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BlogTrust Me

Treat Employees as Investors

by Ron Potter April 8, 2019

It is interesting to watch privately held companies that seek to go public. They hire IPO (Initial Public Offerings) coaches who work hard with the CEO, CFO, and COO to train them to attract investors. They work with these leaders to help them say the right things in order to sell their companies. They teach them which messages work and which do not.

My question:

“Why don’t companies do the same thing with employees?”

If you do a quick study on employee relations over the last several decades, we think you will discover that how employees are viewed and described has moved along a continuum from workers to commodities to assets. We do not believe that referring to employees as “assets” is a satisfactory description because so many leaders look at assets as disposable or upgradable. Leaders and companies would be more successful in building organizations if they thought of their employees as “investors.”

Leaders need to give their people the same compelling we’re-a-great-company-and-here’s-why-and-where-we-are-going reasons for success that are promoted to IPO investors or current stockholders.

Leaders need to ask:

“How can we get employees excited about what we are doing?”

This approach is basic to team building and goes beyond vision and mission. It’s a way to engage the greatest resource of people—their energy!

Alan Loy McGinnis, in his book Bringing Out the Best in People, tells us, “Talk may be cheap, but the right use of words can generate in your followers a commodity impossible to buy…hearts on fire.”

Isn’t that what all leaders want—team members with hearts ablaze for the company’s vision and goals? The leaders certainly want investors who are loyal, happy, and motivated to give resources. Treating your employees as investors will produce similar results.

Leaders and companies would be more successful in building organizations if they thought of employees as “investors.”

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BlogTrust Me

Humility and Endurance: The Two Pillars of Leadership

by Ron Potter March 25, 2019

My book Trust Me is centered on eight principles of successful leadership. What we call the “two pillars”—the key principles that support and are intertwined with the others—are humility and endurance. A leader who desires to build a great team must first become a leader of humility and endurance. Pride and despair always force leaders to choose incorrect methods and solutions.

It is difficult to build a team when you need to be the center of attention, the only voice, the only one with an idea, and the only one who can make a decision. It is also difficult to build a team when, at every sour turn, the team stumbles and fails or doesn’t learn from failure. Endurance means pushing through struggles together until the results are positive. Leaders, by the way they respond to crisis and chaos, often cause teams to quit sooner than necessary.

Understand, Accept, and Communicate Change

Since the 1980s—or earlier—the business world has begun to see the need for entirely new models of management in order to succeed in regaining and defending competitiveness in today’s world economy. The old paradigm of management that had guided the U.S. economy since the rise of the railroads and the large corporations of the Industrial Revolution no longer seemed to work. Firms struggled to remake themselves in order to be competitive. They followed the advice of many writers and consultants to become organizations that stepped away from Management by Objective and adopted a strategy of learning.

Today we live in a rapidly changing postindustrial society that is becoming increasingly complex and fluid. It is an environment that requires decision making and sometimes rapid change within organizations. Surviving and thriving in this rapidly changing landscape becomes a function of an organization’s ability to learn, grow, and break down institutional structures within the organization that impede growth. Organizations that are ideologically committed to growth and change will be at an advantage in the postindustrial era.

In his book Leading Change, John Kotter explains how leaders can effectively communicate change in their organizations. All of us at one time or another fully understand the confusion caused by change. Kotter writes,

Because the communication of vision [change] is often such a difficult activity, it can easily turn into a screeching, one-way broadcast in which useful feedback is ignored and employees are inadvertently made to feel unimportant. In highly successful change efforts, this rarely happens, because communication always becomes a two-way endeavor.

Even more important than two-way discussion are methods used to help people answer all the questions that occur during times of change and chaos. Clear, simple, often-repeated communication that comes from multiple sources and is inclusive of people’s opinions and fears is extremely helpful and productive.

Humility and endurance guide a ship experiencing change and chaos. A leader who builds a team, but their leadership style, upon the foundation of humility and endurance will see their team through difficult days.

Humility and Endurance quote

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BlogTrust Me

Peacemaking On Your Team

by Ron Potter February 25, 2019

Peacemaking Leaders

The times demand that leaders bring peace to their organizations and teams. Peacemaking can be rare in our cultural climate, but that doesn’t have to be true in your company.

