Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Leadership Dissected, where we examine the details of leadership strategy, workplace culture, and decision-making through the lens of behavioral science.
Speaker: I'm Dr. C. And I'm Dr. D. With our decades of leadership experience and PhDs in business psychology, we dig into the latest research trends and practical strategies to help you survive at work without losing your mind.
Speaker: Today, we're going to discuss important topic for workplace.
Speaker: Trust.
Speaker: How do we cultivate trust?
Speaker: How do we earn it?
Speaker: How do we maintain it?
Speaker: We'll also explore what happens when we lose trust and when we should try to recover it, when we should cut ties and walk away.
Speaker: So let's get into the topic.
Speaker: Let's talk about trust.
Speaker: Let's talk about trust.
Speaker: Dr. C, we have very different styles when it comes to building trust.
Speaker: I trust people immediately until they give me a reason not to.
Speaker: And you're the opposite.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely the opposite.
Speaker: I am very much you need to earn that trust.
Speaker: You need to show me that you can be trusted.
Speaker: People start at zero with me and they have to earn that trust.
Speaker: Now, it doesn't mean that you can't earn it quickly.
Speaker: But I mean, into a conversation, coming into a relationship of any type, you you have to earn it has to grow.
Speaker: You have to foster that trust.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, the thing I know about you as well is that once that trust is earned, you are very forgiving when somebody violates that trust.
Speaker: I mean, somebody has to go pretty far before you're willing to not forgive them, depending on the severity of the slight.
Speaker: Once you've built that trust, you are incredibly committed to that relationship and that trust, once it's been earned, gets pretty consistent.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's really about level of commitment.
Speaker: And if I'm allowing you to have that level of trust with me, I have to give it to you 100 percent after that.
Speaker: You've proven yourself to be worthy of that trust.
Speaker: So that means I'm going to give you a little bit more space, a little bit more grace when it comes to violating that trust.
Speaker: Although there are thresholds, there are some non-negotiables there.
Speaker: I think back to being a leader and with the teams I've managed, you got to earn that trust.
Speaker: And I try to build that trust up as quick as possible because I need to trust my team members to do the tasks that are assigned.
Speaker: I also trust my team members not to take advantage of that.
Speaker: It's really a give or take in it.
Speaker: And there's an ebbs and flows to the way I view trust.
Speaker: I give trust really easily, particularly in leadership roles where I'm working with other people.
Speaker: I figure, hey, if you're going to start here, I'm going to trust you 100%.
Speaker: immediately from the start, it's up to you to maintain that level of trust with me.
Speaker: And I know everybody's along a spectrum, but you might be surprised at how many people you work with or people that you meet have a completely different point of view on how they build trust.
Speaker: Is it earned right from the start or do you have to build it up from zero?
Speaker: Either way, for me, if somebody violates that trust,
Speaker: It's almost never coming back.
Speaker: It's very difficult for me to trust again because I'm like, I gave you a gift at the beginning and you squandered that gift.
Speaker: So why should I invest any more time in that relationship?
Speaker: Whereas I think your style or the earn the trust, it seems like a little bit more forgiving after the fact because they've had to really demonstrate and really build up that level of trust.
Speaker: Again, not to say that a significant level of trust violation isn't going to change that point of view.
Speaker: Everybody has a threshold.
Speaker: It feels like it's very different in both gaining and in losing trust.
Speaker: If I have a team member who significantly violates my trust, it's very, very difficult for them to earn it back.
Speaker: I wouldn't say impossible, but it is very, very difficult, and they have to try everything.
Speaker: extra hard.
Speaker: It's probably how hard somebody has to try or maybe even harder than when they're first meeting you and have to build up that level of trust.
Speaker: Because if they violate that, you've invested very little time.
Speaker: You can just walk away.
Speaker: Whereas I have given a gift of trust
Speaker: that has been lost.
Speaker: I don't want to invest more time in recovering that.
Speaker: So I might as well just cut you loose.
Speaker: And I think a lot of that comes from how we define trust.
Speaker: Every person is going to have a different definition of trust.
