With the trust of your employees and colleagues, you can accomplish amazing things. Trust generates commitment. It generates energy. It encourages people to think for themselves, speak up with confidence, and assume greater responsibility. It eliminates the stress and waste associated with self-protective behaviors. When others trust you and believe you have their best interests at heart, they can be a better version of themselves. Everyone wins. So how does a leader build trust? Here are eight steps that will help you become a trusted leader able to accomplish amazing things.
Since publishing The Clarity Papers a year ago, my business has really changed. My traditional core is in greater demand, as you would expect: Clients who want me to come in and lead their teams to greater clarity and better results, whether strategic planning, solving complex problems, or increasing the team’s ability to work together honestly and effectively. Executive coaching clients who work with me one-on-one as their trusted advisor to unlock their insights, challenge their assumptions, and enhance their ability to manage the host of decisions and situations they face with greater confidence and integrity. Keynote addresses that transform audiences into fans of clarity. What’s new:
You don’t get to the top by being lazy. It takes a lot of hard, careful work. You need to be thorough and avoid mistakes. At the same time, you need to keep your eye on the big picture so you know when to push back and change course. You also have to be alert to your environment and know who can be relied upon and who needs help or watching. By the time you’ve earned a long series of promotions, you’ve made ultra competence your habit. That’s great! Congratulations! Now it’s time to stop that. It’s time to be lazier!
When I sat down with three executives at a large international bank in London, I got an earful of frustrations. Determined, hard-working, ambitious people, who would like to accomplish more faster, are susceptible to frustration. It’s only natural. It is also the reason they were talking with me.
There is a formula for providing effective feedback. It is really pretty simple and many people know about it. Recently, however, I discovered a common and fatal flaw in the way most people apply that formula. The Feedback Formula The formula involves pointing out a specific, observable behavior and ensuring the other person understands the impact of that behavior. “When you {did/said a particular factual, observable thing}, {it made me/us/the company feel/think/suffer a negative impact}.” Once you’ve made your point, it is time to listen and understand the other person’s perspective on what happened and why. With this new, mutual understanding, you can work together to figure out how to prevent a recurrence. To make this work, you have to:
A client of mine was told confidentially by a third party that he was picky. That’s it. That’s all he was given. The messenger didn’t want to reveal the source and so my client was left with nothing to go on. Few people consider being picky a virtue. Especially my client, who was new to the job. When he told me about this, he had fashioned no fewer than three detailed theories about what he might have done and with whom that could have possibly led to this disparaging label. What a waste!
During the opening rounds of a pickleball tournament, I played with seven different partners. I’d played with some of them before. Others I’d never even met. In order to get a lot of games in without delays, the organizers set time limits on the games. I don’t think any of us had a clue as to how long our games usually took, but we did know that the points we scored in each game would accrue to our individual tournament scores. Thus, not finishing exacted a big penalty. No one wanted to be caught down 2-8 when the bell sounded while someone on the next court walked away with 11 points for finishing the game. This combination of competition and time pressure was pretty nerve-racking. It also provided the opportunity for me to compare the way my different partners reacted to the pressure. The best partners not only helped us win by hitting great shots and chasing down lops, they also helped me play my best by:
After completing individual interviews with the executive team of a new client, it was clear to me that one of the things we have to work on is what happens when people do and don’t achieve established objectives. Simultaneously, my friend and colleague Andy Bass from the UK published an article that includes a really nice tool for evaluating the factors that motivate and demotivate.
In a recent article of mine, “This Is Your Only Life. Are You Putting Yourself First?,” I encourage you to put yourself first because doing so not only makes you healthier mentally, physically, and emotionally, but it also makes you more productive and effective. One reader responded by saying the ideas were nice and simple in theory, but not realistic. He blamed the “work landscape” for making them impossible. I thought that reaction might be quite common and, thus, worthy of discussion. There are three problems with this reader’s response: