Move With The Speed Of Trust

Our expert thought leaders share critical imperatives to achieving results during unpredictable times

In the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, and on the day after the stock market’s worst day in over three decades, I spoke with a client who runs a technology consulting company in New York City. This CEO told me, “The disruption is devastating, and is hitting all of us. But it’s interesting to me, when something like this happens, you see leaders invest and focus on all sorts of different things they think are vital to solving the problem at hand, but you know what? If I’m going to focus on anything, it’s going to be on trust. Trust is baseline humanity, and we need it to solve our problems. If we get better at trust, that will help us navigate everything else.”
 

In times of change, crisis, and uncertainty, the greatest asset and security any leader has is their credibility. The greatest currency they have is the trust people have in them. The greatest power they have lies in how they choose to extend trust to others.

While that’s always true, during enormous disruption, the critical currency of trust carries an even greater premium. Trust is the one thing that changes everything. We still have to do other things — collaborate, be adaptive and agile, and stay responsive to changing conditions — but what this CEO was affirming as he navigated that particular crisis for his business is that we can do all of those things better if we start with trust. He’s right. And if we lose trust, our ability to do any of those other things is profoundly diminished.

If we do what it takes to build a high-trust culture, even in the midst of a crisis— and I would emphasize especially in the midst of a crisis— we’ll be far more agile, collaborative, creative, and innovative.

Trust is an Accelerator

When we say “trust,” many people think of a soft, nice-to-have social virtue, and it is that — but it’s so much more. Trust is a pragmatic, hard-edged, economic, and actionable asset we can create through specific behaviors. It affects the speed at which we can move and the cost of everything.

When there’s low trust in any team, culture, organization, society, or relationship, speed goes down, and cost goes up. It’s a tax. Think about a leader you don’t trust: They can communicate all they want, but you’ll discount what they say, or you simply won’t believe it, much less act on it. You’ll have to verify and draw your own conclusions. Low-trust organizations are ensnarled in bureaucracy and excessive controls. Low- trust team members miscommunicate, have “meetings after the meetings,” and play politics. Everything takes longer.
Thankfully, the converse is also true: When trust is high, speed goes up, and cost comes down. When credible leaders share information or announce a plan, their teams get to work. Communication and collaboration are seamless. Teams feel safe to innovate and take smart risks. High trust earns a dividend; it’s a performance multiplier.
Teams and organizations that operate with high trust significantly outperform teams and organizations with low trust — this has been proven in dozens of studies, across a multitude of industries and sectors. The “How Report” study conducted by consulting firm LRN, for example, found that people who work in high-trust cultures are “six times more likely to achieve higher levels of performance compared with others in their industry.” Tapping into this level of performance during times of crisis or disruption is vital.

Four Key Behaviors That Build High Trust Fast

The common advice for navigating times of crisis and change is to communicate, communicate, communicate. I agree. But if you stand up and communicate without being credible or having trust or telling the truth, you’re going to dig a deeper hole. How you do what you do makes all the difference, and it will also increase your credibility.

Think about it: if we’re not credible when we communicate, people won’t believe what we’re saying. They may not care or take stock in our advice. They may question our agenda or doubt our motives. We need to focus first on building credibility through both our character and competence and then earning trust through a few key behaviors.

The behaviors we need to emphasize during times of change and disruption are the same behaviors we need during times of non-crisis. They just become even more important because the degree of difficulty has gone up. We need to be intentional and deliberate about those behaviors.

Thirteen specific behaviors are common to every high-trust, highly engaged culture, and 13 opposite and counterfeit behaviors are found in every low-trust, toxic, dysfunctional culture. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to build trust over months and years; we’ve been thrown into a new environment.

There are four of the 13 behaviors that are disproportionately leveraged during times of change and crisis, and I’ll cover them in the following sections:

• Confront Reality
• Create Transparency
• Talk Truthfully
• Extend Trust

We’ll spend extra time in “Extend Trust” covering its specific application to remote work.

Interestingly, during major disruptions, leaders tend to drift not to the opposite of a high-trust behavior — but to the counterfeit. These first three behaviors are vital—people are looking for them. They will help you to be more credible, and more trustworthy. The last behavior, Extend Trust, is completely transformative—and it’s not happening enough.

Confront Reality

High-trust leaders take things head-on, even the tough things. Confronting reality means discussing the undiscussable and calling out the elephant in the room.

The opposite of confronting reality is to ignore it, act as though it doesn’t exist, and hope it will go away in time. The counterfeit is to act like we’re confronting reality when we’re actually evading it. We might acknowledge it—particularly when it’s obvious—but focus on busywork or ancillary issues, instead of tackling the tough root causes of the challenges at hand. We kick the can down the road. We skirt reality or give lip service to it, versus facing the hard news that it’s bad now and it may get worse. Acknowledging the elephant in the room, or merely talking about it, is very different from taking it head-on.