Speaker: We look at the Webster dictionary definition of trust, shared reliance on character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.
Speaker: Now, I prefer a different definition.
Speaker: It's a willingness to open oneself to risk by engaging in relationships with another person.
Speaker: And I think that's the crux of a lot of challenges with trust.
Speaker: There's risk involved in building those relationships, essentially giving up a little bit of your power.
Speaker: Because that's what a component of trust is.
Speaker: You're allowing someone else to have a semblance of influence or control over you.
Speaker: So when we think about
Speaker: trust, there's also that risk.
Speaker: And as leaders in the workplace, we have to give up a lot of power.
Speaker: We have to take a lot of risk, even joining a new organization, forming a new team.
Speaker: There's risk associated with that manifests on how we trust people.
Speaker: It's interesting because you think about
Speaker: are different leadership styles, are different trust gathering styles.
Speaker: But I can imagine an employee starting on the end of their first month.
Speaker: Think about the end of the first month where you're just getting comfortable.
Speaker: Everybody's getting into the new rhythm of having a new person there.
Speaker: And a person who is starting as an employee is a type of person who trusts immediately.
Speaker: But the boss or maybe the culture of the team
Speaker: is filled with people who you have to earn that trust how long is that employee going to feel out of place until they've developed that trust and especially if that expectation of the trust style isn't set up first and the employee doesn't know they're just going to feel perhaps like they're not liked or that everything's being scrutinized or whatever imaginary thought processes might be going through their head and conversely
Speaker: In a style like mine, where it's trust everybody immediately, give them 100%, an employee who starts who doesn't trust immediately, this doesn't feel right.
Speaker: I don't know these people yet.
Speaker: Why are they treating me this way?
Speaker: What's the real story here?
Speaker: An employee like that might end up feeling skeptical or, again, equally out of place.
Speaker: And I wonder how many leaders and how many people...
Speaker: have thought down and said, what is your trust style?
Speaker: What is your definition of trust and what qualities of trust are important to me so that when I'm working with a new employee or I'm starting in a new job, I can articulate, hey, this is how I view the world from a trust perspective.
Speaker: It takes me a little while to warm up to somebody.
Speaker: And for me,
Speaker: Reliability is very important in building trust.
Speaker: So if you say you're going to be somewhere and you don't show up, that's going to violate my trust and I'm going to have a hard time trusting you.
Speaker: Or if you constantly change meeting times on me at the last minute, I'm going to feel like you can't be trusted.
Speaker: And so that's going to erode trust.
Speaker: Having that inventory in your mind
Speaker: First, knowing your style and second, knowing what those characteristics are to build or erode trust and being able to communicate that really effectively could really help people build relationships in a way that's more meaningful than just jumping in and going with the flow and seeing how it
Speaker: falls out without that level of insight.
Speaker: I think one of the areas that we as psychologists can really start digging into is let's dissect trust.
Speaker: What are components that make up trust?
Speaker: I see three real big dimensions of trust that are pretty uniform across relationships.
Speaker: The first is integrity.
Speaker: The belief that the person is fair and just.
Speaker: I think for a lot of organizations, a lot of leaders, we look at integrity as is
Speaker: Is this person doing the right thing?
Speaker: Second dimension is dependability.
Speaker: We live in a world that's interdependent with each other, especially in the workplace.
Speaker: You're dependent on someone else to finish a task to complete your task.
Speaker: So it's really that belief that the person is going to do what they say they're going to do.
Speaker: And I think the third dimension is confidence.
Speaker: That's really confidence in yourself that you can trust the person, that you can create this space for the person to actually do what they're going to do.
Speaker: And I think for leaders and team members, the dependability and confidence is the two areas where people struggle.
Speaker: That's when you start getting leaders who become micromanagers.
Speaker: They don't have the confidence.
Speaker: in their team member that they're dependable or even in just regular team dynamics, that confidence and willing to take that risk to say this person's gonna actually follow through what they said.
Speaker: That's really fundamental for any team is finding the space, finding and creating the environment for people to really build trust.
