Trust: The Foundation of Leadership and Relationships
Trust is a cornerstone of human interactions, vital for both personal relationships and leadership. It's something that must be earned and reciprocated, never given away carelessly. Trust can sometimes be an illusion, so it’s crucial to be discerning about who we extend it to.
The Essentials of Trust
To build and maintain trust, one must:
Keep promises and commitments: Reliability is key.
Practice honesty: Deception undermines trust and damages character.
Avoid lying and cheating: These actions inflict lasting harm on one's reputation.
When Trust is Broken
Regaining lost trust is a daunting task. For me, once trust is shattered, it’s a long road to repair it. Don’t test this with me. Don’t misquote me or attribute things to me that I didn’t say. Just don’t cross that line. Character is everything.
Outcomes of Trust
Trusting someone can lead to two possible outcomes:
A lifelong ally: Trust can forge enduring relationships.
A valuable lesson: Even if trust is betrayed, the experience is a learning opportunity.
Wisdom on Truth and Trust
As Edgar J. Mohn wisely said, “A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.” Mark Twain added, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” These insights highlight the enduring power of truthfulness.
Leadership and Trust
Leadership involves transparency, especially in the face of failures. Recently, I was reminded how crucial it is to be open about mistakes to achieve greater success. I faltered and relearned a hard lesson: trust must be earned over time.
The Complexity of Leadership Choices
Leaders face dilemmas with no clear right answers. In times of change, should they urge immediate action or advocate patience for adaptation? Should they maintain optimism or provide a realistic outlook on challenges? Effective leadership requires balancing these polarities.
The Leadership Paradox
Leadership demands addressing both the human and structural aspects of an organization. Change is best managed with a “yes, and” approach, considering multiple perspectives simultaneously. Leaders need to rely on their teams and move quickly, this requires trust. Teams move at the speed of trust and whole organizations move at the speed of their teams. This is one of many “ yes, and’s” of leadership.
Balancing 6 Critical Paradoxes
To build and maintain trust during transitions, leaders must navigate these paradoxes:
Transition and realistic patience
Empathy and realism/openness
Trusting others while going against the grain
Catalyzing change and maintaining a sense of urgency
Being tough yet optimistic
Self-reliance while capitalizing on strengths
Mastering these balances is challenging but essential for effective leadership.
Structural changes may require a sense of urgency to move things forward, while people need realistic patience as they transition their mindsets and adapt to new conditions, designs, and processes. Leaders lose trust when they ignore or overplay either side of the equation. A leader may be seen as lacking empathy and patience if they push too quickly toward change. Alternatively, if a leader is overly patient and lacks urgency, change may stall, causing them to lose credibility. This is a delicate dance with specific choreography needed to be successful.
Trust: A Core Human Need
There is greater psychological safety when information is regularly shared along with developed relationships with mutual influences. Interpersonal trust, information sharing, and mutual influence increase overall group psychological safety; which is a key driver of team performance and innovation.
Research shows that trust is a fundamental human need. It fosters alignment around team purposes, goal achievement, collaboration, and empowerment. Conversely, a lack of trust complicates work and slows progress. With the rapid pace of change in today’s organizations, trust is more critical than ever for leaders.
Trust in the context of leadership is complex, and it can mean many things to different people. Talking about trust and establishing shared definitions are key steps to address trust across a team and an organization. With shared understanding and language to talk about specific behaviors that affect trust can result in more productive conversations about team performance. These conversations can even create stronger bonds between leaders, teams, and employees.
Revealing Failures in the Field
Revealing one’s failures can transform malicious envy into benign envy and foster authentic pride while avoiding the negative social effects of envy. Envy's social function is to reduce the perceived status gap between oneself and someone more successful, often triggered by the display of pride from that successful person. Hubristic pride is when one attributes success to innate, uncontrollable factors like talent. In contrast, authentic pride attributes success to controllable factors like effort. When leaders only highlight their achievements, it can be perceived as hubristic pride.
However, disclosing the failures encountered on the path to success emphasizes the effort required to overcome obstacles—information typically hidden from view. When leaders share successes and failures, they are less likely to be perceived as displaying hubristic pride and more likely to embody authentic pride. On an organizational level, transparency increases appreciation for the effort involved, thereby building trust and triggering benign envy rather than malicious envy.
By revealing their failures, leaders provide valuable insights into achieving success. This transparency helps others learn and view the successful person as deserving of their accomplishments. It also encourages the belief that similar success is attainable through similar efforts. Sharing failures may lower the leader’s perceived status and reduce malignant envy.
A leader should be vulnerable enough to admit failures, celebrate successes humbly, and be transparent to build trust and foster authentic pride.
What is this all about anyway?
Well, I trusted just a little too much. I gave it away on a whim. Now, I may look untrustworthy as a result. Remember the quote from earlier? “ A lie has speed, but the truth has endurance.” I will stand by this to be true; I have witnessed the endurance of truth in rebuilding trust. However, in this lesson, I learned the value of balancing the structural and people sides. I can’t trust others without being tough; sometimes, others will envy what I have or have not appeared to have developed. This malicious envy can be used to gain status and inflate one’s sense of ego. Be wise, fellow leaders, and learn from my mistake this time.
Lean in, lead upward, and elevate!
