Seven Keys to Higher Trust Working

There are a lot of Chief Executives around who seem to have persuaded themselves that to be a good CEO they’ve got to become very different from how they are now. If you ask them how good they think they are as a CEO it won’t be long before they’re telling you that fundamentally they don’t feel particularly adequate for the job.

Looking at your own inadequacies might be fine for your sense of humility. But if you want your people to trust you, forget it.

People can only really trust you if they think you’re being REAL with them. And you can only be real with others if and when you feel pretty comfortable in your own skin.

Of course, top performing CEOs always want to be better than they are. However good you might be, there’s still bound to be a part of you that is imagining how you might become that bit better.

Being okay with yourself as you are is not about being complacent. It’s about being able to say to yourself:

“Here I am, with my own particular set of shortcomings and weaknesses, most of which I think I know about and quite a lot of which I think I’m doing something about – and basically I’m OKAY and making a pretty good fist of this job and whilst I’m sure there are people on this earth who could do it better than me, I love it – or I’m learning to love it! – and I give myself to it 100%.”

Being okay as you are. You can’t succeed as a high trust leader until you’ve challenged yourself on this one. It can be a struggle, which is why you might need to assert this as an act of faith – in yourself.

You’re okay. More than okay.

A bit dysfunctional at times? Of course. The best leaders are the most dysfunctional. Seriously. Every gift and virtue that you bring to your job will have its own downsides.

You know you have some “issues” that need to be managed, as do we all. What you need to let go of is any notion that you’re not good enough, because if you can’t see yourself as good enough you definitely won’t see anyone else as good enough.

You ARE okay. And you know that you need to believe this for others to be able to invest their trust in you.

Strong leaders need a clear sense of what they stand for. And they need to communicate this to those around them.

For some CEOs, this means that you need to work at making it easier for others to “read” you.

For other CEOs who are naturally open, it means that you need to keep on with being open and occasionally wearing your heart on your sleeve.

However much passion and openness and generosity of spirit you might have, you also need to be very clear with yourself and those around you that you are never too proud to be wrong.

If they think you’re about to take a decision that would be a mistake and they don’t have the guts to tell you, they need to know that you will think less of them for that. A lot less.

To you, a core part of trust is about others in your team respecting your passion and having the confidence – and bravery – to take you on.

If at any time they think that you are not open to being proved wrong, or changing your mind, then you absolutely need them to challenge you on THIS.

This is here because telling yourself you’re never too proud to be wrong is fine, but not enough.

One of the most common one-liners I’ve heard from CEOs in all sorts of industries and businesses is “Not enough people challenge me”.

“How many do?” I ask.

They often mention one person in their immediate Executive team.

“Who else?” Silence.

“When did you last say at a meeting with your Exec Directors that you WANT them to challenge you more?” Longer silence.

“Or how about the Board?” At this stage they tend to start laughing.

Unless you give your team permission to take you on, they won’t.

Deep down, you know that.

It is rather an easy option – isn’t it – to complain about not being challenged when you hardly go out of your way to encourage your team to mount the challenges that you say you’re missing!

The simple fact is that trusting others more to follow their instinct and take you on when they disagree with you is as much about trusting yourself as it is about trusting them.

Because of the laws of hierarchy, those at the top need to bend over backwards to reassure those who see themselves as “beneath” them, even if it is just by one tier, that you WANT them to challenge you more and won’t dismiss them as “difficult” and “not team players” if they do.

You know, as do they, that you retain the prerogative at any time to say:

“I realise you don’t rate this idea and I’m really grateful for the way we’ve been able to brainstorm it and take it apart. Nevertheless, I want to follow my instinct on this and go ahead with Plan A and I'm banking on you to help make it a great success.”

You’re paid the money that you’re on because at times you’re expected to back your own judgement call even if and when some of those around you disagree.

But you always need to KNOW that if and when they disagree they will tell you and want to work through the arguments with you.

They need to know that you will respect and value them MORE for being able to challenge you to your face.