Speaker: And I've seen many teams just collapse, fail, or have a revolving door where people are coming in and out constantly as a trust.
Speaker: Now, recently I did a workshop and with this group, I was having this conversation around trust.
Speaker: And having a conversation about why people leave organizations.
Speaker: Majority of time, people don't leave organizations because of the work that they're doing.
Speaker: Generally, people are going to get into a field, unless it's like entry and you're really exploring.
Speaker: The people who are in the profession get into that profession because they enjoy it.
Speaker: But man, they don't like the people around them.
Speaker: They don't trust the people around them.
Speaker: And that becomes really challenging.
Speaker: So as leaders, we have to create that environment.
Speaker: We have to create that environment where people can set this foundation of trust.
Speaker: Now, Dr. D, how can we set a foundation of trust?
Speaker: In your opinion, what do teams need to do?
Speaker: I think it's a couple of things.
Speaker: I think one, it is understanding each individual on that team, how you build trust and make that an active conversation.
Speaker: How people approach risk.
Speaker: You've brought up risk many times in this conversation so far, Dr. C. And I think people's risk tolerance happens.
Speaker: Since a lot of my research is based on how people perceive risk and uncertainty, I know I have a very high risk tolerance.
Speaker: I know you have a lower risk tolerance than I do.
Speaker: And so the fact that risk plays into our decision making process of how we're going to trust, that doesn't surprise me.
Speaker: When I think about the things that I need for somebody to build or erode trust,
Speaker: It's doing things that, as you said, the reliability for me is very important.
Speaker: Showing up, doing what you say you're going to do.
Speaker: That integrity component is table stakes.
Speaker: That's just the bare minimum.
Speaker: If somebody is going to look me in the eye and flat out lie to me about something that we both know is untrue or can be easily proven untrue, that's really hard to continue to build trust.
Speaker: You have to have that level of integrity.
Speaker: But the reliability is there.
Speaker: I'm talking about reliability showing up, being there when you're needed for the really important things.
Speaker: There are inadvertent slights or violations of trust that happen at work all the time.
Speaker: An employee wants a promotion, they talk to their boss and say, oh, I'd really like to get a promotion at some point or I'd like a raise.
Speaker: And the boss says, oh, I'll look into it and then not follow up.
Speaker: That will uprode trust with an employee.
Speaker: One, as a leader, you have to really be cognizant about what people are asking for, have a good list of follow-up questions.
Speaker: The foundation is really communicating about what real requests are.
Speaker: And the
Speaker: If you as an employee have brought up something that's important to you and you haven't heard anything back, it's important for you to reach out and remind the person.
Speaker: And it's up to the person who is feeling like their trust is being violated to actually raise your hand, speak up and say, hey, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable with we had a topic.
Speaker: I haven't heard anything about it.
Speaker: Can you give me an update rather than just relying on the other person to meet your expectations when they don't know that there are expectations being violated?
Speaker: It's not a one-sided thing.
Speaker: If you feel like your trust is being violated, raise your hand and say, hey, we had a conversation about something.
Speaker: I haven't heard anything about it.
Speaker: It's making me concerned that I haven't heard anything about it.
Speaker: Should we have a conversation about it?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I think to get even deeper, more fundamental, I think in the workplace, we often forget we're working with other people.
Speaker: We're working with other human beings.
Speaker: There's this opportunity.
Speaker: And if we get into a neuroscience part of it, oxytocin is
Speaker: is our hormones.
Speaker: A lot of times it's called the hug hormone, the love hormone makes us feel good.
Speaker: It's actually one of the precursor hormones that is released when we start to do social bond and getting to connect with people, getting to know people.
Speaker: And studies actually show people who build these connections have higher levels of oxytocin, which actually leads them to be willing to take more risk of all kinds in their social bonding, social interactions.
Speaker: Because if you think about it, work is really a lot of different social interactions with different people that you're going to have different levels of trust with.
Speaker: And it's important to foster that foundation, getting to know the people in the room.
Speaker: Some of the workshops that I do with people are really geared around how do I get to know you as a human being, as a foundation?
