he is willing to do the uncomfortable work of protecting them. They wonder if he will stand up to his boss when necessary. They worry more that he will be so nice that he'll let poor performers slide by and stay around to poison the team's morale.

The advice given to most new managers is to "build trust with your people." There are two things wrong with that advice.

First, there's no "build trust" button out there that you can push. Trust is what the systems theorists call an "emergent property." It emerges from a number of relatively simple interactions that take place over time.

It's all about all the things that go with communicating and telling the truth and keeping promises. You do that every day and all of a sudden, trust is there.

You don't "build" trust, either. Trust is not like a building. It's more like a tree.

A tree is a living thing. So is trust. In the beginning both are fragile and require conscious care. Later they grow strong and can weather storms that would have destroyed them earlier.

But destruction can still happen. Rude, thoughtless, cowardly, or self-serving behavior can kill trust as quickly as a chainsaw can take down a tree.

And just like with a tree, once that happens, you can't put the old trust back the way it was. All you can do is start over.

In Kevin's case, his team members trust him as a person because they've known him for a while. They know how he deals with people. The tree of personal trust has grown strong already.

But now he's their boss. And they don't know if he can deliver on his promises as a boss. That tree of trust will take a while to grow, if it grows at all.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

Request your free copy of "Meeting the Challenges of the Boomer Brain Drain: An integrated approach."

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.