This sort of trust needs to be grown and encouraged by YOU.

• “Guys, if you ever disagree with me you’ve got to tell me to my face, there and then, and we’ll thrash it out together.”

You can’t say that often enough.

When I think of the Chief Executives I’ve got to know who are leading high trust, high performing businesses, I’d say that one of the characteristics they share in common is that members of their teams tend to find them rather possessive towards their talents and skills as well as ambitious on their behalf.

As CEOs, they want to see their Directors stretched and fulfilled in the business and want to keep for them as long as they can. They also make a point of saying every now and then that if they ever feel they’ve outgrown the business it will be time for them to move on – and the organisation will be fine because its culture is about everyone being important and special and no-one being indispensable.

If you put people first and trust their inherent goodwill and decency and loyalty, of course you can be ambitious for them in the broadest terms possible.

They know that you live your belief that the organisation is the people who work for it. This is why they find it so easy to trust you and be ambitious for you, just as they see you as being ambitious for them.

Two-way trust and all that.

High trust working is about relationship-building, it’s about engagement, it’s about taking some risks in an open way and on the basis that some will work out and some won’t – and when they don’t the level of trust among the top team is such that this can be managed and no-one will resort to playing the “blame game”.

Not hiding from hard truths. Never becoming so process-driven that you stifle your individuality and creativity. These are the hallmarks of a high trust leader and they’re what you require of your staff. And yet they’re inherently threatening to the HR practices in many organisations that tend to over-emphasise the importance of conflict-avoidance and creating formal processes for trying to contain conflict in case it can’t ultimately be avoided.

I have now had a number of moments with CEOs who have told me what they wanted to do in managing an extremely problematic member of staff and then added the words “I’ve been told I can’t do that, I’ve got to do it the HR way”.

“Oh”, I say, “I thought you were the Chief Executive and HR work for you. They’re treating you as if you’re simply a party to a dispute, which you’re not. And if you don’t do what you believe to be right in this situation how can you expect members of your team to do the same?”

There is a default mode in many HR Departments that leads them to advise the CEO to pursue what they regard as the lowest risk course of action, without the issue of business performance even being taken into account in this calculation. Their advice is valid and useful, of course, but it only provides one part of the picture and a high trust CEO needs to keep an eye on the whole picture.

If your overriding commitment is to driving up performance, there needs to be a sense in which the “HR way” is often the last resort in situations where you are at odds with a member of your senior staff. As I explain in the Guide for CEOs on Managing Under-Performance, there is so much more that you should be doing first to root out under-performance before triggering the defensive and self-justifying behaviours that nearly always come to the fore when a formal HR-led process for assessing under-performance gets underway.

If you want to move something on, there’s nothing better than an open conversation with the team concerned in the spirit of “we have a problem that we need to solve, together”.

Keep it out there, keep it about business and not personality – and don’t let it get stuck!

I include this one because it’s not obvious to some, and indeed wasn’t at all obvious to me for many years.

For nearly 25 years I have facilitated all sorts of annual “Strategic Awaydays” for Boards and I’m very grateful to them for having been an important source of income! And yet there’s a real sense of “datedness” about so many discussions to do with strategy.

First off, they can imply that so long as a Board can agree on how they want the business to develop, that’s the brief that should guide the Executive team for the next year. “We decide, you deliver...”

Yet in more and more industries and sectors, the pace of change is such that strategies need to be rethought every quarter, if not every month! Increasingly, the best strategy is to listen as hard as possible to what customers and the market are saying and be prepared continually to adjust your market offers to “delight” as many potential buyers as possible.

Secondly, any business claiming to be committed to “excellence” and customer quality knows that standard-setting is all about the detail of the product and its delivery to the customer. This is why the CEOs of successful businesses need to acknowledge the importance of “detail” to the wider success of the business.

Thirdly (and this might sound like a heresy to some), we have a culture across the large corporates and much of the public sector that over-rates the ability to “think strategically”. It’s no surprise that there are more than a few CEOs who act as if the detail of implementation and delivery isn’t really their concern so long as they’re on top of the strategy as agreed with the Board.