A peacemaking leader is a leader who:

  • seeks to create calm within the storms of business.
  • understands the positive role of conflict in building a solid team.
  • is creative, energy-filled calm when employees can feel under siege and at the mercy of chaos.
  • who stays steady in the turbulence and work with them to create new answers, new plans, and a new future.

Planting Seeds of Peace

This kind of leader can bring about peace by making meaning out of the mess. The times demand that flexibility and humility replace rigid systems and pride.

The predictable environment is outdated, but to ensure quality, solid staff relationships, and employee achievement, leaders must embrace the peacemaker role and bring meaning to everything that is done or will be done.

This may sound like a daunting task. But even spreading a few small seeds of peace consistently will make such a difference—long term. Max Lucado put it this way:

Take a seed the size of a freckle. Put it under several inches of dirt. Give it enough water, light, and fertilizer. And get ready. A mountain will be moved. It doesn’t matter that the ground is a zillion times the weight of the seed. The seed will push it back.

Every spring, dreamers around the world plant tiny hopes in overturned soil. And every spring, their hopes press against impossible odds and blossom.

Never underestimate the power of a seed.

As far as I know, James, the epistle writer, wasn’t a farmer. But he knew the power of a seed sown in fertile soil.

“Those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of goodness.”

Become a leader who sows seeds of peace.

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BlogTrust Me

Quality Chaos: Creativity

by Ron Potter February 4, 2019

The irony is that a certain amount of chaos is necessary because “quality” chaos stimulates creativity. Organizations that do not create some space for creative chaos run the risk of experiencing staleness, loss, and even death.

“Life exists at the edge of chaos,” writes Stuart Kauffman, author of At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. “I suspect that the fate of all complex adapting systems in the biosphere—from single cells to economies—is to evolve to a natural state between order and chaos, a grand compromise between structure and surprise.”

If a leader fears the creative tension caused by chaos, trouble is often not far away. Leaders need to understand that creativity comes out of chaos, and even what has been created needs to be exposed to chaos just to make sure it is still viable and working. Even the new creation may need the chaos of re-creation to survive in a highly competitive world.

Meg Wheatley writes in her book Leadership and the New Science, “The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—are also the primary sources of creativity.” The question is, how do leaders get people from the scary, agonizing, and anxiety-filled feelings of chaos to the liberating place of creativity, change, and steadiness?

Before we answer that question, we do need to look at creativity and chaos. The reality of today’s world is that millions of ideas for innovation, change, and improvement lie within any factory, distribution center, high-tech office, retail storefront, or operations center. You can also multiply that number by millions (or so it seems) when you bring people together in a team setting and allow them the freedom to create, innovate, and change. In many organizations this causes chaos and uncertainty.

Leaders, then, who understand the positive side of chaos can begin leading people through the confusing maze that creativity causes. They can help people understand that disruptions are opportunities. They can focus their attention on a building a culture that understands change and brings teams together, creating synergy among the members. These leaders explain how necessary it is for a company to respond to change in order to remain competitive.

Leaders help their employees understand the chaos going on around them by making meaning out of it. It is not easy, but it is so very necessary. “Leaders must have the ability to make something happen under circumstances of extreme uncertainty and urgency. In fact leadership is needed more during times of uncertainty than in times of stability: when confusion over ends and means abounds, leadership is essential.”

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BlogTrust Me

Chaotic Order

by Ron Potter January 28, 2019

The world we live in is chaotic. A great leader learns how to leverage chaos into creativity, to bring a sense of tranquillity to a crazy world.

Dealing with new technology, profit expectations, continual new-product development, the fickle shopper, and global competitors requires perpetual change and lightning-fast reactions. Markets change, old competitors consolidate, new competitors emerge, and attempts at re-engineering threaten our daily bread. Both leaders and employees can soon feel under siege and at the mercy of chaos.

