Resignation. It’s a word we, as leaders, don’t like to hear from our teams.

But it is a real problem in today’s workforce.

You spend the time, energy and resources into recruiting, hiring and training the right people for your team just to have them leave within a short amount of time. It’s frustrating to say the least.

So how do you build confidence in your business’ culture, effectively keeping your employees for a longer period of time?

It starts with building an effective team in an intentional and authentic way.

The two key foundational pieces of building an effective team are:

1. Building and sustaining trust

2. Creating a vision that makes sense and your people can follow

As a leader, one of the things that we forget to do often is to think about our own personality style.

Are you someone that has easy conversations? Does listening come really easy to you? Do you allow for a space of listening, or is your brain constantly moving and thinking and you’re trying to move to the next thing without actually listening to the person speaking? Do you listen to respond rather than listen to understand?

The first piece of building an effective team is understanding where you come from personally. It will make a huge difference in how your team receives you.

If you show up as vulnerable and authentic, your team will know that you can be trusted with the communication they’re bringing to you.

But then, also, it is important to cast the vision of your company, or your team, in a way people can understand clearly and concisely.

I often hear leaders saying they are communicating all the tasks to their team, but it goes much further than stating the next step. People long to understand that their work is making a bigger contribution to something important, bigger than themselves. If you have trust with your team, the next critical retention strategy is to get them excited about where you are all going and talk about it often.

You have to have the one-on-one conversations with your team members to communicate with them how THEY can be a part of that larger, lofty goals. If you’re taking the time to build trust and connect through the larger vision, you will begin the process of building an effective, long-term team.

Don’t overcomplicate things. It begins with you, knowing how you are perceived. Then from there, make it a priority to connect with each team member, to learn, connect and give feedback and also to continually reinforce this incredible thing you all are doing together.