I’ve now seen a number of CEOs glaze over when the discussion has turned from broad strategy to how some aspect of it might best be implemented in detail. Almost without exception, I then found that they weren’t generally trusted by their middle managers and sometimes also by members of their own team. Why? Because what they call “detail” is the heart of the work that these people do and they feel demeaned to be told it’s in a box that’s no longer really worthy of the attention of their CEO.

Strange, isn’t it, because every successful innovator knows that innovation is in the detail.

CEOs who command the trust of their people have respect and time for detail as well as broad strategy. They don’t switch off once the latest version of the corporate strategy has done the rounds.

The simple fact is that old distinctions between strategy and operations don’t help nowadays. The trusted leader is interested and engaged with them both.

So often, those CEOs that give time to talking through ideas with their operations and implementation teams are the ones who say that they have lots of ideas about new products and income-generation for the future, because they came from their own staff.

Your people have the answers to your future. They just need to trust you enough to share them with you.

Apart from being trusted as leaders, the top performers are very effective as diggers. So often it’s not their inventiveness or foresight that marks them out, it’s their curiosity and perseverance. They ask the questions and keep on asking them until they get the answers that they can do something with.

If you have skimmed the page on challenging facilitation, you might have noticed that the first groundrule that I always suggest when I work with a Board is that “we assume the best of each other”. This is because assuming the best is in many ways the single most important tool open to a CEO who is committed to being a high trust, high performing leader.

It makes it possible for you to have a difficult conversation with an individual Director, or the whole of your team, and say some really challenging things without quickly slipping into one of those exchanges in which there’s far too much defensive self-justification.

Suppose you have been on leave for two weeks and come back to hear a number of comments about the Exec team not having got on well while you were away and let themselves become distracted by a number of “turf wars”. You’re disappointed and more than a little angry, and say you want an hour with the team the next day.

You know that you need to raise this as an issue. If you start of by just offloading the anger that you’re feeling about this, you might get silence or maybe one or two defensive comments (“You are right, BUT...”)

Would this enable the team to ensure that they don’t make the same mistake next year or the year after next? Doubtful.

If you are assuming the best of your team, before the meeting you need to find a way of having a few minutes on your own so that you can bring the team to mind and

• picture them as you know they CAN BE: as good as any team that you’re going to get.

It’s really important that you picture them standing in their full potential.

As you think of them, at their very best, remind yourself of how seriously impressive they are and how proud you are of that.

When they arrive for the meeting, don’t pull your punches in what you have to say. If they’re going to trust you as someone who says it straight, that’s what you need to do.

Because you’re in a state of assuming the best, you’re talking to them as a group that you really believe in, who you know to be among the very best in your sector and your part of the country.

In this frame of mind, you can say almost anything and it will be fine. Seriously.

From your tone and the way you’re talking, they will know how highly you regard them and how committed you are to them as your top team. Because of this, whatever you say won’t be a problem and they’re almost certain to AGREE that they could have been so much better than they were during the previous fortnight.

The generosity and warmth in your tone make it possible for this not to be a big deal.

As a result, by the end of the meeting you should be in a position where you feel that you and the team have dealt with and sorted out a significant problem. Problem discussed, problem sorted.

Assuming the best is an attitude of mind.

Whenever I do a facilitation with a Board or an Executive team, during the hour before it starts I make myself spend a few minutes picturing that group, all of whom I’ve made a point of speaking to on the phone if I haven’t yet met them. I think through some of their aspirations and ambitions as they’ve described them to me.

In this way, I make sure that it’s their aspirations and their potential for greatness that I’m thinking about as I walk into the room.

I know that I must remain in this frame of mind if I am to support them in living their greatness.

Assuming the best doesn’t guarantee anything, but it does give your top team the best chance possible to maximise their potential.

What more can a CEO want for their top team than that?