A creative, energy-filled calm is what we need. A word picture may aid our understanding of this. Imagine you are a surfer. There you are with your board, waiting for the “big one.” If you are in Hawaii, the waves you are playing in might rise to twenty feet. All around you is surging, frothy chaos. Currents, tides, and the weather have combined to create a uniquely unstable environment. Conditions are always changing; every moment the ocean is different. If you try to catch a wave exactly the way you did yesterday, you will take a hard fall. You must stay alert and react quickly to every nuance of water, tide, and wind.

Gutsy leaders confront chaos. No one who is content to just paddle a surfboard beyond where the waves break has ever caught a “big one.” Neither has such a person ever wiped out. If you want to ride a wave, you have to enter into the chaos. If you panic while riding a big wave, you are sure to wipe out. If you stay calm, you can have a wonderful ride while tons of water crash down around you.

Creating calm in the office requires a similar ability to assess the environment, to act quickly, and to stay calm. The economy, products, competitors, consumers, and employees all constantly change. Someone has to have answers; someone must be an independent thinker, able to calmly think things through.

I am familiar with a banker who had a client ready to sell a branch location of his business. The main location seemed to be prospering, but this particular branch appeared to be a drain on energy, time, and resources. The business owner was upset, but the banker remained calm. He took the time to analyze the underlying causes of the owner’s problems. He visited the location, recast the numbers, and advised the owner not to sell the branch but to move and resurrect it. In reality, the branch location was producing extra cash, and the owner, following the banker’s advice, turned his entire business around.

People will follow leaders who stay steady in the chaotic times and work with them to create new answers, new plans, and a new future.

Whatever you do, don’t slip into what I call the “arsonist’s response to chaos.”

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that firefighters in Genoa, Texas, were accused of deliberately setting more than forty destructive fires. When caught, they stated, “We had nothing to do. We just wanted to get the red lights flashing and the bells clanging.”

Do you know any leaders who intentionally start “fires” so they can get the “red lights flashing and hear the sirens”?

Leaders in one of my client organizations proudly described themselves as “firefighters.” They were proud of the fact that they were good at hosing down crises. But when they were asked, “Is it possible you might also be arsonists?” it caused a great deal of reflection within the company.

The goal is a creative, steady productivity—not a chaotic environment that squanders energy and resources on crisis management.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Truth: Truth Depends on Beliefs

by Ron Potter January 24, 2019

We’ve been introducing and preparing ourselves to walk through the elements that make great teams. The first of these is Truth. Great teams can tell each other the truth. But Truth needs some special understanding.

To create a truthful and dynamic atmosphere, teams must:

  • Develop and maintain Trust
  • Be able to share their Beliefs and Assumptions openly and without recrimination
  • Believe that every member of the team has a Valid Perception of the issue.

In the last post, we talked about building the trust required to share the truth. In this post, we’ll talk about how our beliefs and assumptions shape our truth.

Beliefs and Assumptions

Years ago, Peter Senge wrote a book titled The Fifth Discipline that was a deep book but had a profound effect on the corporate world. This book about systems thinking was based on work by Gregory Bateson and extended by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge. It known as Systems Thinking or Learning Organizations. I had never seen a concept penetrate the halls of corporations as much as these ideas.

It seemed that I couldn’t walk into any of my client companies without them wanting to show me how they were adapting system thinking or becoming a learning organization or both. It was an amazing tidal wave.

But much of this impact was related with the second loop of what Senge and company referred to as triple loop learning. In brief, let me describe the three loops.

The first loop says that you do some work, you observe the results. If you’re not satisfied, you put in a fix, and you do the work again. I’ve seen this first loop referred to as “Following the Rules” or “Are we doing the right thing.” I started to think of it as a “do loop” from my early computer days. We would talk about a computer program that was hung up as being in a “do loop.” That meant the program was running in circles and couldn’t get out. The first loop of triple loop learning is much like that do loop. Do some work, check the results, put in a fix, do some work, check the results, put in a fix, etc.

Senge and team began to talk about the second loop as a longer, more sustainable loop. In this loop that wanted you to think about an issue as not needing a fix but as part of an entire system. Check your policies, procedures, systems, and processes to see what is directing the work. If you put the proper system in place that guides the work you’ll get better, more sustainable results. But it required system redesigns and re-engineering. These are the words that my clients were using. They wanted to show me their re-engineering work and their systems redesign and the improved results. And indeed, they were getting improved results. But maybe not the best results possible. The third loop of triple-loop learning was required. Unfortunately, I didn’t see many of my clients looking at the third loop. Why?

