Ron’s Short Review: Lack of Trust adds a stiff tax to the operation of an organization.
Source: Alan Levine, Creative Commons
And what does Feedback, Truth and Trust have to do with speed?
In an interview with Daniel Roth, Executive Editor at LinkedIn, Jack Welch said
You always want your people to know where they stand. See, one of the things about appraisals for people, appraisals shouldn’t be every year. The world changed in a year, they’ve changed in a year. You’ve got to let them know, ‘Here’s what you’re doing right, here’s what you can do to improve’. And you’ve got to be on them all the time.”
Leadership today is all about two words: It’s all about truth and trust.
When they trust you, you’ll get truth. And if you get truth, you get speed. If you get speed, you’re going to act. That’s how it works.
Feedback
In earlier posts, I’ve talked about the origins of the word ‘feedback’ forming in the early days of rocket development when the pioneers built rockets with enough thrust but couldn’t hit a target. They had to spend more effort developing what they termed “feedback” so they could adjust the thrusters of the rockets and actually hit their target. Now think about that a minute. If they had waited until the rocket finished its flight, determined how far it had missed the target and then built corrections into the next flight, in the end, the process wouldn’t be very efficient.
But, that’s exactly what happens in many corporations today. Annual targets are set then checked at the dreaded annual review. Did the employee hit the target or not? No help along the way, no feedback mechanism adjusting the thrusters. No chance to make any mid-course adjustments or even agree that the target moved or changed.
Throw out the annual appraisals. Regular and frequent feedback sessions are the only way to get meaningful results and generate speed from your team.
Truth
Getting to the “truth” of the matter is difficult if you assume you know the truth and everyone else has their perspective (implying perspective is different from the truth). We all have different perspectives and part of building a great team is understanding that these perspectives are strong and powerful and formed by our experiences, beliefs, values, and goals. A humble leader understands that outstanding and highly effective people will often have different perspectives and it’s our jobs as leaders to get all those perspectives on the table, listen, learn, be curious and in the long run align our perspectives so we’re all pulling in the same direction.
Trust
Trust is the key element to all of this. Annual appraisals don’t build trust, regular feedback builds trust. Demanding that your perspective is the only true way of looking at an issue doesn’t build trust. Trust is built through humility, development, focus, commitment, compassion, integrity, peacemaking and endurance.
Speed
If you want your team to act effectively with speed, build trust. It’s the only fuel with enough energy to win the race.
Amy Cuddy has written at least three very profound books:
- When They Trust You, They Hear You: A Modern Guide for Speaking to Any Audience
- Leadership Presence – Part of HBR Emotional Intelligence Series (14 Books)
- Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges
Amy says the first two things people want to know when they first meet you are:
- Can I trust this person?
- Can I respect this person?
Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence, respectively.
Warmth is not measured on corporate evaluations
I often run an experiment with teams where half the team gets a list of characteristics found in a fictitious person. The other half of the team gets a similar list of characteristics on another fictitious person.
Both lists contain words such as:
- Intelligent
- Skillful
- Industrious
- Determined
- Practical
- As well as a few other descriptions
There is one (and only one) difference in the two lists:
- One list contains the word “Warm”
- The other list contains the word “Cold”
I then have the whole team vote on characteristics such as:
- generous vs. ungenerous
- unhappy vs. happy
- reliable vs. unreliable
- frivolous vs. serious
- imaginative vs. hardheaded
- dishonest vs. honest
- There are 16 total comparisons
(Remember that the lists are identical except for the words warm and cold.)
The group that has the word “warm” in their descriptor attributes the more positive characteristic to their fictitious person.
The group with the word “cold” in their descriptor attributes the more negative characteristic to their fictitious person.
Is a person warm or cold? This one factor will set our expectations for that person and can be the difference of our trust factor! Be a warm person. It pays rewards.
Respect or Competence
In the book, Speed of Trust, author Stephen M. R. Covey lists four characteristics that need to be present before we trust someone. This list has often helped my consulting when there is obvious (at least to me) mistrust on a team. However, when I ask the team if they trust each other, the answers are almost always a positive yes.
But when I break down trust to this subset of characteristics, there is usually one where people have a concern. “Yes I trust the person but….”
The list is
- Integrity – Is the person always the same person no matter who they are talking with or what the circumstances are?
- Intent – This one usually revolves around the issue of what is best for the team or company vs. what is best for the individual. Is their intent focused on the best for others or the best for themselves?
- Capabilities – The person may be sharp and accomplished but do they have the experiences necessary to work through the situation they face? Are they capable?