Speaker: One, to start building a relationship and also building trust to assume good intention.
Speaker: A lot of organizations don't take the time for that.
Speaker: And I'm
Speaker: Automatically people start to assume malintent.
Speaker: They fall into the fundamental attribution error.
Speaker: The easiest way to explain that is the story I'm telling myself.
Speaker: People will start to create all kinds of stories about situations and tension, which starts to erode trust.
Speaker: And as leaders,
Speaker: We do it ourselves.
Speaker: We have to be really conscious about what our assumptions are versus what's reality.
Speaker: As we build more trust, build more trust through these relationships, through these interactions, through getting to know who your team members are on a human level, it helps reduce a lot of these assumptions that are created and a lot of the negativity that we create in terms of why a person is doing a certain action.
Speaker: I'll give you a great example.
Speaker: From one of my workshops, I had one of our participants actually share they had great trust with their senior leader until one day she responded with an emoji to a message.
Speaker: It wasn't just an emoji.
Speaker: She happened to use an emoji that had a darker hue because the person unbeknownst to their leader, she was Hispanic.
Speaker: So she started using the darker emoji.
Speaker: Her leader created this whole story in her head.
Speaker: This person's a racist and trying to make fun of the leader because the leader happened to be African-American.
Speaker: This happens a lot because we don't
Speaker: foster these relationships and start creating these stories, start creating these assumptions, trying to attach an intent to other people's actions without pausing and just saying, what's going on?
Speaker: This person ended up having a conversation with her leader because she noticed the difference in behavior.
Speaker: Turns out the leader just didn't know her background.
Speaker: She never bothered to have this conversation.
Speaker: They didn't find out that this person is Hispanic.
Speaker: So they're using emoji that represent themselves.
Speaker: We constantly in the workplace have to contend these assumptions, which come from a lack of trust.
Speaker: but also on the other side, start to erode any built trust.
Speaker: And a lot of the work that I've done in workplace culture building, this shared intent, this idea of assumed positive or negative intent is one of the most significant areas where organizations lose their employees, honestly.
Speaker: They bring this idea that, hey, integrity is in our values and accountability is in our values.
Speaker: But employees who are not on the inside of a social network within an organization will view and say, hey, I'm not a senior leader and I see senior leaders violating our corporate culture all the time.
Speaker: I worked in an organization where sales was very important and the sales people had a lot of latitude and power to do things that were
Speaker: I would say questionable.
Speaker: They did not treat people around them very well.
Speaker: They were very entitled and egocentric and they were forgiven and cut a lot of latitude because they brought in a lot of money.
Speaker: And it seemed like in that organization and in that culture, the best salespeople were the worst people to work with.
Speaker: They treated people poorly.
Speaker: They certainly were engaging in some questionable activities.
Speaker: But a cornerstone of the culture was integrity and accountability.
Speaker: And if it was anybody outside of the sales team that were operating with those same principles and same behaviors, if it was an accountant, they would have been cut from the organization long ago.
Speaker: So trust is not just performance-based.
Speaker: We're going to trust you as long as you're trustworthy or you bring value to the organization.
Speaker: It has to be, we're going to trust you because you live up to our values and you perform well.
Speaker: Performance without a
Speaker: abiding by the culture that are necessary for team building in an organization.
Speaker: If you don't want that kind of behavior in your organization, you have to be just as willing to cut high performers as you are to cut anybody else for violating those cultural norms.
Speaker: And if trust is a cultural norm within your organization,
Speaker: then you have to do everything that you can to protect it.
Speaker: That's a great example of how organizations actually foster distrust.
Speaker: I think it's important we have trust, really a strong foundation for a successful team.
Speaker: But fortunately, some organizations create this environment where they're fostering distrust.
Speaker: One of the dimensions of distrust is credibility.
Speaker: People doing things ethically, or people being held accountable.
Speaker: They do respect laws, they do respect the policies, or are they just words on a sheet?
Speaker: That creates a really tough environment for people to be connected with.
Speaker: The other side is also malevolence.
