"I look for three things in hiring people. The first is personal integrity, the second is intelligence, and the third is a high energy level. But, if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you."
Warren Buffett
I recently read an article about the current prime minister and treasurer of my country (Australia), sub-titled, "20 Tries for 20 failures". While in opposition, these two political leaders had identified twenty areas where they believed the then current government had failed. However, under their leadership, the article proved that in each of those areas their government was performing worse than the previous one!
It's but one example of how trust in public leadership has eroded significantly in recent years, dramatically shortening the shelf life of leaders. Another political leader was recently forced to resign because he claimed under oath to have never received a bottle of Grange as a gift from someone. It was clearly a lapse in memory - but it cost him the top spot because it destroyed his ability to be trusted. If he couldn't remember a gift of that significance, what other "memory lapses" was he guilty of?
I'm sure that anyone reading this can share an example of when they had lost trust in someone they followed. And the media reminds us almost daily of the conduct of people from all walks of life who betray trust on many levels - whether it's extremist terrorist plots that have been foiled, or shonky businesses, to jilted lovers.
In spite of that, trust is not only possible, but vital to being an effective leader.
Gallup's research has found that the chance of employees being engaged at work when they do not trust the company's leaders to be one in twelve. The odds of engagement rise to higher than 50% if they trust the leadership.
Most people when asked to define trust end up saying something along the lines of the former CEO of GE, Jack Welch: "You know it when you feel it".
Words like integrity and honesty are what most often come to mind. And while they go some way to providing a definition, trust is so much more.
We've always known that trust is important, but its bottom line impact was rarely quantified.
In a study of eight automakers in the US, South Korea and Japan conducted in 2002, almost 350 customer and supplier relationships were surveyed. The buyers who were most trusted had costs six times lower than the costs of those least trusted. The least trusted companies were also the least profitable.
The study also found that the most trusted companies increased information sharing. So trusting behaviours led to more trust being given.
In terms of books specifically dedicated to Trust, there's a couple worth getting hold of.
For the socio-political view, Francis Fukuuyma's Trust put forward the view that the wealth of nations and their ability to be competitive is directly linked to the level of trust that exists within the society. In an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, Fukuyama argues that only societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.
From the societal to the personal (and back again), Stephen M.R. Covey (the son of the famous Stephen R. Covey who wrote the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), published his ground breaking book The Speed Of Trust just over ten years later.
Confirming the study cited above, Covey proved that when trust is high, speed of execution is also high, thus lowering cost. Conversely, when trust is low, speed of execution is also low and the cost is high.
He defined the concepts of Trust Taxes and Dividends and busted many trust myths. He identified five "Waves of Trust" - self, relationship, organisational, market and societal - along with how to build credibility, what behaviours build trust and build it internally and externally with organisations.
Six years later, he followed up with Smart Trust where he outlined five action steps to operate with high trust in a low trust world. They're worth repeating here:
- Choose to Believe in Trust
- Start with Self
- Declare Your Intent...and Assume Positive Intent in Others
- Do What You Say You're Going to Do
- Lead Out in Extending Trust to Others
All good stuff - and for something team leader specific, in Patrick Lencioni's business fable The Five Dysfunctions of Team, he cites absence of trust as the first of the five dysfunctions. Interestingly, three of the other four - lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results - also measurably decrease trust within a team.
Whether you subscribe to Rath & Clifton's How Full is Your Bucket? model, or Stephen R. Covey's Emotional Bank Account metaphor (where one withdrawal required twenty deposits to re-balance the scales), the point is that you need to continually be relating to your team in ways that build trust, or be at risk of passively creating a low trust environment.
Because trust is built through actions based on intentions, it's no surprise that when you have high trust, it doesn't need to be talked about. Whereas when there's low trust, it's almost ALL people will talk about in some form or another.
The world has changed dramatically in how trust operates. As Dov Seidman puts it in his landmark book How:
"…in our hyper-connected, hyper-transparent world, there is no longer such a thing as private behaviour. For better or worse, everything that happens can now be forwarded, tweeted, and blogged about. We all have unprecedented power to see...into the characters of the individuals who comprise and lead organisations. We can evaluate not just what they do, but how they do it...advances in technology have connected us faster than we have developed human frameworks to understand each other."
The key takeway? As a team leader, there's nowhere to hide. While trust is based on both your character and your competence, relationship is key. If you have a close working relationship with your team and do something that unintentionally hurts trust, you can often repair it quickly. No relationship, and it's a lot more effort to repair the damage.
So never stop building trust. Build it as though your life depends on it. Because the life and ongoing health of your team depend on it.