Tag Archive for: leadership

Building Bridges Of Trust: Your #1 Leadership Priority

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“Trust is the new currency in life. It is critical to a productive workplace. Trust lies at the heart of every team, organization, and community, because without trust, you have no relationship.”

From the book Bridges of Trust: Making Accountability Authentic, by David Irvine and Jim Reger.

What is the most important thing on any team? Think of all the various teams you have been on in your life – sports teams, school teams, family teams, or teams in your workplace. Our experience is that teams that have high levels of trust are better in every way – they are more productive; they are more creative; the energy is high; people are motivated to be on them; and they are more fun! Contrast this to the experience of being on a low or no trust team and we’re sure you will agree with us that the difference is not incremental – it’s huge.

Trust enrolls people in a worthwhile vision. It then enables full passion, commitment, freedom, energy, health, effectiveness, and engagement. Trust makes everything happen in organizations. If you can earn and build trust,  you can lead. If you can’t, you won’t be a leader. It’s that simple, and it’s that complex.

Questions that assess trust

  • Can they deliver results?
  • Do they stand by me under pressure?
  • Do they tell me the truth?
  • Do they fulfill their promises?

Seven Things We Know About Trust

  1. Trust cannot be commanded, coerced or controlled. It can be only invited and earned.
  2. Trust is a function of three primary qualities:
    1. Character (your trustworthiness);
    2. Competence (your skill level); and
    3. Connectability (your ability to connect with people).
  3. Trust is a rather delicate flower. What can take years to build can be destroyed in one action.
  4. Trust is not a prerequisite; it’s an outcome. It takes courage to trust. While trusting people can be risky, not trusting people is a greater risk. Blind trust is naïve. Mature trust, on the other hand, has lived through betrayal and responded with courage.
  5. Trust in others begins with self-trust. You won’t trust others beyond your capacity to trust yourself.
  6. Trust must be constantly earned.  It’s like a chequing account; you have to keep making deposits if you want to have something to withdraw.
  7. You don’t have to be perfect to be trustworthy. You simply have to be honest, sincere, and willing. Most broken trust can be repaired.

Seven Ways To Build Trust

  1. Be accountable. Accountability – the ability to be counted on – is, in many ways, the foundation of trust. Think carefully before you make a promise. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Then honor your agreements.
  2. Be Competent. This is a given. If you are leading a team of engineers, you aren’t going to be trusted if you claim to be a competent engineer unless you can demonstrate this. When I consult with a team of engineers, my competence comes from my reason for being there. I better be a great presenter or workshop facilitator. I had better have done my homework to research their culture, their industry, their organization.
  3. Be Honest. Tell people what you know, and tell them what you don’t know. People will see through dishonesty and inauthenticity. When I work with an organization such as the RCMP, I obviously can’t build trust on my ability as a police officer. What I can do is tell them that, and let them see that I’m an expert in leadership development, the people side of their work when they aren’t policing.
  4. Extend trust. Trust presents a paradox in that it needs to be earned, but to be earned, it has to first be given.  Yet trust, without the facts to base it on, is naiveté.  That is why trust is often given in small amounts over time.  As we experience success trusting an individual, we are more and more willing to trust further. Behaviour begets behaviour. Trusting others invites trust. Make trust a conscious objective.
  5. Deliver results. If I want to establish trust with a new client, what is the one thing I can do to make that happen quickly? Deliver results.
  6. Learn to connect. Your capacity to build trust ultimately depends on your capacity to connect. Listen at least twice as much as you talk. Take time to understand before being understood. Let people see who you are, which allows them to like you, not just respect you. The key in relationships is to be personal. Acknowledge feelings. The key is not just walking around; it is opening up, paying attention, and being in touch. People really don’t care how much you know until they know  how much you care.
  7. Be in touch with reality. Know about what goes on in the “meetings after the meeting.” Get down to the cafeteria. Know what people are talking about in the hallways. Do your homework to know what is really going on inside people – when they don’t have to be polite.

What’s your experience of fostering trust in your workplace or home?