The third loop examines the team’s Beliefs and Assumptions about an issue before the redesign or re-engineering takes place. If your personal beliefs don’t agree with the redesigned system, beliefs will override or ignore the system. If the system was redesigned based on an issue or observation that doesn’t match your assumptions, there is no true belief that the new system will produce the desired results. Beliefs and Assumptions rule the day!

Senge and company believed that by fully sharing and understanding Beliefs and Assumptions you would improve the quality of thinking and interactions and in doing so would experience more sustainable improvements. They also believed this would not be a one-time fix but would result in continued improvement of thinking, interactions, and results. Now you would become a Learning Organization.

Working Out Beliefs

Sharing of Beliefs and Assumptions is the second part of building a high-quality team that provides the highest level of happiness for the team members. But, this is a muscle or discipline that develops through training just like going to the gym to improve any part of your body.

I’m assuming here that you’ve successfully created an atmosphere of trust that will allow for the sharing of Beliefs and Assumptions. But, the first time you engage a new muscle group the results are painful. And the rest of the body must adapt to the higher performing muscle group before all of the pain and awkwardness ceases.

The first time teams practice sharing Beliefs and Assumptions there is hesitancy, holding back, embarrassing moments and even shock and disbelief from others on the team as you get used to sharing at this deep level. But even with this first awkward attempt, teams find that the solution they reach as a team is often better than most past experiences. And, as teams get better at this level of sharing at the beginning of problem-solving, it becomes almost addictive. If you’ve become comfortable with starting the process by sharing Beliefs and Assumptions, and then you walk into a team that has not developed this same muscle, you can hardly stand to face the amateur approach to problem-solving. That becomes painful.

Develop the Beliefs and Assumptions muscle. You’ll become a much more Truthful team, and you’ll become a powerful problem-solving team. And that will make you happy.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team: Introduction

by Ron Potter January 3, 2019

A new year, a new series. Ready to talk teams?

When Wayne Hastings and I began writing our first book, Trust Me, I assumed we would cover all three areas that I focus on, building Teams, Growing Leaders, and creating Cultures—TLC. As we began to work with the publisher, it became obvious that the first book was going to focus on the leadership area. The team and cultures would have to wait their turn to be covered in future books. The good news is that over the years I’ve learned more about what makes great teams work.

A few of the things that I’ve learned about teams include:

  • Hitting the sweet spot of TLC
  • Team is the leading element
  • Being a great leader, functioning as part of a great team and creating great cultures makes you happy!

Hitting the Sweet Spot

When I formed my company in 2000 (I had been in the business for ten years at that point), I wanted to give it a name that described what we did. Reflecting on the previous ten years, one pattern that emerged was that new clients hired me at one of three entry points:

Leadership

I was being asked to help improve the leadership skills of existing or up-and-coming leaders.

Or a slight variation was the young hotshot contributor that the company thought would make a great leader someday but was currently advancing based on some great competency and had not learned the role of being a leader.

Or sometimes I was being asked to help save a derailed leader who had been in the organization for a long time but had gotten off track.

Team building

Team building was the second point of entry into a client. The work wasn’t necessarily related to a leader (at least in their mind), but the team wasn’t performing well.

Many times, these were existing teams where:

  • Productivity had fallen off or never existed.
  • There was a conflict or rift in the team that they couldn’t get past.
  • The team was facing dramatic change they weren’t handling well.

Sometimes they were ad hoc teams where:

  • They were pulled together for a short-term project that needed a quick launch to get productivity levels high as soon as possible.

A side story to that scenario was my first taste of team building when I was a young engineer. My company brought in a consulting firm (HRDA—Human Resource Development Association) to help facilitate communication, understanding, and decision making between ourselves (the constructor) and the design engineers. The process was called “Face-to-Face.”