Speaker: To your point, is their willingness to allow people to lie or deceive team members in order to increase profits, in order to take more than that they're given.
Speaker: We've definitely had a shift for a lot of organizations in understanding that if we tolerate this behavior, we're going to erode at the STEM.
Speaker: And I love this quote, linking on the organizational psychologist's name, our culture or an organization for a team is the worst behavior that we're willing to tolerate.
Speaker: When a team doesn't have trust, they'll tolerate any behavior because most of the time people have one foot out the door.
Speaker: We're going to talk about some of the more common phrases that we hear right now.
Speaker: We have this quite quitter mentality, but we have to really take a pause as leaders, looking at the workplace.
Speaker: What are we doing to create this environment where we can't trust each other?
Speaker: Where we feel we can have this integrity, this accountability to ourselves, accountability to our team members.
Speaker: I think this is something we haven't talked about yet.
Speaker: We talk about risks in relation to trust.
Speaker: But to that point, there's also a level of vulnerability you have to have when you have healthy trust.
Speaker: And I think there's opportunities as leaders to model the behavior.
Speaker: As I tell my team members, and I've told them in the past, I only know what I know.
Speaker: I didn't take the class on mind reading, so I don't know what's on your mind.
Speaker: You got to tell me.
Speaker: You got to foster this environment of open communication.
Speaker: This takes a lot of risk.
Speaker: When you build the right trust, it makes it easier, this willingness to say I'm wrong.
Speaker: You're absolutely right.
Speaker: Vulnerability.
Speaker: is of real importance in organizations because so many decisions are made at an organizational level because of trust.
Speaker: You brought up quiet quitting, which is an organizationally leadership-centric view of employees who shouldn't be trusted because they're not behaving in a way that is productive to the organization.
Speaker: It's viewed as a trust violation.
Speaker: That's why it's talked about in negative terms.
Speaker: From an employee perspective, there's also whisper promotions where people get a lot more work and a lot more responsibility without the title bump and without the pay bump.
Speaker: A leader leaves, roles get combined.
Speaker: A VP role is combined with the director role that the other person's already in.
Speaker: And they end up taking on a lot more responsibility while the organization wins out.
Speaker: That also erodes trust.
Speaker: It's good for the organization.
Speaker: So organizations don't talk about whisper promotions as much, but employees certainly do.
Speaker: From an organizational perspective, there's also what I'll call the dark side of trust.
Speaker: In behavioral science, there's this idea of in-group and out-group bias.
Speaker: But also there's something called familiarity bias.
Speaker: And this is when you trust somebody, you give them a lot more forgiveness than when you first know them.
Speaker: I worked in an organization that had a very loud and very aggressive and a very abrasive leader over a part of the organization.
Speaker: The things that he would say in meetings, talking about politics, talking about gender, having a very definite worldview that was not necessarily consistent or sensitive to other people in the room, he would just say things.
Speaker: And when it was brought up to his boss, they would say, that's just who they are.
Speaker: They've been here for years.
Speaker: We're not going to change that behavior.
Speaker: That's just who they are.
Speaker: And while that person's performance was good, I don't know just forgiving it because they had a long relationship and a lot of familiarity.
Speaker: They were basically on the in-group for that group, and they were given a lot of forgiveness.
Speaker: And people on the outside would go, how can that person talk that way?
Speaker: Or how can they say something like that?
Speaker: Because a person who's only been in the organization for a month, if they were talking like that in a meeting surrounded by senior leaders, they would be quickly
Speaker: escorted out the door.
Speaker: But because this person had been here for 20 years, they've accepted that behavior.
Speaker: Why was that behavior acceptable?
Speaker: And that would cause a lot of mistrust from employees.
Speaker: Other people who had experienced from a leadership perspective said, if the organization is not going to handle this, I'll go work somewhere where they actually respect our values.
Speaker: That's a great example of the quote I gave earlier.
Speaker: Culture you foster as a leader is really the worst behavior to tolerate.
Speaker: And in that sense, what I interpret is this organization was willing to accept that behavior as part of their culture.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And people from the inside did not see it as a problem.