“Trust is the new currency in life. It is critical to a productive workplace. Trust lies at the heart of every team, organization, and community, because without trust, you have no relationship.”

From the book Bridges of Trust: Making Accountability Authentic, by David Irvine and Jim Reger

What is the most important thing on any team? Think of all the various teams you have been on in your life – sports teams, school teams, family teams, or teams in your workplace. Our experience is that teams that have high levels of trust are better in every way – they are more productive; they are more creative; the energy is high; people are motivated to be on them; and they are more fun! Contrast this to the experience of being on a low or no trust team and we’re sure you will agree with us that the difference is not incremental – it’s huge.

Trust enrols people in a worthwhile vision. It then enables full passion, commitment, freedom, energy, health, effectiveness, and engagement. Trust makes everything happen in organizations. If you can earn and build trust,  you can lead. If you can’t, you won’t be a leader. It’s that simple, and it’s that complex.

Questions that assess trust:

  • Can they deliver results?
  • Do they stand by me under pressure?
  • Do they tell me the truth?
  • Do they fulfill their promises?

Seven Things We Know About Trust

  1. Trust cannot be commanded, coerced or controlled. It can be only invited and earned.
  2. Trust is a function of three primary qualities: 1) Character (your trustworthiness); 2) Competence (your skill level); and 3) Connectability (your ability to connect with people).
  3. Trust is a rather delicate flower. What can take years to build can be destroyed in one action.
  4. Trust is not a prerequisite; it’s an outcome. It takes courage to trust. While trusting people can be risky, not trusting people is a greater risk. Blind trust is naïve. Mature trust, on the other hand, has lived through betrayal and responded with courage.
  5. Trust in others begins with self-trust. You won’t trust others beyond your capacity to trust yourself.
  6. Trust must be constantly earned.  It’s like a chequing account; you have to keep making deposits if you want to have something to withdraw.
  7. You don’t have to be perfect to be trustworthy. You simply have to be honest, sincere, and willing. Most broken trust can be repaired.

Seven Ways To Build Trust

  1. Be accountable. Accountability – the ability to be counted on – is, in many ways, the foundation of trust. Think carefully before you make a promise. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Then honor your agreements.
  2. Be Competent. This is a given. If you are leading a team of engineers, you aren’t going to be trusted if you claim to be a competent engineer unless you can demonstrate this. When I consult with a team of engineers, my competence comes from my reason for being there. I better be a great presenter or workshop facilitator. I had better have done my homework to research their culture, their industry, their organization.
  3. Be Honest. Tell people what you know, and tell them what you don’t know. People will see through dishonesty and inauthenticity. When I work with an organization such as the RCMP, I obviously can’t build trust on my ability as a police officer. What I can do is tell them that, and let them see that I’m an expert in leadership development, the people side of their work when they aren’t policing.
  4. Extend trust. Trust presents a paradox in that it needs to be earned, but to be earned, it has to first be given.  Yet trust, without the facts to base it on, is naiveté.  That is why trust is often given in small amounts over time.  As we experience success trusting an individual, we are more and more willing to trust further. Behaviour begets behaviour. Trusting others invites trust. Make trust a conscious objective.
  5. Deliver results. If I want to establish trust with a new client, what is the one thing I can do to make that happen quickly? Deliver results.
  6. Learn to connect. Your capacity to build trust ultimately depends on your capacity to connect. Listen at least twice as much as you talk. Take time to understand before being understood. Let people see who you are, which allows them to like you, not just respect you. The key in relationships is to be personal. Acknowledge feelings. The key is not just walking around; it is opening up, paying attention, and being in touch. People really don’t care how much you know until they know  how much you care.
  7. Be in touch with reality. Know about what goes on in the “meetings after the meeting.” Get down to the cafeteria. Know what people are talking about in the hallways. Do your homework to know what is really going on inside people – when they don’t have to be polite.

What’s your experience of fostering trust in your workplace or home? What is your leadership priority?