Both companies had good people. We were all good engineers but weren’t communicating or more importantly, understanding each other. I began to realize that understanding relied more on good relationships and character than it did on competency.

Corporate Culture

My third possible entry point is corporate culture. When I started in the business in the early 1990s, the idea that you had to understand, pay attention to, and mold corporate cultures wasn’t well known, understood, or accepted. By the early 2000s, it had become an accepted fact.

Those seemed to be the solid entry points for me to provide services and add value to all the companies I worked with in those early years of my consulting work—leadership, team building, corporate culture.

Team is the leading element

After ten years I could see that my three entry points were leaders, teams, and cultures. The challenge was what do I name my new company that reflected those points?

Leaders—Teams—Cultures            LTC

Culture—Leaders—Team            CLT

Teams—Culture—Leaders            TCL

Teams—Leaders—Culture            TLC!!

TLC, that was it. Team Leadership Culture, LLC. That was my new company, TLC!

I must admit that I still thought of leadership being at the core and many of my presentations still reflected that belief. But how could I pass on TLC, so that became the name of my company, Team Leadership Culture, LLC.

What’s interesting is that over time, I’ve come to believe that great teams are the essential lead element. I’ve seen more corporate failures caused by the lack of teamwork than either of the other two elements. Great teamwork can overcome mediocre leadership and lack of a good culture, but neither leadership or great culture can overcome a bad team.

TLC is indeed the right sequence.

Happiness

One of my friends is Jim Berlucchi, who is the executive director for The Spitzer Center. Jim introduced me to the four levels of happiness that were described by Aristotle and greatly expanded into a mental model of leadership by Dr. Spitzer.

Aristotle concluded that what makes us uniquely human is our pursuit of happiness. That is why our forefathers included it in the Declaration of Independence.

It seems even more visible when we see the opposite. Despair and depression seem to occur when there is a loss of hope or happiness. If the ability to pursue happiness is lost, depression fills the void.

The pursuit of Happiness has Four Levels

Level 1 drives our basic needs for food, money, and sustenance — anything that relates to the senses. Without level 1, we don’t survive.

Level 2 drives us to win, improve, get better, achieve, grow. Without level 2, we don’t thrive.

Level 3 is focused on providing blessings to others. These are the elements of our book “Trust Me” which provide great leadership.

  • Humility – “I don’t have all the ”
  • Development – “I want us to grow through the ”
  • Focus – “Let’s not get ”
  • Commitment – “We’re looking for the greater ”
  • Compassion – “I care about what you think and who you ”
  • Integrity – “I will not hold back, I will share who I am and what I ”
  • Peacemaking – “We want divergent perceptions leading to ”
  • Endurance – “We will endure to a committed ”

Level 4 is described by Aristotle as

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

These become the elements of great teams and deliver the greatest level of happiness.

Over the next several blog posts, we will be exploring each of these “Team” elements in more detail.

The team is the sweet spot. The team is what makes you happier. The team is what provides the greatest value to your organization. A great team will provide the greatest of memories when you think back over your career and lifetime.

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BlogCultureOrganizational IntegrityTrust Me

Organizational Integrity: Learning to Change

by Ron Potter December 31, 2018

For the next few Monday posts, I want to provide some snapshots into what makes up organizational integrity.

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread. It won’t do to be a saintly leader of highest integrity if the rest of the team consists of liars, backbiters, and thieves. Integrity must exist from top to bottom. There are some key qualities that need to be modeled by leadership in order for an organization to embrace integrity.

Last week we started with Prioritizing People-Development. This week we explore Prioritizing People-Development.

Prioritizing People-Development

Another way a leader builds team integrity is through a willingness to make changes. How does a leader do that? How does a leader react when challenged or confronted by peers or subordinates?

Tom Peters is no stranger to change. He insists that embracing change is the single most competitive weapon in business. He suggests the following major points to help leaders effect change:

  • “Trust/respect/don’t underestimate potential.
  • Insist upon (and promote) lifelong learning.
  • Share information.
  • Get customers involved.
  • Emphasize ‘small wins.’
  • Tolerate failure to the point of cheerleading.
  • Reject ‘turf’ distinctions.”