Speaker: They just washed it away because they couldn't see it anymore because they had blinders on around this person.
Speaker: This brings up the idea of the old boys club in the C-suite.
Speaker: A lot of people can't get into the leadership in an organization because a group of leaders have built such a tight bond of trust that they forgive each other, but they also don't allow outsiders into their in-group in their leadership of an organization.
Speaker: A well-established company that has a well-established leadership team might be very skeptical to allow an outsider to come into that leadership team and become part of that leadership team.
Speaker: because that's a big risk to allow people onto the inside.
Speaker: Meanwhile, that makes people who are looking to grow within an organization feel like it's an impossibility to work their way into senior leadership because they're not afforded the opportunity to develop the trust because the senior leadership team has already got their in-group and they're not really looking to bring more people in from the outside.
Speaker: So Dr. D, how do we fix this?
Speaker: How do we build trust with an organization with a team?
Speaker: Well, that's easy.
Speaker: you just fix it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Maybe it's not that easy.
Speaker: I think there's a little bit more to it.
Speaker: Otherwise, we have the magic wand.
Speaker: We'll just wave it.
Speaker: You trust each other.
Speaker: Yeah, let's not trust that.
Speaker: Let's think of some real ways.
Speaker: For me, it is taking blinders off.
Speaker: It's with an open mind and a want to get feedback to really try to understand what the perceptions are of people within the organization.
Speaker: If you're a senior leader, you should
Speaker: Take on that responsibility to understand across the organization what that sense of trust is.
Speaker: If you're over a team or if you're on a team, it means having a conversation with your peers, your employees, your supervisor, the constituents that you work with, and really creating opportunities to take feedback and act on that feedback.
Speaker: Because listening and putting an effort towards whatever that feedback is, is a great first step.
Speaker: Lacking anything else.
Speaker: bring in somebody from the outside, somebody who can be impartial, somebody who can listen, develop trust, develop a plan of action, who can see beyond your own or your organization's blind spots.
Speaker: That's where I would start.
Speaker: How about you, Dr. C?
Speaker: I think at a foundational level, you got to connect.
Speaker: You got to find out who's in the room.
Speaker: You got to find out who they are.
Speaker: There's this perception that we are our employee number.
Speaker: We're our role title.
Speaker: We all know that we are much beyond that.
Speaker: As leaders, as team members,
Speaker: Taking the time, just connect with the person on a human level.
Speaker: It goes a long way.
Speaker: Matter of fact, when I did one-on-ones with team members, even group meetings with team members, start off with two fundamental questions.
Speaker: Where's your head at?
Speaker: Where's your heart at?
Speaker: Head is really what's top of mind.
Speaker: What's your focus?
Speaker: Heart is how are you as a person?
Speaker: How are you as a human being?
Speaker: What's coming up?
Speaker: You got to give yourself permission to be human.
Speaker: That's a foundation.
Speaker: We are social creatures.
Speaker: We want to be around people to some extent.
Speaker: Foundation of trust is just connecting with human beings.
Speaker: Just connecting with someone, finding out who they are.
Speaker: Does it mean deepest, darkest secrets?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Does it mean I know who you are?
Speaker: I know what you enjoy.
Speaker: I know where you may struggle and it's okay.
Speaker: We're going to create an environment where we can give you that support.
Speaker: I think at the basic level,
Speaker: For any leader, for any team member, if you can start connecting and building relationship, you can start building upon it.
Speaker: The more formal asking of how is it that you like trust?
Speaker: How is it that I can build trust with you instead of going into an automatic assumption?
Speaker: I think that's really important for building the relationship, bringing people together so that they do take advantage of that familiarity bias that we talked about earlier.
Speaker: You're more likely to take a risk with somebody that you like and somebody that you know than somebody that you don't or that you don't like.
Speaker: So building that likability is, I think, a really great way of building that trust.
Speaker: I'm going to say something controversial, and I'm curious about your perspective, Dr. C. Let's hear it.
Speaker: The work that people do is a transaction.
Speaker: A lot of the challenges that people have with mistrust at work is because they try to make it their second home.
