Begin with Trust

The thesis of this article is that the core to empowering leadership is to build bonds of trust with those you support, and talks about how to analyze causes of low trust. This is reading material for our next meeting – not very long, and it is excerpted from another longer article (which I’m happy to send you if you’re interested). 

We think of trust as precious, and yet it’s the basis for almost everything we do as civilized people. Trust is the reason we’re willing to exchange our hard-earned paychecks for goods and services, pledge our lives to another person in marriage, cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. We rely on laws and contracts as safety nets, but even they are ultimately built on trust in the institutions that enforce them. We don’t know that justice will be served if something goes wrong, but we have enough faith in the system that we’re willing to make high-stakes deals with relative strangers. 

Trust is also one of the most essential forms of capital a leader has. Building trust, however, often requires thinking about leadership from a new perspective. The traditional leadership narrative is all about you: your vision and strategy; your ability to make the tough calls and rally the troops; your talents, your charisma, your heroic moments of courage and instinct. But leadership really isn’t about you. It’s about empowering other people as a result of your presence, and about making sure that the impact of your leadership continues into your absence. 

That’s the fundamental principle we’ve learned in the course of dedicating our careers to making leaders and organizations better. Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for your people to fully realize their own capacity and power. And that’s true not only when you’re in the trenches with them but also when you’re not around and even—this is the cleanest test—when you’ve permanently moved on from the team. We call it empowerment leadership. The more trust you build, the more possible it is to practice this kind of leadership. 

THE CORE DRIVERS OF TRUST

So how do you build up stores of this foundational leadership capital? In our experience, trust has three core drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they believe they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they feel that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers. 

THE TRUST TRIANGLE

Trust has three drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy. When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of them. To build trust as a leader, you first need to figure out which driver you “wobble” on. 

People don’t always realize how the information (or more often, the misinformation) that they’re broadcasting may undermine their own trustworthiness. What’s worse, stress tends to amplify the problem, causing people to double down on behaviors that make others skeptical. For example, they might unconsciously mask their true selves in a job interview, even though that’s precisely the type of less-than-fully-authentic behavior that reduces their chance of being hired. 

The good news is that most of us generate a stable pattern of trust signals, which means a small change in behavior can go a long way. In moments when trust is broken, or fails to get any real traction, it’s usually the same driver that has gone wobbly on us—authenticity, empathy, or logic. We call this driver your “trust wobble.” In simple terms, it’s the driver that’s most likely to fail you. 

Everybody, it turns out, has a trust wobble. To build trust as a leader, you first need to figure out what yours is. 

BUILD IT, AND THEY WILL COME

To identify your wobble, think of a recent moment when you were not trusted as much as you wanted to be. Maybe you lost an important sale or didn’t get a stretch assignment. Maybe someone simply doubted your ability to execute. With that moment in mind, do something hard: Give the other person in your story the benefit of the doubt. Let’s call that person your “skeptic.” Assume that your skeptic’s reservations were valid and that you were the one responsible for the breakdown in trust. This exercise only works if you own it. 

If you had to choose from our three trust drivers, which would you say went wobbly on you in this situation? Did your skeptic feel you were misrepresenting some part of yourself or your story? If so, that’s an authenticity problem. Did your skeptic feel you might be putting your own interests first? If so, that’s an empathy problem. Did your skeptic question the rigor of your analysis or your ability to execute on an ambitious plan? If so, that’s a logic problem. 

Now stand back and try to look at your pattern of wobbles across multiple incidents. Pick three or four interactions that stand out to you, for whatever reason, and do a quick trust diagnostic for each one. What does your typical wobble seem to be? Does the pattern change under stress or with different kinds of stakeholders? For example, do you wobble on one trait with your direct reports but on a different one with people who have authority over you? That’s not uncommon. 

This exercise works best if you bring at least one person along for your diagnostic ride, ideally someone who knows you well. Sharing your analysis can be clarifying—even liberating—and will help you test and refine your hypothesis. In our experience, about 20% of self-assessments need a round of revision, so choose a partner who can keep you honest. Consider going back and testing your analysis directly by speaking openly about it with your skeptic. This conversation alone can be a powerful way to rebuild trust. When you take responsibility for a wobble, you reveal your humanity (authenticity) and analytic chops (logic) while communicating your commitment to the relationship (empathy). 

Longer article: https://hbr.org/2020/05/begin-with-trust