Embracing change is the single most competitive weapon in business. Are you willing to change? How do you react when you are challenged or confronted?

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BlogCultureOrganizational IntegrityTrust Me

Organizational Integrity: Prioritizing People-Development

by Ron Potter December 10, 2018

For the next few Monday posts, I want to provide some snapshots into what makes up organizational integrity.

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread. It won’t do to be a saintly leader of highest integrity if the rest of the team consists of liars, backbiters, and thieves. Integrity must exist from top to bottom. There are some key qualities that need to be modeled by leadership in order for an organization to embrace integrity.

Last week we started with self-disclosure. This week we explore Prioritizing People-Development.

Prioritizing People-Development

In 1997 Dennis Brozak, the president of Design Basics, a company with revenues of $4 million, handed over day-to-day operations to Linda Reimer, a highly qualified fifty-three-year-old whom he had found three years earlier at, of all places, a copy machine. Brozak saw that Reimer had management potential, but the intensive systematic training he gave her was the key to her rapid advancement in the company.

Back in 1991, Reimer was a longtime preschool director who wanted a part-time summer job. She took a low-level job photocopying blue prints for Design Basics, a company based in Omaha, Neb., that sells blueprints for homes via catalog. She did that job so well that Brozak hired her full-time in1994.

Over the next two years, Brozak gave Reimer various assignments that tested the potential executive’s leadership capabilities. First, he made her a human resources director and asked her to switch the department’s focus from advocating employees’ rights to developing their professional growth. She succeeded. Brozak began challenging her more and more. “I wanted to find out a lot about her,” he says. “Can she manage and motivate people? Can she delegate accurately and appropriately? And she had to be able to fire people when necessary. She has a big heart,
but she passed that test, too.”

Then, to see if she understood the market and the industry,
Brozak put Reimer in charge of one product, a catalog. The catalog’s home designs sold well. Brozak then evaluated her financial acumen
by making her an operations director, and he watched how well she used the company’s money. Again, he says, she did well. So Brozak
gave her control over all the company’s publishing. Once more, she produced a hit.

Finally, Brozak tested Reimer, by then a vice president, with new product development. He figured that assignment would show whether she was a big-picture thinker. Reimer identified a new niche that has become a major profit center for the company. “She changed the direction of our sales,” Brozaksays. By 1996, after 13 years at the company’s helm, Brozak wanted more free time. He began passing day-to-day operations to Reimer, giving her new responsibilities gradually to make sure she was ready to be promoted. In April 1997, Reimer officially became president.

Mike Hoffman, “The Leader Within,” Inc.,September 1998

If leaders want to develop others, they need to embrace these assumptions:

  • “Everyone wants to feel worthwhile.
  • Everyone needs and responds to encouragement.
  • People buy into the leader before they buy into the plan.
  • Most people don’t know how to be successful.
  • People are naturally motivated.
  • Most people will move once they receive permission and equipping.”

John C. Maxwell, The Maxwell Leadership Bible: Developing Leaders from the Word of God (Nashville: Nelson, 2002), 1437.

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BlogCultureOrganizational IntegrityTrust Me

Organizational Integrity: Self-Disclosure

by Ron Potter December 3, 2018

The makeup of organizational integrity

For the next few Monday posts, I want to provide some snapshots into what makes up organizational integrity.

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread. It won’t do to be a saintly leader of highest integrity if the rest of the team consists of liars, backbiters, and thieves. Integrity must exist from top to bottom. There are some key qualities that need to be modeled by leadership in order for an organization to embrace integrity.

Last week we started with Vulnerability. This week we explore self-disclosure.

Self-disclosure

Leaders need to be the first to share what they stand for, what they value, what they want, what they hope for, and what they are willing to do in order to get where they want to go.

Self-disclosing leaders also need to be willing to risk trusting and being open with others if they want people’s trust and openness in return. The only way to receive others’ trust is to first trust others yourself.

Self-disclosure is risky for a leader. However, most people will appreciate the openness and will buy into a leader’s plans, vision, dreams, and actions more easily than if a leader is walled off.

Leaders need to be willing to risk trusting and being open with others if they want people’s trust and openness in return.