- Results – Has the person actually produced positive results.? Often people talk a good line or more likely have a list of reasons why something didn’t work. Did they actually produce results in spite of the difficulties they faced?
When you break down the question of trust into these four components, it’s easier to deal with and identify.
Trust/Respect
Is trust more important than competency? Or is competency the supreme measure of success and reliability? If you think competency is the superior measurement, you need to read a chapter from Deep Change by Robert Quinn. The chapter is titled “Tyranny of Competence”.
Amy Cuddy says “But while competence is highly valued, it is evaluated only after trust is established. And focusing too much on displaying your strength can backfire”.
Be trustworthy first! It’s the only way your competency will have value.
I know, the actual quote says “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” The essence of the proverb is that you can give someone an opportunity but you can’t force them to take it.
I’ve had a couple of horse-related experiences lately that got me thinking.
Equestrians
I have two granddaughters who are both equestrians. I was watching one granddaughter take her horse through the paces in the arena and then cleaning and grooming him afterward. During my time in the arena, I watched as she guided the horse through different patterns and speeds. What amazed me was that I couldn’t discern what she was doing to get the horse to speed up, slow down, turn left or right. It was almost as if the horse knew what to do and she was just along for the ride.
After her ride, she was washing, cooling down and grooming her horse. Once again, I was amazed to see this petite young woman work around this half-ton animal with no concern for getting kicked, shoved or bitten. You could see the complete trust between them. So that was my first clue. Trust!
After she released her horse to the pasture, I asked her how she got the horse to work through the different maneuvers without doing much in the saddle. Her answer was simple. “I just shift my weight and the horse knows that I want to do.” Trust and understanding!
Dallas the Leadership Horse
An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Dallas the Leadership Horse Glues Teams Back Together.”
The article was about a company called WorkHorse that hosts team-building workshops. One story was of a team that was given the assignment to get the horses to move into a pre-defined circle in a certain amount of time. After no success and with just three minutes to go in the exercise, one of the team members dispensed with the pleasantries, walked up to Dallas the Leadership Horse and began scolding him. “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do!” she said. Then she leaned against him and started pushing.
Kristen de Marco who founded WorkHorse, says she’s seen this scenario play out before. “Under pressure, some humans resort to treating equines like recalcitrant office workers, issuing orders, making threats, dangling incentives, even shoving them. None of it works.”
She says that horses can sense when a stranger’s energy doesn’t feel genuine, or fails to line up with their body language, or conveys something other than trust and respect. If you’re bossy, overconfident or inauthentic, horses just tune you out. “They can’t read your resume. They only care about who you are in the moment.”
Leadership and Teams
The bold emphasis in the previous paragraph is mine. But look at the words.
- Under pressure
- Genuine
- Trust and Respect
- Who you are in the moment
They can’t read your resume! They only care who you are in the moment.
This blog post was supposed to be a break from the Team outline that we’ve been working on since the first of the year. But it seems to have fallen right back in step with the lessons we’ve been learning along the way.
Who are you in the moment? Genuine? Authentic? Trusting? Respectful?
How are you treating the other person in the moment? Being genuine and respectful is the only means by which leadership and teamwork are successful.
Teams are at the heart of great performance, great happiness, and the best memories. These blogs are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle Used five words:
- Truth
- Love
- Purpose
- Beauty
- Unity
Love (Respect)
The Greeks had several words that are all translated into the English word “love.” The Greek word for Love that Aristotle used had nothing to do with emotions or the feeling of love that we have for another person. This word referred to treating the other person with respect. It’s about what we do, not how we feel.
As human beings, we seem to have an innate sense that someone respects us or not. Great teams require great respect (love) for each other.
In unpacking the concept of Respect (or love), we will look at the following concepts over the next couple of posts:
- Three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
- Patience
- Kindness
- Envy
- Anger
- Grudges
In our last post, we looked at Psychological Safety (both Truth and Respect being at their highest level). Research has indicated that Psychological Safety is one of the best indicators of high team performance.
This post will start a series digging deeper into the concept of Respect. How do we define it? How do we use it?
Humility, Development, and Compassion
These are three of the eight concepts that we learn from my book, Trust Me are present with great leadership. Let’s look at each one and see how they relate to Respect.
Humility
When someone does not demonstrate humility, it’s hard to believe they have respect for others. Lack of humility becomes self-focused. When someone is self-focused, they are not “other” focused. Humility means that I have an interest in your opinion. Steven Covey listed one of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as “Seek to understand first before being understood.” When someone wants to know what I think before sharing with me what they think, I feel respected. I feel like my opinion counts. I’m more interested in their opinion because they were interested in my opinion first. I feel respected.
