I haven't updated in a while, so I'm going to cheat and publish a couple of things I wrote a while back. Hope you don't mind.
The most effective leaders, in my experience, have an ability to build trust with the people around them, most importantly the people they lead. They have an ability to personally connect with the people they lead, and through that, they are able to build an environment where the team works more effectively together. The team spends less time questioning what needs to be done and more time doing it. They spend less time passing responsibility and more time supporting one another. The team learns faster as well, because feedback from the leader and other team members are carefully considered instead of dismissed.
But how to do it? Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) there is no systematic way to do it. Building trust is an art, not a science. This is because people are people, and individuals are individuals. In some far distant future we may have enough of an understanding of human behavior to deterministically predict how people act and react to the point where we can reliably design a process to build trust. But that will probably come after some of the easier problems are first solved, such as the Grand Unified Theory, world peace, and the meaning of existence.
Until then, all we have are some guidelines, and the dependency on people to learn, practice, and improve. Just as there is no formula to make you a great musician, there is no formula to teach you how to build trust. You start with some guidelines, practice them, see the results, adjust, and repeat. How fast you learn depends on how consistently you practice and how well you observe the results and learn from them.
Guidelines for Building Trust as a Leader
The following guidelines are ones that have worked for me in my experience. I do not claim them to be the only way or the best way, only that I’ve gotten good results with them. Your results will vary depending on your personality and experience, the people you are leading, and how you well apply the guidelines.
They are listed as follows
- Sincerity and Honesty
- Have the best interests of your people in mind
- Strength as a leader
- Real trust in your people
- Fairness
1. Sincerity and Honesty
It should be common sense that if you are dishonest and insincere, people will have a tough time trusting you. But for many people, there are degrees of sincerity and honesty. And that’s the problem. You can’t really be selectively sincere or honest just some of the time. You’re either sincere all the time or you’re not really a sincere person. You’re either honest all the time or you’re not really an honest person. With a person who is truly sincere and honest all of the time, I can trust him whenever I interact with him, even when I don’t find the interaction to my liking (e.g. disagreement or conflict). With a person who is sincere/honest 95% of the time, I will have no problems trusting him when I agree with him. But when I don’t like what I hear, I will wonder if this is the 5% of the time he’s being dishonest.
With that being said, just what exactly is sincerity? What does it really mean to be honest?
In my opinion, sincerity is truly meaning what you say. It means everything you tell another person is heartfelt and not manufactured. It means saying something because you believe in it, and not just saying something to get people to like you better or just to make them respond to you a certain way. It also applies to listening to people. Feigning interest is not sincerity. Being only 50% involved in a conversation is not sincerity. If someone believes you to be sincere, they will trust that you are not bs-ing them. They trust that you really care about what they are saying and that they aren’t wasting their time with you.
Honesty means not lying of course, but it also means being truthful. What’s the difference? A person who makes a mistake but doesn’t admit it isn’t technically lying, but he also isn’t being truthful. Not giving honest feedback to someone who needs it isn’t lying either, but it also isn’t being truthful. Honesty means the pursuing the truth, no matter when, where, or how. This also means actively stamping out dishonesty. If you know someone in your team who is being dishonest, and you allow it, or if you allow yourself to be dishonest (especially if you allow yourself to be dishonest), you are not really being honest.
2. Have the Best Interests of Your People In Mind
As a leader, your job is to lead people. Another way to look at it is that your job is defined by how well your people execute. It’s never about how great you are. It’s about how great your people are. It’s not about you delivering. It’s about your people delivering. A person can deliver by micromanaging every aspect of their people’s work, apply constant pressure to get them to work harder, and makes sure everything goes her way. But she is not really being a leader. She is being a slave driver. She can be highly effective at doing what she does and even consistently deliver on time, but she is still a slave driver.
No, a leader is someone who sets up the conditions so that her people can deliver to the best of their potential. This means that she makes sure that her people have the tools, the skills, and the opportunities to learn so that they can execute and deliver, both near and long term. It means she proactively removes those obstacles that prevent her people from learning, improving, and delivering. In the end, her people deliver, not her. Note that delivery is still key. You are not a very effective leader if your people cannot deliver.
People come first. Not sometimes. Not only under certain circumstances. They always come first. What we’re talking about here is building trust with your people, and in order to do that, they have to trust that you will always put their best interests first. Even when you don’t (more on this later). If their needs come second to anything else, trust will suffer. When you make a decision they don’t like, they will begin to wonder who’s side you’re really on.
This may raise a few eyebrows because shouldn’t it be the company that comes first? Certainly the execs and most managers think it should be, but if we’re talking about building trust, maybe not. First of all both the company’s needs and your people’s needs are important. You really can’t focus on one and ignore the other. If you only spend time on your people’s needs and let the company’s needs suffer, pretty soon your ability to meet your people’s needs will suffer as well (no money to hire more help, give raises, etc.). Similarly, if you only address the company’s needs and ignore the needs of your people, your people will be less productive (or leave) and then the company suffers. So really both the company’s needs and your people’s needs have to be met. The only question is which is more important. Look at it this way: If you prioritize your company’s needs first, the company gets the benefit of quicker response time, but the trust with your people will not be as strong as it can be. It might not be the end of the world, but consider the other way around. If you prioritize your people’s needs first, you can build much stronger bonds of trust with your people. With this trust you can help your team operate better and become more productive. They will respond more quickly to you when you need them to. In the end, the company still benefits.