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BlogCultureOrganizational IntegrityTrust Me

Organizational Integrity: Vulnerability

by Ron Potter November 26, 2018

The makeup of organizational integrity

For the next few Monday posts, I want to provide some snapshots into what makes up organizational integrity.

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread. It won’t do to be a saintly leader of highest integrity if the rest of the team consists of liars, backbiters, and thieves. Integrity must exist from top to bottom. There are some key qualities that need to be modeled by leadership in order for an organization to embrace integrity.

This week we’ll start with Vulnerability.

Vulnerability

A leader who is approachable, available, and open to other ideas, thoughts, and even criticism has learned to be a humble person and further develops his or her integrity.

Executives often overlook the power of vulnerability. They confuse vulnerability with being weak. Too often, and for whatever reason (fear, circumstances, office politics, and so on), leaders build walls around themselves. They add one brick at a time until one day they become walled off from their people and their peers. The walls give them protection, but at the same time, the walls hide them from the harsh realities that confront every leader and keep them from communicating effectively. They are insulated and protected, but they are also cut off from others. Behind the walls, they can control and be hidden from failure. Behind the walls, they do not need to trust others or be vulnerable.

Gates, instead of walls, give others access to leaders, which enables leaders to demonstrate that they are trustworthy, open, and humble. Gates also allow leaders to share their visions and values with others. Open gates allow leaders to be vulnerable, to let go, and to trust others, which in turn builds others’ trust in their leaders.

Abraham Lincoln made himself accessible to people as often as he could. He listened to them, cried with them, and found out about the war campaign from them. His habit of wandering around and listening to others offers an important management lesson. Donald Phillips writes,

If subordinates, or people in general, know that they genuinely have easy access to their leader, they’ll tend to view the leader in a more positive, trustworthy light. “Hey,” the followers think, “this guy
really wants to hear from me—to know what I think and what’s really going on. He must be committed to making things work!” And so Lincoln was.

Once a leader takes this step of vulnerability, others will give back, and an effective team can be built on interpersonal integrity.

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BlogCultureOrganizational Integrity

Integrity-Based Leadership

by Ron Potter November 19, 2018

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread.

So what does this look like?

As leader, you are the key. Integrity and trust are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. According to Charles O’Reilly and Karlene Roberts,

Leaders who build trusting relationships within their team are willing to consider alternative viewpoints and to make use of other people’s expertise and abilities. They feel comfortable with the group and are willing to let others exercise influence over group decisions. In contrast, managers in a distrustful environment often take a self-protective posture. They’re directive and hold tight the reins of power. Those who work for such managers are likely to pass the distrust on by withholding and distorting information.

How does integrity-based leadership work?

In a research study, several groups of business executives were asked to be involved in a role-playing exercise. The groups were given identical factual information about a difficult policy decision, and then they were asked to solve a problem related to that decision. Half of the groups were briefed to expect trusting behavior from the members of their group; the other half were told to expect untrusting behavior (“You cannot openly express feelings or differences with members of your group”).

After thirty minutes of discussion, each group member as well as those who had observed the role playing completed a questionnaire. The responses were in harmony with each other: The discussions among members in the high-trust group were significantly more positive than the discussions among members of the low-trust group. In fact, people in the low-trust group who tried to be open and honest were virtually ignored. Hostility was caused by a mere suggestion, and it quickly spread throughout the group. The people in the low-trust groups realized that the lack of trust kept them from high achievement. They did not feel free to be vulnerable due to the actions and rejection of other group members.

Here are some findings on the high-trust group:

  • Members were more open about their feelings.
  • Members experienced greater clarity of thinking.
  • Members searched for more alternative courses of action.
  • Members reported greater levels of mutual influence on outcomes.

The high-trust group opened the gate of personal vulnerability, and the result was a better team and a model of integrity-based leadership.

When people do not trust one another, it is difficult for the organization to succeed and for the people within the organization to feel completely fulfilled. People who feel trusted and who trust their leaders are more satisfied, and their work environment is less stressful. There exists a feeling of openness and confidence and a greater ability for people to believe they can take risks.

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