Speaker: What if we approached in the absence of trust, work neutrally?
Speaker: We say, I'm here to do a job.
Speaker: I'm going to show up and do the job the best that I can.
Speaker: I'm going to try to better my expertise so I can do my job more efficiently and grow in my role.
Speaker: But trust doesn't.
Speaker: play a role in it.
Speaker: I just need to do what I'm here to do and I need the people upstream and downstream and the people that supervise me to do what they need to do.
Speaker: As long as trust isn't violated, in the absence of trust is trust in the process, trust in the transaction, and trust in the part that you play under the agreement that I'm going to do this work and I'm going to receive payment for that work.
Speaker: Is that adequate?
Speaker: I think the challenge
Speaker: And that scenario is, although a lot of work is transactional, there is an interdependency when it comes to work.
Speaker: A lot of what we do is a sum of our labor, not just one person doing one component.
Speaker: I think the neutral mindset only goes so far as more complex to work gets.
Speaker: The more we start digging into what is this system of work?
Speaker: What are all the levers that are being pulled?
Speaker: I think that neutral mindset is not sustainable for an organization.
Speaker: As lo and behold,
Speaker: People have personalities, people have their wants, people have their needs, people have their perspectives.
Speaker: And it's important that you see people's perspectives.
Speaker: We see their wants, their motivations, because then we can make this neutrality that you're proposing to make it more effective by finding those components, those levers to pull.
Speaker: It actually is going to increase productivity, increase people's sentiment of the workplace.
Speaker: I'll be honest, I don't want to work in a place that's neutral.
Speaker: It just doesn't sound appealing.
Speaker: I agree.
Speaker: And I've heard leaders, and the reason I bring this up is, one, I think it's a good mental exercise.
Speaker: Would you really want to work in a place like that?
Speaker: I've heard leaders say, this is a social contract.
Speaker: They're here to do work.
Speaker: We're here to pay them.
Speaker: We don't need to get along.
Speaker: They just need to do their job and let me do mine.
Speaker: And that really is a mentality of some leaders.
Speaker: I think about this idea of work from home and hybrid and the sense of mistrust that drives a lot of senior leaders to say, I can't see what they're doing.
Speaker: Therefore, I don't know what they're doing.
Speaker: Therefore, they can't be trusted.
Speaker: Therefore, we have to get them back into the office because we're missing out on something.
Speaker: Whereas an employee who's working from home says, I'm working hard over here.
Speaker: I'm doing everything and more than I did while I was in the environment of the office.
Speaker: Only I'm surrounded by people that I really like to have relationships with and I'm not forced through circumstance to have relationships with.
Speaker: So that dichotomy of trust is leading leaders to make these wholesale changes, eroding engagement.
Speaker: The engagement of an organization is feeling connected to your work and feeling connected to the people around you.
Speaker: in a shared purpose.
Speaker: And that comes from trust.
Speaker: And I think part of what creates that environment, leaders not knowing what their team members are actually doing, and they're getting questioned by their leadership.
Speaker: Where are we on this project?
Speaker: Well, I can't, as a leader, run over to your desk and go take a peek or corner them and say, where are we?
Speaker: I think in that example,
Speaker: It's more so the interweaving of trust and power dynamics.
Speaker: It's a semblance of control.
Speaker: Trust, that also is a scale of how much control we're willing to give another individual or how much control we're willing to take from another individual.
Speaker: We talked about earlier micromanaging.
Speaker: That's not trusting persons.
Speaker: You're taking away all their control of autonomy and making decisions the right way.
Speaker: And that creates that environment where people can't do what they need to do.
Speaker: Depending on how we view trust, how much trust we're willing to give, how much trust we're willing to take as leaders.
Speaker: We have to understand that there's an ebb and flow to it.
Speaker: Having people return to the office, just a semblance of control.
Speaker: And a lot of time it's because someone has questioned that leader's knowledge or has questioned that person's trust.
Speaker: So in turn, you're questioning your team's trust now.
Speaker: Yeah, I will stand behind this thought process.
