Trusted Leadership

“The glue that holds all relationships together–including the relationship between the leader and the led–is trust, and trust is based on integrity.”

Trust is one of the most vibrant forms of wealth a leader has today. Trust is a very important component in organizations or in a team since they represent a type of ongoing relationship. In the book, The Trusted Leader, Robert Galford, and Anne Seibold analyze this important aspect of leadership and offer a model for understanding trust and how to build it.

Robert Galford and Anne Seibold identified three types of trust within an organization or team:

• Strategic Trust – When trust is in the organization’s mission, strategy, and ability to succeed.
• Organizational Trust – When trust that the organizational strategy will be fairly administered and implemented as stated.
• Personal Trust – Trust that subordinates place in their manager to be fair and to look out for their interested

In the book The Trusted Leader, writers primarily focused on building personal and organizational trust.

Trust reduces unproductive rumors and second-guessing that distracts employees from their work. It motivates, and stimulates creativity, passion for success, and responsibility and helps organizations attract and retain great talented employees.

Trust Model:

• Credibility: It is earned by expertise, by the ability to obtain the required expertise, and by being up-front about one’s limitations.
• Reliability: It is consistent and dependable. Reliable leaders give a sense of comfort to their subordinates.
• Intimacy: It is not about revealing personal details. But rather, making the business of the organization or team personal and understanding the sensitives of others.
• Self-Orientation: It is the degree to which one focuses on one’s own concerns when interacting with others. Self-orientation decreases trustworthiness.

Enemies of trust:

When the above logic provides some insight, building trust is not an endeavor performed in isolation. Instead, building trust is an effort of defending trust from its enemies. A lone trusted leader can not succeed an in the untrustworthy environment because such a leader will become a target and eventually be brought down.

Robert Galford and Anne Seibold recognized and highlighted 22 such enemies in their book and they can be categorized as follows:

1. Inadequate communication
2. Misbehaviour, political, and harmful
3. Unremedied situations

Personal Trust:

There are five stages to building personal trust.

1. Engaging – Finding common ground and relating to other people
2. Listening – Building trust by showing that one cares enough to invest the time to listen
3. Framing – Making sure that one understands the core of what the other person is conveying, and letting him/her know it.
4. Envisioning – Looking to the future and identifying an optimistic archivable outcome and helping the other person to visualize the benefits of the outcome.
5. Committing – When both parties agreed and are committed to moving towards the envisioned future.

Organizational Trust:

Organizational trust is based on belief in the way things are done in the organization or in a team. When organizational trust requires personal trust in the organization or team’s leader on an aggregate basis, it is possible to have an untrustworthy supervisor and still believe in the organization.

Robert Galford and Anne Seibold recognized five variables on which organizational trust depends. Following is the equation:

Here are the details of these five variables:

• Aspiration – Aspiration provides the incentive for people in the organization to want to trust each other. Aspiration is another term for business vision.
• Abilities – These are the resources and capabilities required to fulfill the aspiration.
• Actions – Actually getting into the task and doing what is needed to reach the organizational goal rather than losing focus to the distraction that unavoidably will arise
• Alignment – Having consistency between aspirations, abilities, and actions.
• Articulation – Communicating the aspiration, abilities, actions, and alignments so that everybody in the organization knows them and is able to articulate them.
• Resistance – Building a trusting organization is likely to be met with resistance in the form of skepticism, fear, frustration, and a “we-they” mindset.

In the organizational trust formula, resistance is unique because it stands alone in the denominator, hence it is crucial to minimize it.?Robert Galford and Anne Seibol suggested that resistance is best conquered by long-term actions designed to directly address the issues behind the resistance.

What Is Trustworthy Leadership?

Trustworthiness can be thought of as the excellence of someone capable and compassionate so that others can safely be in partnership with that person. Trustworthiness is important to all human relationships, but it is essential for leadership effectiveness and the ability to prepare for and drive organizational or team change.

All change requires a partnership between leaders and followers. In any partnership state, the leader must first establish competence. After all, why should anyone follow the leader if the leader first does not demonstrate skill or competence in envisioning the future, making that vision a reality, or both? Certainly, followers are compliant every day with those in authority, but compliance is largely effective only in stable and unchanging situations. In unstable and changing situations, a trusting temperament among a critical mass of employees is essential. If the followers’ disposition is largely acquiescent, change will be temporary or non-existent. Indeed, it is foolish for anyone to follow a leader who is not deemed competent to lead. In other words, it is appropriate for followers to resist change when the leader has not demonstrated competence in leading. Kelley (1992).

But competence must be coupled with kindness for one to have sufficient trust in a leader to agree to be led. Competence is a reflection of skill and followers want and need their leaders to be skillful, but what if the leader skilfully takes benefit of his or her followers? This suggests that to be skillful or competent as a leader is necessary, but not sufficient grounds for leading change.

When a leader becomes political with the team or subordinates, the trust goes away, and the team thinks of the harm which might happen to them. Hence, leaders who are highly political in nature, cannot demonstrate trusted leadership. Responsibility comes from the presence of trust and the absence of fear.

This article is based on the famous book The Trusted Leader and profesional experience.