Development
When a leader believes it’s worth their time to grow and develop me, I feel respected. Leaders dedicated to development will provide straight and meaningful feedback.
I once worked with a client who told me their boss was a wonderful person, always positive and encouraging but not very useful. They went on to explain that all of their performance reviews were great with nothing but good feedback. However, it gave them nothing to work with. There were no suggestions for growth or betterment. Therefore, it just wasn’t very useful.
Positive Development means straightforward feedback about what’s working and what is not working with suggestions for development and follow-up on efforts. Taking the time to develop people demonstrates respect.
Compassion
I would often get negative comments about this topic when we first published Trust Me. Many managers would express the sentiment that they were not running a charitable organization; they were running a business and business was rough and tumble, not soft and cushy!
I started dealing with this question by asking these rough and tumble leaders about their doctors. Did they like doctors that looked at the lab results only and treated them as numbers on a graph or did they like doctors that related to them as human beings first and then talked to them about how the clinical numbers might be affecting their quality of life. They all like doctors who were professionally competent but treated them as human beings first and foremost. The same is true with your teammates.
You want a teammate who tells it to you straight but knows you as a human being first. We are not motivated or encouraged by people who treat us as a human ‘doing’ (relating to what we do rather than who we are) rather than a human being. If we’re treated as human beings (which means we’re respected) first, we are much more likely to respond to our fullest.
Patience, Kindness, Envy, Anger, and Grudges.
These are concepts that we’ll look at in our next post about Respect.
Can your team speak freely?
Leadership today is all about two words: It’s all about truth and trust.
When they trust you, you’ll get truth. And if you get truth, you get speed. If you get speed, you’re going to act. That’s how it works.
You and others are willing to work long and hard to accomplish goals. However, as we’ve seen from the stories in recent posts, our efforts can become very scattered and focused on the “urgent.” We need to build accurate, open, reliable feedback systems.
A team leader needs to create a learning environment in which every team member is appreciated, listened to, and respected. In this kind of environment, the opinions of team members are fully explored and understood and are incorporated into the decision-making process. The team actively learns from all members who express their positions and opinions, and as a result, the team is stronger and more efficient.
In the end it will be the ability to endure through the challenges, criticisms, and doubts that distinguishes the great leaders. But if you have staked your reputation on a wrong or unachievable goal, enduring through the challenges will only take your team or organization down the wrong path. What keeps you from that wrong path is good solid feedback. But good solid feedback is hard to come by, especially the higher you climb in an organization.
The power of effective feedback
People don’t like to give the boss bad news or news that doesn’t agree with the boss’s stated position. But without it comes only failure.
Effective Feedback. It’s not just something you ask for. It’s a cherished gift. It’s a wonderful reward for building a trusting organization or team.
An effective feedback apparatus starts with humility. Humble leaders create an atmosphere where feedback from others is desired and honestly requested. Leaders who are focused on growing their people build that growth on feedback. When people know that a leader is committed and wants honest feedback to help reach stated goals, they are more likely to provide the open and honest feedback required. Compassion, integrity, peacemaking—upcoming chapters that will all lead to an atmosphere and culture that is open to and thrives on honest and timely feedback.
The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world has become more interconnected than ever. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity are swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance, bad things happen.
Over the last few of blog posts, I’ve introduced that Balance is the key ingredient of great decision-making, health, and happiness (human needs). Today let’s explore Human Needs.
A couple of years ago I wrote a short post on human needs described by Tony Robbins. I’m sure Tony didn’t invent these needs, they have been known and observed through human history as being part of who we are as humans. But, Tony has done a nice job of observing and describing the drives behind each.
The six (in my words) are:
- Certainty—Uncertainty
- Belonging—Standing out
- Learning—Teaching
Certainty-Uncertainty
- I’ve watched corporate leaders attempt to boil down the big-data they need so that it fits on their laptop or tablet. They are searching for certainty and assume that if they have all the data at their fingertips they’ll always make the right decision. If that’s true, why do we need the human element at all? Just let the big-data make the decision. Leadership is dealing with the ambiguity of the situation and making the decision despite the fact you don’t have all the data. Decisions are about the future. The future is difficult (impossible) to know. Life is full of ambiguity and people in general and good leaders are better at dealing with ambiguity than computers.
- Leadership is about not being certain about the future but also not being afraid. Balance.
