I Hated Trust Workshops

Several years ago, I was driving to a two-day workshop on trust with a sense of dread and foreboding. I was loving the venue (Robert Redford’s Sundance Resort in the mountains of Utah), but was already inventing excuses for getting out of what I thought would be the inevitable trust falls, group hugs, and metaphorical singing of Kumbaya. I hate crap like that. I had been working for a year developing a process for strategy execution – I’m the “get stuff done” guy, tender feelings be damned, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend two days sitting in a “circle of trust” talking about a nice-to-have social virtue!

Have you heard about a paradigm shift? Well, I had my paradigm slapped at Sundance. Felt like my head spun completely around on my shoulders like the little girl in The Exorcist! Within a matter of a few minutes I went from seeing trust as soft, illusive, and hard to define to seeing that it is hard-edged, quantifiable, and tangible. I found a business case for trust. I worshiped at the altar of the results equation: (Strategy x Execution) = Results but had not considered a very important hidden variable in that equation. When we engage with high-trust people in high-trust culture, the speed at which we can do work is greatly increased. Time is money – I had my business case and my new equation for creating value became: Trust (Strategy x Execution) = Results. I also figured out by mid-morning the ancillary nice-to-have benefit that a high-trust work environment feels much better than a low-trust one and as rough around the edges as I am, I liked that little bonus. Quantitative AND qualitative value.

My next aha moment came when I learned that having a high-trust culture started with ME. I can’t control the behavior of others. If I want to enjoy a high-trust team, I must be a high-trust person. I need to be a team member that others can have confidence in. People gain that confidence when they see me as a person with both character and competence. I learned that trust is much more than being honest, although that is part of it. Character is made up of Integrity and Intent. Competence consists of Capabilities and Results. Each element is critical to earning the confidence of others at work, in our families, and even at play.

Three critical things really stuck out in my mind during the morning of the first day of this work session. First, that integrity requires courage; second, that misunderstood intent causes huge problems; and finally, that we must stay relevant if we want to solve the results equation.

Integrity Requires Courage

I have been profoundly influenced by a FastCompany article on courage written by the now late Senator John McCain. In that article he said that you cannot display courage in the absence of fear. It made the following connection for me. If I have integrity, there is congruence between my values and my actions. However, “walking one’s talk” can be challenging when circumstances make it uncomfortable or potentially dangerous. Consider realizing you’re the only person on the team who holds an alternative perspective on strategy and you disagree with the boss who tends to shoot messengers. Consider the otherwise good people who YouTube videos show stood by and watched a person get mugged/robbed/beat up and failed to intervene. Consider the cases of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort; on the surface, good men who, rather than doing the moral/legal/right/honorable thing, kowtowed to political pressure and forfeited their integrity by committing a number of criminal acts. Why does this happen? Because people are afraid. They are scared about what might happen when one disagrees with the boss or goes against the grain. They are worried about getting hurt. They are terrified of losing power or disappointing an authority figure.

Senator McCain told us what it takes to overcome the fear of doing the right thing when he wrote, “You get courage by loving something more than your own well-being. When you love virtue, when you love freedom, when you love other people, you find the strength to demand courage of yourself…”

The Problem of Misunderstood Intent

“Assume positive intent!” they say. That’s helpful and limiting. If I assume that others are assuming positive intent, when in fact they are not, then my intent can become misconstrued. When people are unclear about another person’s intent, they tend to think the worst, and in their minds, they go to a bad place; a place of suspicion. When we are suspicious, everything slows down. We tend to carefully gauge motives, we must cover our rear ends, keep eyes open on the back of our heads, and we start Bcc’ing an off-shore email account. That little amygdala, the most ancient and protective part of our brain, what I call the “lizard brain,” gets over-stimulated and goes into fight or run mode, instantly shutting down the parts of the brain that help us innovate, solve problems, and get along. All this non-productive activity takes time and we all remember what time equals.

To keep people from going to lizard brain when what we do and say makes them wary, we can proactively speak our intent. We can make it overt. We can boldly expose our intent for all to see! As people of integrity, we have the courage to openly share our intent – no hidden agendas here. What you see is what you get!

The Relevance of Relevance

…and what you get is a person who is relevant.  I learned in the work session that our capabilities are a critical component of being trustworthy. In evaluating capability, we seek to ascertain whether a person, a team, an organization, or a brand matters to us – are they relevant? We are relevant as leaders, as team members, as friends, neighbors, and family members when we have talents, skills and knowledge that others find valuable. However, I’ve discovered that these things are the price of entry when it comes to relevance. What often most differentiates us in these key relationships is our attitude and our style. Are we easy to do business with or a pain in the rear? Are we moody or “bi-polar” in a non-diagnosed way? Do people wonder whether we will show up as Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde; Bruce Banner or Hulk? Look, for most of us in a life situation that allows us to read an article like this, we don’t have the right to wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Like I tell my kids sometimes, “We don’t do moods! If you’re having a bad day, go back to your room and fix yourself!” If we lose our arrogance, stop our whining, show gratitude, and smile a little we increase dramatically the likelihood of mattering, of being relevant, to the most important people in our lives.

So now I’m a raving fan of trust and am committed to helping others see its value in the results equation. I’m still a work in progress when it comes to behaving in high-trust ways and as I learned in that workshop years ago, if I want to be trusted, one of the behaviors that helps is to Get Better!

In this article, I obviously haven’t gotten into everything I learned during the work session at Sundance. You can do your own research and learn more by reading Stephen MR Covey’s book The Speed of Trust (which provided the framework for the FranklinCovey Leading at the Speed of Trust workshop I attended) or Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s book Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End (which identifies how confidence is won at four important levels).

If these ideas helped you get better, please join the conversation and share with others in your network who might find the article compelling. I also invite you to follow me on LinkedIn.