Speaker: If you show me a leader that can't manage a team that's working from home, I will show you the same leader is one that can't manage a team while they're in an office together.
Speaker: I 100% agree with that.
Speaker: If you show me a team member who can't be trusted working from home, I will show you a trust a team member that can't be trusted working in the office.
Speaker: If a leader can't trust their team to work remotely, then those team members shouldn't be on your team.
Speaker: If they aren't trustworthy enough to be productive and do their job and live up to their social contract.
Speaker: of I'm earning my paycheck and I'm going to deliver the work, then they shouldn't be on the team.
Speaker: And if a manager can't manage their team effectively to get the best out of their team while they're working remote, you don't need that manager on your team any longer.
Speaker: But many leaders won't admit to that because they're the manager that doesn't know how to manage a team remotely.
Speaker: And they might have to face the hard truth.
Speaker: They might be the manager that doesn't know how to manage a team in-house as well.
Speaker: Good communication is agnostic to location.
Speaker: Yeah, that reminds me of the movie Office Space.
Speaker: You got four different managers coming to the same person, seeing if they read the memo.
Speaker: Do you have my TPS report?
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: My 2K already passed.
Speaker: But I think that's an interesting conversation.
Speaker: What makes good leadership in-house remotely?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One more thought exercise before we wrap.
Speaker: Dr. C, you are building a new organization or you're consulting with an organization that
Speaker: And they want to build into their culture a high level of trust.
Speaker: What guidance do you give them so that they really build that in?
Speaker: And there's accountability around ensuring that core part of their culture, trust, is something that is sustainable, believable, and trusted in their culture.
Speaker: So there's a couple of components that I would say would be the starting point.
Speaker: First of all, you have to be clear on why you exist as an organization, why the team exists, especially with a startup growth organization.
Speaker: It's making sure there's alignment with the teams in terms of what are we here for?
Speaker: Once you have that alignment, it's important for leaders within the organization to actually have trust with each other.
Speaker: Because a lot of times team members are going to
Speaker: look at leadership or cues on how should I behave with this team?
Speaker: How should I behave with this other team?
Speaker: When we don't build that trust with the leadership team, an early foundation, you end up having a lot of silos that are interdependent with each other.
Speaker: And you end up failing as an organization, failing as a team, or you're constantly trying to fix relationships.
Speaker: So building a strong foundation with the relationship, I think where a lot of organizations miss the target is not providing expertise and support to middle and frontline managers and supervisors on how to foster strong teams.
Speaker: Reality is they're the ones doing the work.
Speaker: They're the ones that are going to have the revolving door of team members leaving and
Speaker: Now we have these increased costs and it comes to recruitment and retention, sentiment, where there's no trust, trust in the product, trust in the system, trust in the organization.
Speaker: It becomes reflective in our interactions with our stakeholders.
Speaker: So I think a big miss for a lot of organizations is they don't actually create the space and have these real conversations about what is trust and how do we foster trust as a team in the organization?
Speaker: How do we foster trust with each other?
Speaker: So having that additional perspective, having
Speaker: expertise come in to actually facilitate these conversations.
Speaker: So many times I see as a senior leader, should be a participant in a conversation, trying to facilitate the conversation, yet consciously or unconsciously, they're staring at the way that they want it to be seen.
Speaker: So for an organization, there has to be attention to fostering trust and building a foundation of trust for teams.
Speaker: I agree 100%.
Speaker: And we've touched on a lot of really cool topics like psychological safety, culture building.
Speaker: You just talked about how to de-bias meetings, coaching emerging leaders in an organization.
Speaker: I think I'll just say this was a lot of fun.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I think we've got interesting, relevant topics that you and I have a pretty good perspective on.
Speaker: And I'm really looking forward to continuing the conversation next time.
Speaker: Absolutely, Dr. D. Excited, excited to have a conversation.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, I think we're done here.
Speaker: Let's close it up.
Speaker: I'm Dr. D. And I'm Dr. C. And we'll keep dissecting leadership so your time at work sucks a little less.
Speaker: That's all we can ever hope for, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Until next time.