On Staying Connected As A Leader

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Recently I was inspired by an executive who was participating in one of my leadership programs. Several years ago, he arrived to lead a division within his organization and found out there were eighty-four offices spread throughout the area within his stewardship. “For the first year,” he said to me, “I made it a goal to visit everyone office. I spent about three quarters of the year travelling that first year, and although I missed my goal by six offices, I have since had the chance to meet with every team in the division.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“No agenda; just a connection. That was all that was important. Everyone wants to be acknowledged, listened to, and connected with. We all need to feel that somehow we belong. I intimidated many of the teams because they had never had their divisional leader show up in their office. This just made me realize that I need to do this more. Most of them loosened up and talked about their families, their goals, and their life’s priorities. I received suggestions about how to make the organization better and had a chance to share my values and vision. It was all about making the connection, showing that I cared, and making some deposits in the trust account. It’s not rocket science. You just have to make creating connections a priority.”

How do you connect with those you serve? How do you build trust? How are you staying connected as a leader?

Authentic Leadership and Integrity

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This week I started coaching a senior executive who was recently promoted to lead a large office in his firm. He approached me for coaching to help him be accountable for living leadership with greater integrity.

When I asked him what this meant, he said: “Reflecting on the leadership responsibility I now face made me take a careful inventory of my life. I realized that in my efforts to advance in the business, I have been neglecting my health, my spiritual life, and my relationships with my family. Because I lack the discipline to live a life aligned with what matters, I don’t have the integrity, self-respect and credibility to influence people in the way I need to now. I want you to help hold me accountable for living in accord with my values.”

This executive gets it: integrity means being an integrated human being, and from that integration comes self-respect, credibility, and the power of sustained leadership presence. You will never get this kind of power from your position or your title alone.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “A person cannot do right in one department of life while attempting to do wrong in another department. Life is one indivisible whole.” A leader will never be able to have the strength to impact others if their life is fragmented or lacking wholeness. Integrity comes from the word “integer,” which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Great leadership cannot be reduced to technique; great leadership comes from the identity and integrity of the leader. This is why leadership is about presence, not position.

This executive’s clarity, wisdom, and courage, reminds me of a story of Gandhi, which illustrates the power of integrity in leadership. During the time Gandhi was in office, a troubled mother had a daughter who was addicted to sugar. One day she approached Gandhi, explaining the problem and asking if he would talk to the young girl. Gandhi replied, “Bring your daughter to me in three weeks’ time and I will speak to her.”

After three weeks, the mother brought her daughter to Gandhi. He took the young girl aside and spoke to her about the harmful effects of eating sweets excessively and urged her to abandon her bad habit. The mother thanked Gandhi for this advice and then asked him, “But why didn’t you speak to her three weeks ago?” Gandhi replied, “Because three weeks ago, I was still addicted to sweets.”

What is your experience of the effect of integrity on leadership and its effect on your self-respect, your credibility, and your ability to influence others?

Leadership and Personal Balance

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The great philosopher Yogi Berra said once that “you can learn a lot by observing.” Over the past 25 years working with leaders, I have observed that balanced leaders are better leaders. You don’t respect people that are always hurried, behind schedule, stressed, and harried. It’s not only a sign of strong character to be calm in the midst of pressure. It’s a indication of good leadership. I had a day this week with a great group of municipal government leaders. The topic: Leadership and Personal Balance. The group gave me some good insights into staying balanced in their highly demanding work environment.

Here’s a few things we came up with. Balance is not a destination; it’s a method of travel. You aren’t likely to “reach” balance. Instead, you bring balance with you. You aren’t always going to be balanced on the “outside.” For example, you don’t talk to farmers about balance in the midst of harvest, or to accountants in the middle of tax season. Sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and do what it takes to get the job done. As a leader, the skill is to have a process for staying calm on the inside. Being able to maintain perspective, holding on to an internal spiritual foundation during a crisis, and coming back to your authentic self on a daily basis are ways to maintaining this sense of balance, regardless of the demanding world that you live or work in. Living your life in accord with your values also helps you maintain this inner sense of balance.

I’d love to hear from you. What does balance mean to you in the context of leadership? What is your process for staying balanced in the chaotic world you live in?