How we receive bad news the first time often determines whether or not we will continue to receive bad news. But we can’t solve a problem we don’t understand. We need the bad news. We have to confront and work through it, not around it. If team members, peers, or experts share difficult information, we don’t hide from it. We take it head-on.

Doing so inspires trust and confidence.

Create Transparency

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson said, “Transparency is ‘job one’ for leaders in a crisis.” We need to be open and authentic and real. Transparency is drawn from the principle of light: it cleanses, dissipates the shadows, and enables people to see. It gives them a sense of comfort and confidence. They know nothing is hidden.

The opposite of creating transparency is to hide or cover-up. It includes hoarding, withholding information, keeping secrets, or having hidden agendas. It’s darkness. The counterfeit of creating transparency is being open…to a point. It’s an illusion, revealing some things and covering up others, worrying that too much information might make people fearful. It’s when we share information in a way, or to a degree, while still trying
to control people’s response to it. But that causes more destruction and harm.

If we try to hide the bad news, we will lose credibility and trust with our audiences, our constituents, and our people — they’ll likely find out at some point anyway. The best way to handle this is to be upfront about the information we have. When we know things, we share what we know. When we don’t know things, we say what we don’t know and what we’re doing to learn those things and how we’re trying to respond. If we know things we can’t share, or it wouldn’t be appropriate or responsible to share, we tell people we can’t share, and why. We are transparent about why we might not be able to be transparent. We model transparency. We tell the truth in a way people can verify for themselves.

Talk Truthfully

Now more than ever, we have to tell the truth, even difficult truths. We have to call things what they are.

The opposite of talking truthfully is lying or deceiving, but I especially want to contrast talking truthfully to the counterfeit, which is when we spin, position, posture, or manipulate. During disruptive times like today, it’s very understandable to think; I don’t want to panic people. So the temptation is to soft-pedal the news. We might feel like we’re going to be less alarming and frightening if we downplay things, but if we do that, then every time we speak, people will wonder, Are they sugarcoating again? Is this real? Can I trust this?

At the same time, some might swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. We’re not trying to become alarmist and paint the absolute worst-case scenario, which can cause an emotional contagion that’s extraordinarily distressing. But we also don’t want to go to the extreme of saying everything is fine, there are no problems, and nothing is going to change — when everyone can look around and see everything is changing in front of their eyes. We have to find the sweet spot.

Get a reputation for being clear and upfront about bad news. People might not always like what they hear, but they’ll learn they can trust what they hear. With that, our ability to communicate will go up. Our ability to connect with our people and instill confidence in them will go up.

One of the most potent ways to talk truthfully is to start our meetings, discussions, and communications by declaring our intent. We should give not only the “what,” but especially the “why” behind the information we’re sharing or the direction we’re asking teams to take.

Extend Trust

Among the 13 Behaviors of High-Trust Leaders, this one stands apart. When I work with senior leaders and have the opportunity to really go deep with the Speed of Trust content, this behavior is the one that is nearly always the greatest struggle. And yet, it’s also often the most impactful.

During crisis and disruption, the tendency for even high-trust leaders is to backtrack and revert to more of a “command and control” style of leadership.

Think of a person who’s moved to another country and spoken the language fluently for years. When they stub their toe, they aren’t going to swear in the foreign language — they’ll go back to their native tongue. Extending trust is like an acquired language; it’s not necessarily instinctive and natural for people, especially under stress. And during crisis, or disruption, our tendency is to go back to what we know, what we were trained in, scripted in, and maybe what we’re good at. For many, that means going back to “command and control” versus what I refer to as “trust and inspire.”

So often the reason is fear: fear of the unknown, of the risk of it going wrong, that people aren’t ready, that they’ll take advantage of it, that they aren’t capable, that they aren’t motivated, or that they won’t deliver.

When we lead in a way that shows distrust to our people, it doesn’t inspire any of the kind of performance we need from them; it does just the opposite. Not only do we show them we don’t believe they can rise to the occasion, but we deny them the opportunity to even try. And our distrust is reciprocated.
One of the main reasons employees in many organizations don’t trust their managers is simply because the managers don’t trust their employees. Thankfully, this reciprocity goes both ways. Trust begets trust. People rise to the occasion. They perform better. Trust brings out the very best in others. In fact, I would say that being trusted is the most inspiring form of human motivation.

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Author Bio

Stephen M. R. Covey is the Global Leader, FranklinCovey Global Trust Practice and is the Content Expert for FranklinCovey’s Leading at the Speed of Trust and Working at The Speed of Trust courses. He is the New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Speed of Trust and is author of the new Wall Street Journal bestseller, Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others.