Forging Trust in Time for the Next Crisis
To both record my own thoughts and to showcase how things can change in the publishing process, I’ll be writing down early but complete drafts of any articles that end up being published. For example, what follows is the foundation that eventually became this article in the Green Notebook, which I co-authored with my friend Ted Delicath, who is one of the best people I have ever known.
You don’t have time to build trust during a crisis. So before the next crisis comes—and it will—leverage these leadership behaviors to establish trust in your teams to weather whatever adversity comes next.
You can’t wait to build trust. Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
When Bad Things Happen
A truism on par with death and taxes, organizations will face adversity. Whatever it is, leaders are faced with leading their teams through unsettling, uncomfortable, even ugly events all the time. At the McChrystal Group, we work with leaders and teams to embrace this inevitability as a key reason for building trust as a foundational component of high-performing teams.
Create Trust Before the Crisis
In creating a high-performing team culture, there is nothing more important than the stable foundation upon which it rests. For us, this stability is centered on trust.
During the war against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the crucial transformations of the military force was to start trusting troops on the ground to make the right decisions, as opposed to waiting to be told what to do. The focus became on giving junior members context and the outcome to be achieved, and then empower them to make decisions in the time needed to have the most impact. In so doing, it removed upward referral and eliminated the time lag that hindered effective action. As General Stan McChrystal would say, “If you arrive on the battlefield and everything has changed and our orders don’t make sense, then follow the orders we should have given you”. Underlying that statement was the message, we trust you. The result was faster decisions that were attuned to the reality of the environment and operational outcomes – the business value – increased 17-fold.
These kinds of results are not limited to the battlefield. As stated by one of our partners during our efforts directing the nation’s response to COVID-19 (hyperlink), “no one makes friends during a crisis. You either have their trust or don’t.”
A foundation of trust means team members have confidence in the people they work with day in and day out, and that starts with the leaders in charge. And while many leaders recognize the importance of trust, there remains a legitimate question of how to build it throughout the organization? Fortunately, the answer starts close to home.
Introduce our model
Assume ultimate responsibility (that means no excuses)
Deliver what you promise (actions matter more than words)
Embrace curiosity (including about what you’re wrong about)
Assume Ultimate Responsibility
As leaders, we provide a public-facing personality that shapes a culture from the top-down. For some, this microscope can be a burden. Such publicity also provides an opportunity to inspire as a role model for the desired behaviors of the organization. Whether that’s transparency, courage, wisdom, or trust, leaders can do a lot of their work driving cultural change through their actions, as opposed to their words.
One of the key ideas in this space is the idea of “by me” leadership, as opposed to “to me” leadership[1]. Coined by Diana Chapman, the founder of the Conscious Leadership Group, “by me” leadership recognizes that personal “emotional states, my physical states, my mental states, are happening by me. The circumstances out there are not ultimately the cause of my direct experience here.” Therefore, we can recognize our role in creating our own experience, as opposed to ‘to me’ which wastes energy despairing of external circumstances outside of our control.
The unfortunate reality of our business and our life is how often we control what happens to us. However, we can always embrace the ultimate responsibility of choosing our response to those events. It may not be our fault, but it is always, especially as leaders, our responsibility to choose something better, for ourselves, for our teams, and for our organizations. While it sounds simple, embracing a “the buck stops here” mindset in your work is the first step to serving as a trustworthy role model for your teams.
Promise and Deliver
So we’ve taken responsibility for our role as leaders. We’ve made a promise to set a direction for our team and to follow it. Now we have to act on that promise. This can be delivering on what we say we are going to do; it can also show up in the clarity and transparency in our expectations for our teammates and direct reports.
One of the tools we use at McChrystal Group to provide this clarity is what is called ‘decision space’. In essence, we use this to delineate what it is that I am responsible for, what you are responsible for, and what, if anything, needs to be escalated or delegated to a different level. It is a clear drawing of the boundaries between what is my work and what is your work, and anything that falls in the gray space between should be a signal for us to reconvene and discuss. Done well, this eliminates chokepoints of too many responsibilities on one person, and it empowers people at the appropriate levels to take initiative and become proactively creative on the responsibilities that fall within their purview. Perhaps more importantly, this concept builds trust because we all know and we all now agree on who is doing what, with no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Together, we taken our collective promise and laid out clear guardrails for how to deliver it.
Choose Curiosity over ‘Right’
Finally, in what is perhaps the most difficult aspects of building trust is the acknowledgment that at some point, inevitably and unavoidably, we are going to get it wrong. No leader in human history has a 100% track record of being right. Not even you. Not even us. What separates great leaders is the willingness to own the failures and to learn from them. Surprisingly, this raise of the hand to say “I messed up” builds more respect and more trust than the blind, blustering refusal to acknowledge a mistake.
In the organizations we work with, we encourage our leaders to embrace curiosity over the certainty of always being ‘right’. We may have a great sense of the big picture. Leaders often arrive in their roles after decades of experience and years of expertise. So perhaps some of the most difficult questions to ask after such a track record are: “What is it about this picture that I am missing? Where are my blind spots? Where do I need to hear from voices of the people closest to the problem?”
In short, trustworthy leaders are willing to ask themselves “Where am I wrong?”
Leaders can, and must entertain the notion that we may be missing some crucial piece of the puzzle. If we can embrace a spirit of curiosity about what that missing piece is, we won’t ignore the flashing red lights of the wrong decision. Through such ownership, we also invite others into a circle of trust by demonstrating an awareness of our own human fallibility. We show strength by embracing weakness. We build trust by owning our mistakes. It doesn’t happen overnight but an established record over time of accountability builds the type of culture where people feel secure to fail safely and fail forward, a proven facet of successful organizations[2].
Slow, Steady Leadership Builds Smooth, Trusting Teams
The day may come where you must deliver bad news to your team. We might even go so far as to say that day will come. But for leaders who have focused on building a culture of trust, we can build the kind of stable foundation necessary for a resilient recovery, coming back stronger and faster than before.
That is a characteristic of great teams, and great teams by led by great leaders who take responsibility, set clear boundaries to deliver on promises, and own their mistakes when failure (inevitably) occurs.
It is important to note that none of this happens overnight. Trust takes time to build, and a moment to lose. But it is this slow, smooth work that builds the capacity for fast action when it’s needed. And at the very least, you’ll have eyes on each other in that unpleasant meeting, secure in the knowledge that you can achieve together what’s needed to come back stronger than ever before.
[1] Parrish, Shane. “Diana Chapman: Trusting Your Instincts.” The Knowledge Project. Accessed March 13, 2022. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast-transcripts/diana-chapman/.
[2] Duhigg, Charles. “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” The New York Times, February 25, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.