What’s The Difference Between Communication And Just Passing Along Information?

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I serve as vice-chair on an international nonprofit board. Our chair is passionate about her work and about staying in contact with board members around the world. If she has a weakness, however, it’s that she assumed that sending emails to board members meant she has actually communicated with them.

“I can’t understand why he didn’t get the message. I was so careful about crafting a clear email that outlined all the facts.”

We have had some long discussions lately about the difference between passing along information and actually communicating a message.

The problem, of course, is not in her intent. The problem is that texting and emails are great ways to pass along information. They are just a lousy way to communicate. I’m all for technology, but it is critical to understand the limitations.

To communicate you need conversation and dialogue. Even the phone can be limiting when it comes reading body language as a response to a message.

If you aren’t allowing time for reactions, questions, open dialogue, clarification, and a space for reflection, then all you are doing is passing along information. You aren’t communicating.

What have you learned about what it takes to communicate? What, for you, is the difference between passing along information and communication?

photo credit: Love you to (license)

How Is The Pace Of Your Life Affecting Your Leadership Presence?

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When I am helping leaders strengthen their authentic leadership presence, I find it is important they understand how the pace of our life affects our connection to others. In the words of the philosopher Piero Ferrucci, we are in the midst of a “global cooling.” Human relationships are becoming colder. Interactions with others are becoming more rushed and impersonal. Values such as profits and efficiency are taking on greater importance at the expense of caring and authentic presence.

Think about it. You make a phone call to a person and you get a digital voice recording with a list of options. You park your car and find out the parking attendant has been replaced by mechanism for inserting your credit card and keying in your license plate number. You send an email to a colleague instead of walking down the hall and having a face-to-face conversation. Rather than playing street hockey with a group of friends, kids are now more likely to be alone in their bedrooms in front of a computer screen. Instead of a face-to-face conversation with a bank teller or customer service representative, we now bank and make many transactions on line. Your doctor, pressed for time, now focuses on the test results and data on a computer screen instead of listening to you and looking at you. Rather than a travel agent that we have come to know and trust, we book vacations on line. We check in at the airport and buy our theatre tickets at kiosks rather than from real people at a booth or a counter.

I’m not interested in going back to the “good old days.” There were lots of problems with those “good old days.” What I am interested in is bringing balance to this world. Do we stop and realize the effect of all this automation and hurried pace on our workplaces, our families, and our lives?

One expert on the pace of life, Robert Levine, has been studying time as it is experienced in various cultures. Levine measures three different variables; The time it takes to buy a stamp in a post office, the speed at which pedestrians walk across the street, and the accuracy of clocks in a bank. What he discovered was that there are faster cultures than others, in which punctuality and precision are rewarded, while other cultures are slower and less precise. Western society is the fastest; Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico are the slowest. Levine doesn’t make a judgment that some cultures are necessarily “better.” There are advantages and disadvantages to both slow and fast cultures. In cultures where the pace is hurried, cardiovascular disease is more widespread.

Is all this technology helping us improve the quality of our connections and the quality of our lives? Is it helping us be more kind and charitable?

Much emerging research is telling us that the more we hurry, the less we are able to connect, and the less we connect, the less we care, and the less we care the less real influence we have.

One of my favorite studies along this line was done with a group of theology students who had to listen to a lecture on charity, and then had to move, one by one, to a nearby building. On the way, they met an accomplice of the experimenters. This person was down on the floor, pretending to have fallen and hurt himself. Most of the students helped him. But when they were pressed for time and had to hurry from one building to the next, the Good Samaritans among them drastically lessened. One of the students, in a hurry, even stepped over the unfortunate crying actor and headed straight for his destination. We are kinder when we have more time. And without kindness, how can we possibly influence others?

How hurried are you in your life? How is the current pace of our world affecting your leadership presence? Have you ever felt “hurried” even when you weren’t in a hurry? How does your sense of continual “hurriedness” affect your kindness, your connections, and your ability to influence others? What are you doing to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n and make a connection?