Leadership Skills Training - Trust makes you a better leader
Trust is THE most powerful tool in life. It creates opportunities for individuals and teams to succeed. Understanding Trust enables doing more than ever imagined. Adopting a culture of trust into your authentic leader isn’t easy, but worth it!
How often in life are we asked, “do you trust so-and-so?” I’ve been asked that hundreds of times because others want to validate if the person is trustworthy. In the organic sense, trust is built upon relationships and experience with others. Sometimes trust is mutual and other times its one-way. We use terms like mistrust and distrust to identify those we don’t full believe are trustworthy and perhaps those terms are used loosely as they aren’t fully understood.
Some psychobabble. Trust enables us. As a child, we are eventually trusted to walk on our own, drive a car and interact with others without our parents. How is trust achieved during those formative years? Parents typically trust as they learn about the child’s capabilties, maturity and environment they live in. It’s earned! Children can take liberties with their earned trust which deminishes the “level of trust” offered by the parent. If limited issues occur and as we mature (aka more experience), additional opportunities are provided to extend more trust…perhaps in the form of later curfew times. The ebb and flow of trust is largely one of observation. Is the parent trusted by the child? Normally this is by default. Children have little to base mis/distrust upon yet over time they will form their own measurement of the parent.
The same experience applies to how employees interact with a leader. Do you give the keys to the kingdom to someone that you just hired? It’s possible, but that would be an act of blind trust. Rather, we continue to extend trust in a test-and-learn model that allows us to observe how the person reacts to delegation and/or empowerment. The same is true for the leader. Leader’s are always on, always observed and always measured by their people. It’s akin to 24-hour surveillence. Employees will read the leader’s authenticity to measure the degree of trust they should award the leader. Parent-child, child-parent. Funny how most things come back to what we learn as a young person.
Trust is a complex mindset that requires numerous behaviors to be successful. Trust yields empowerment and requires both leader and employee to understand the risks and rewards. The risk is why some leaders choose not to empower others. If I am going to be blamed, I might as well make all the decisions. If that tact is taken, the leader is limited by 1) their intellectual capabilities, 2) the tasks assigned them, 3) their time. In contratry the empowering leader takes measured risks to create signfiicant additional outcomes for others and themselves. They are leveraging the talents of others to solve problems and complete tasks, they can take on more tasks and more time is invested into ways to advance their area. This skillset is how leaders can move up to higher-levels in the organization as they demonstrate the ability to deal with larger spans-of-control.
If leaders don’t trust, aren’t they managers. Yes. The management discipline is about process, control, authoritairanism, and governance. Those fight against what employees want…to be trusted. The Servant Leader believes in authentically caring for and helping others, even before yourself. I can attest, it’s a mindset worth invested into.