Finally a quick note about putting your people’s needs first, “even when you don’t.” You will on occasion encounter scenarios where you cannot put the need of an individual first, because doing so will hurt the team. You may have to make a decision that will sacrifice the needs of that person for the greater good of the team (such as removing a poor-performer). How is this different from putting the needs of the company before your people? Well, you don’t manage the company, that’s the CEO’s job. You manage your people. It’s the needs of your people first, not the need of a particular person first.
3. Strength as a Leader
Regardless of what you think of his politics, former US President Bill Clinton made an astute observation during the 2004 presidential campaigns. He said that people prefer a leader who is strong and wrong to a leader who is weak and right. Whether it is because people desire a clear sense of direction from their leaders, or perhaps genetics (nowhere in the animal kingdom will you find a pack led by a weak leader, or not for long anyway), we innately respect those who are strong, and have a low tolerance for people who are supposed to lead us, but are weak.
Many people mistakenly think that a strong leader is one who is loud, or stubborn, or always insists on getting his way no matter what. Actually, all it really takes to be a strong leader is for you to provide security to the people you lead. People want to follow a leader who knows what he’s doing and knows where he’s taking the team. They want to be able to know that, as long as they trust their leader, that success is assured and they will not have to worry about fending for themselves. Now if you have a leader that isn’t confident in himself, who constantly second guesses decisions, who doesn’t inspire people, who doesn’t have a clear sense of direction, who doesn’t know what he wants, how can you put your trust in him? In the wild, you and your pack will be eaten by hyenas before long. People tend to better respect leaders who are confident, decisive, and will stand up for their principles.
Don’t take this to mean that as long as you’re strong and provide security to your people, you’re automatically a great leader. Confidently leading your people off a cliff doesn’t say too much about your leadership abilities. You still need wisdom, intelligence, and the other 4 guidelines. But you need to be strong as well.
4. Real Trust in Your People
Trust is reciprocal. If you want people to trust you, you have to be able to trust them. Can you imagine trusting someone who distrusts you? This is a very simple concept, and not difficult to grasp, but it’s surprising how often people’s behavior contradicts this. The reason why micromanagers have such a difficult time with their people trusting them is because the micromanager doesn’t trust his people. By micromanaging his people’s work, he is essentially saying “I don’t trust you to deliver this on your own without my help. You are so incompetent, I have to lead you every step of the way to make sure you do your job correctly.” If you want to foster a culture of trust, you have to trust your people to do their work. If you don’t trust a person to do a piece of work, don’t assign it to him in the first place. Assign it to someone else. If you don’t trust any of your people to do work without your interference, then maybe you have a problem with trust.
That being said, there are times when you have to take a more active involvement in a piece of work. If the work is very important and the cost of failure is high, then you may not be able to afford mistakes. You may be forced to manage more tightly. But not all of the work that your people do is like that. There are plenty of projects or tasks where your people can make mistakes that won’t mean the end of the world for your company. Even within a critical project, there are non-critical-path tasks that you can afford occasional mistakes. What you lose is the time it takes to correct those mistakes. What you gain is what your people learn from those mistakes, their personal growth as a result, and their trust in you for giving them the freedom to make mistakes.
“Real” trust in your people means that you trust them enough to put your reputation on line in delivering something. They understand that if they fail, you fail as well. Good people will work harder to make sure you don’t suffer as a result of their work. They will try to reward your trust by putting in the extra effort to make you look good. If you don’t trust them and they don’t trust you, you are on your own.
5. Fairness
Fairness is like sincerity and honesty. You’re either fair or you’re not. You can’t be selectively fair or only part-time fair. Almost everyone has a very strong negative reaction when they perceive that they are being treated unfairly. If people perceive that you are playing favorites, or that you are inconsistent with your praises and admonitions with different people, then they have no reason to believe you when you say things like “results are important”, or “quality is important”, or “working hard is important”. Those things may or may not be true, depending on how well you like the person.
Note that how people perceive fairness is key. It makes no difference if you think something is fair from your perspective if they think it is unfair from theirs. If their perception tells them that they are not being treated fairly, then they are not being treated fairly. What this means is that as a leader, you have to make the extra effort to align your two perspectives (if she is resentful about being treated unfairly, it is unlikely that she will make the effort to understand your point of view). In order two align the two perspectives, you must understand her perspective first. If you just try to force your perspective on her, what you’re really saying is that your perspective is more important than hers, by which you are being, well, unfair. Many people, leaders or not, make the mistake of assuming that the pristine logic of their viewpoints will be automatically evident to all those who hear it, as if you’d have to be stupid not to come to the same conclusions they’ve come to. But this is a huge fallacy. You draw your conclusions based on your personal experience, your personal understanding, and your personal “mental model.” Other people who have different experiences, understanding, and mental models can come to entirely different conclusions given the same situation. This is why what is perceived as fair from one perspective can be completely unfair from another. Don’t make the mistake of assuming your own perspective is the correct one. Work with the other person to really understand their perspective as well, and what the root cause of the misalignment is. You may both learn a thing or two.
If someone perceives you as fair, all the time, to everyone, then they can begin to trust you. It is your integrity that they trust. When you give a person constructive feedback, she will trust that you are being honest with her and not just singling her out because you two don’t get along as well as with others. Similarly if tell her that she’s doing a good job, she can have confidence that you really mean it and are not just saying so because you like her better.
Conclusion
Building an environment of trust with your people is not easy, and nothing is guaranteed. You can follow all of the guidelines to the best of your ability and there may still people that you won’t be able to connect with easily. But that’s why it’s important to view them as guidelines and not rules or a 5-step process. To be successful, you must continually practice, experiment, and learn. Sincerity, putting your people’s interests first, strength in leadership, trusting your people, and being fair are all critically important ingredients to building trust, but you still must use your judgment and wisdom in applying them.