Belonging-Standing Out
- This one is difficult to balance. I believe it takes a trusting team to accomplish. A great team encourages unique abilities, encourages them and helps develop But the goal is to serve the team, not the individual.
- Individuals have a difficult time accomplishing just the right balance without trusting feedback. One of our great American philosophers, George Carlin once said: Everyone driving faster than you are idiots. Everyone driving slower than you are Morons. Which means you are one or the other to all others on the road. Balance.
Learning – Teaching
- When both learning and teaching are taking place, both experiences are better. One of my clients explained to me that I provided the greatest value to them when I was teaching them about what I was learning. My energy and enthusiasm came through when I shared with them the insights of what I was learning through my reading and experiences. Balance
I started my career walking steel up to 200 feet in the air. No safety equipment. Just you, the breeze and balance. Up there, balance was life and death. Balance, Balance, Balance!
The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world has become more interconnected than ever. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity are swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance, bad things happen.
Over the last couple of blogs (Check out Balancing Act and High Wire), I’ve noted that Balance is the key ingredient of great decision-making, health, and happiness (human needs). Today let’s explore decision-making.
Myers-Briggs teaches us that human decision-making is a two-stage process of taking in information (Perceiving) and then making our decisions based on that perception. It has been my experience through 25+ years of team building and leadership development that we must keep those processes in balance.
My data is rather old (meaning more than a day at this point) but the last I remember seeing is that we create over 50,000 GB of data per second. I’ll let you look up what the size of that number really means.
The human mind can’t come anywhere near absorbing that much data (or even a fraction) every day to use in our decision-making processes. So, the mind needs to use shortcuts, models, and tricks to help us survive and make everyday decisions in our daily lives. Each of us uses a different method of taking in data related to a decision that we’re making. The two key areas that Myers-Briggs describes are:
- Sensing
- Facts
- Details
- Data
- What do we know in the present?
- What have we done so far?
- What are the next steps?
- Intuition
- Bigger picture
- Future
- Implications
- Where are we trying to go in the future?
- What will the possibilities be?
- What is the ultimate goal?
As you look at the written list you would likely agree that we need all that information in order to make a good, well-informed decision. The problem is that in our every day lives, our brain tends to focus on and give greater priority to either Sensing or Intuition. It takes a team and a good process to maintain a healthy balance. Without balance you’ll tend to be either too short-term or long-term focused. If this function isn’t balanced it can cause the business to fail.
Once the perceiving function is completed (and hopefully balanced) our “deciding” function kicks-in. Myers-Briggs identifies these as our Thinking and Feeling functions. A better way to think of these is logic and values. All too often in the business world, “feelings” are discounted as being too emotional. Decisions should be made on logic. But values are important to every organization. When values are violated, the culture begins to crumble, and the organization loses a sense of being. Logic and value must be balanced.
Just like on the high wire, goals cannot be met, and trust cannot be build when we lose our balance.
Balance, Balance, Balance.
In 1974 Phillppe Petit walked a tight rope between the World Trade Center buildings (the ones that came down during the terrorist attack). They were nearly 1,800 feet in the air.
In 2012, Nik Welenda walked a tight rope across Niagara Falls. While Nik’s wire was only about 180 feet in the air, that one seemed more difficult to me. Why, because beneath him the Niagara River was rushing over the falls. Everything was moving. This is not to diminish what Petit did. Both would be terrifying. But it just seems more difficult to me to maintain your balance when everything around you is moving.
I’ve walked structural steel. I’ve also walked over the catwalk of a dam with rushing water under me. Both were terrifying, but it was harder to maintain my balance over the moving water.
In my story about walking structural steel I progressed through three lessons from the experience:
- Figure out your goal and stay focused
- Reaching your goal requires trust
- Balance, Balance, Balance. Without balance you will neither reach your goal or build trust.
The world is becoming a very fast paced environment. With each step of increased travel velocity, the world had become more interconnected. With the advent of the internet and pipeline speed that velocity has become almost infinite in nature. It seems like a Niagara amount of information, data and connectivity is swirling around us every moment of every day. With each passing day it becomes more difficult for us to maintain our balance. Without balance bad things happen.
Over the next few blog posts I’m going to talk about balance with a focus on three key areas:
- Decision Making
- Stress and Health
- Human Needs
It seems that we are all living on the “High Wire” of life these days.
- How do we maintain our balance?
- Why is it necessary to maintain our balance?
- What happens when we lose our balance?
Balance, Balance, Balance.
