Trust: #2 Leadership Trait

Welcome to the third installment of our leadership character series. If this is the first character blog you're reading, consider checking out the primer to this series,?The Leaders' Journey, or our first post on the #1 Leadership Trait: Self-Awareness.

A Foundation of Trust

Trust is foundational to any?healthy?relationship. I say healthy because from time to time, whether we like it or not, we all find ourselves in relationships with people we don't trust. This relationship could be between family and friends or strictly work-related—the focus of today's blog on character. We would never say that trust between a boss and their team is as vital as a trusting relationship between two spouses. Yet, we spend so much time at work that a poor working relationship with a leader can be very damaging professionally and personally.

As it's probably become clear if you've read my previous posts, a lot of my experience growing up in leadership came from my time in the Marines. When I served a commander who could not gain trust or was not trustworthy, there was a palatable difference in that command. Trust was essential to a cohesive unit because our lives depended on mutual trust. Not only did I need to trust my leader to carry out their duties sufficiently to accomplish the mission, but I also needed to trust they would sacrifice themselves for me, just as I would for them. When we didn't have that, the unit was broken from the top-down, affecting morale and mission.?

Now I am not suggesting that we all must be willing to take a bullet for one another in a typical work environment (although that would be great). However, I am saying that trust between leaders and their teams is essential no matter the industry.?Trust?leads to a sense of safety, and safety provides a foundation for a high-functioning team. I didn't learn that lesson through my successes but through painful experiences working for poor leaders that didn't model trust. Yet I gained a deep appreciation for just how important trust is through those painful experiences, which is why it is the first character trait after self-awareness. We need self-awareness to get anywhere, but trust is the first place we should go. Here is why:

With trust,?teams are more willing to speak up and provide honest feedback because they can trust you not to take it personally.

Without trust,?teams will stay quiet, and the entire organization will fall headlong into perfectly avoidable pitfalls.

With trust,?teams are more willing to push the limits of comfortability and risk failure because they know it's safe to fail...?and actually tell you when they do.

Without trust,?teams will play it safe and do what they need to not rock their bosses' boat, leading to apathy and stagnation.?

With trust,?people will be more willing to be vulnerable about life events that may be getting in the way of doing their best work for a season, and you can work together towards a solution.

Without trust,?people fear for their job and try to push through. Ultimately the individual, their family, and the company all suffer as a result.?

This list could go on and on.

The bottom line is developing trust is essential. But at Pangea, we don't just think of trust as just something that exists between two people. It isn't just a behavior you strive for; trust is a?posture.?It's part of character.?

The Three Dimensions of Trust

One - Relational Trust

There are several different dimensions of trust. The first is the mutual trust between leaders and their teammates. This maps with another character trait of ours, compassion, which we will cover later. But we call this type of trust?relational trust. This is the?"are you looking out and caring for me?"?type of trust. What do we mean by this? Well, do you take an interest in the person behind the employee? Where did they come from? What are their goals? What are their fears??What is their story??Do you want what is best for them, or do you only want their best? Investing in your people will sometimes pay off for you; sometimes, it pays off for another company if they move on, but it always pays off for the person. Do it.

How do we foster this type of relational trust? Well, pulling from Brené Brown's playbook, vulnerability is one way. As a leader, do you get vulnerable first to encourage your people to get vulnerable? Do you get to know their family situation as much as they are willing to share? We all have lives outside work, and as much as we might want to believe our lives don't get in the way of work, we know they do. Good leaders have created an environment where it's OK to not be perfect, inside and outside work. Our lives sometimes need extra attention, and teams need to feel safe bringing those situations to their leader and navigating through them together as partners.

We wouldn't need maternity/paternity laws if every company did this. We would already be doing it. I promise if you care for your people in this way and they can trust your integrity as someone who looks out for them personally and professionally, they'll go that extra mile for you nine times out of ten. For some of those highly relational folks, this comes naturally. For others, this really requires the empathy muscles to be exercised. You may not be as naturally relationally oriented, but if you want to be a great leader, you'll have to learn.??

Two - Professional Trust

This is the most intuitive of the three types of trust. It's the classic "trust" we think of within a work context. Do you trust your people to get their job done? Do you trust their work enough not to micromanage them? Do you trust your people not to look over their shoulders all the time? Finally, and not to be overlooked, do your people trust you to lead them effectively??

No one likes to be micro-managed because micro-management is born out of a lack of trust for your people; it literally communicates, "I don't trust you to accomplish the mission or goal effectively." It's disempowering and is ironically counter-productive to what the manager is trying to do because it undermines the team member's sense of ownership and responsibility, ultimately undermining their work.?

Either you have the right people to do the job, or you don't. If you have the right person in the right seat, trust them to get the job done. If you don't, then either it's a hiring issue, a training issue, or strategic placement of personnel issue. Either way, it's an organizational problem, not a team member problem. However, this usually is never the case; it's typically a leadership issue. Micro-managers have tremendous insecurity around?their own performance?and thus want to control the outcome (micromanagement), even to their detriment. This is why trust is a character development challenge, going way beyond a behavior modification one.

There are two sides to this coin, though. One side is the trust a leader extends to their people to do the job, rise to the occasion, and even make mistakes. The other side is the trust the team has for their leader. I am afraid this one has more to do with the leader's wisdom, strategy, and technical proficiency in the relevant field than anything else. In other words, the leader can't just be a friend (this points back to relational trust); they need to be a highly proficient leader who also happens to be relationally connected to their team.

Three - A Culture of Trust

The final element of trust is perhaps the most elusive, and it has to do with allegiance... In other words, what are we devoted to? Performance and productivity surely matter, but there is no room for selfish ambition in an organization, especially management. Sacrificing at the altar of success costs us something, which will be the erosion of trust within a company's culture. Remember, micro-management has mostly to do with our own performance insecurity. If we as leaders are unwilling to extend trust to our team because we too are afraid of failure (monetary or pride), we will self-sabotage.?

How can I develop or foster relational trust and personal care with my team if?senior leadership holds me to an unattainable standard, no matter the cost? Trust goes beyond just two people; its presence or absence is felt within the fabric of an organization. It needs to be present at every leadership level, or it is present nowhere.

For any fellow CEOs and senior leaders out there, if you have micro-management issues, retention issues, or team-trust issues, it's your fault. Full stop. Please don't blame your managers; it starts at the top.

Trust begets trust. When the shareholders trust the board, the board trusts the CEO, and the CEO trusts a senior leadership team, the conditions have been set to have healthy teams with healthy managers.

I get it that trusting people is hard. Trust is vulnerable and exposes us to being let down.?It exposes us to failure.?In fact, when we create an environment of safety and make room for failure, guess what? People fail. But, people also learn, and those people become future leaders.?Leaders you want on your team.

In the next post, we look at the next trait: Patience. Until then, check out the chart below on how Trust maps to the other leadership traits and their fruit produced together!

-Aeron Sullivan

*Special Thanks to Andrew Imamura for the beautiful illustrations!