The story of a man who, despite a difficult family life, developed the determination, drive and skills to create a successful business and a happy life.
Corporate leaders today are measured by a new yardstick. The supreme test of a CEO and board of directors is now the value they create not just for shareholders, but for all stakeholders.
The shift to stakeholder capitalism creates pressure for corporate leaders to try to satisfy a wide range of constituencies with different, sometimes conflicting interests and perspectives. Earning their trust is key to navigating this tricky terrain.
Research shows that trust is the key to success. Yet growing distrust, cynicism and misinformation are eroding confidence in corporate impact and Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) claims.
To prosper in the age of stakeholder capitalism, companies must actively cultivate the trust of employees, investors, customers, regulators and corporate partners: developing strategies to understand these stakeholders more intimately, implementing deliberate trust-building actions, tracking their efforts over time, and communicating openly and effectively with key stakeholder groups.
We have entered the trust era: a time where (mis)information is omnipresent, individual perceptions reign supreme, and digital security and data privacy are constantly threatened. Now more than ever, stakeholders expect organizations to do the right things and do them well.
These expectations range from entrusting an organization to safeguard one’s private data to requiring a company to have a strong stance on Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) issues.
Trust also drives performance. When stakeholders trust an organization, their behaviors will reflect that trust can affect more traditional key performance indicators that directly affect financial performance. Trust elevates customer and brand loyalty, which can lead to revenue. It enhances levels of workforce engagement, which can result in increased productivity and retention. And the data confirms it.
Trustworthy companies outperform non-trustworthy companies by 2.5 times, and 88% of customers who highly trust a brand will buy again from that brand. Furthermore, employees’ Trust in their leaders improves job performance, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization and its mission.
Despite the data, however, many leaders and organizations still view trust as an abstract concept. Trust should be managed proactively because, when trust is prioritized and acted upon, it can become a competitive advantage. An organization that positions trust as a strategic priority—managing, measuring, investing in, and acting upon it can ultimately build a critical asset.
No heroic leader can resolve the complex challenges we face today. To address the important issues of our time we need a fundamental change of perspective. We need to start questioning many of our taken-for-granted assumptions about our business and social environments.
Leaders serve as role models for their followers and demonstrate the behavioral boundaries set within an organization. The appropriate and desired behavior is enhanced through the culture and socialization process of the newcomers.
Employees learn about values from watching leaders in action.
The more the leader “walks the talk”, by translating internalized values into action, the higher level of trust and respect he generates from followers.
A good case study is Disney – it strives to design work environments that inspire optimism and drive innovation for all employees, at all levels. And because of this recognize that maintaining an inclusive, supportive workplace requires mindful attention and intention, we continually adapt to the evolving needs of its people. The company’s intention is to put the responsibility for an inclusive culture in the hands of its leaders and employees through comprehensive education and engagement efforts.
We all watched Walt Disney Company (DIS) shares soared last week after the company released its fiscal first-quarter 2024 earnings. The stock had its best day in over three years after the company made a flurry of announcements and markets got a sense that CEO Bob Iger’s turnaround plan has started to show results on the ground.
Since returning to Disney, Bob Iger has inspired hope among employees and investors that he could turn around the entertainment giant — and faced tough challenges, people were a large part of the strategy that gave rise to the changes in fortunes.
To help bridge the trust gap we recognise that organizations need to work with each other and with wider society to identify practicable, actionable steps that businesses can take to shape a new relationship with wider society: a new ‘settlement’ based on mutual understanding and a shared recognition of the positive role that business plays in people’s lives.
To create such a settlement, businesses need to see themselves as part of a diverse, interconnected, and interdependent ecosystem – one that involves government, regulators, individual citizens, and more. Trust within and across this ecosystem is key to its long-term sustainability and survival.
That’s why trust needs to be restored to the heart of the business world.
There is much debate on the management of people, it seems that whatever media source to turn too you will see debate on whether it’s leading a group of people in an office setting, managing teams remotely, or more likely, leading a hybrid workforce, it’s critical for leaders to build and maintain trust with their people.
Leadership trust creates the stable foundation for employees and their organizations to flex, adapt, and thrive in times of continuous change.
The behaviors that build trust are the very behaviors that manage change. Trust building helps teams step into ambiguity, stay committed to managing the unknown with confidence, and embrace change as an opportunity to learn, grow, and do great work together.
Leadership is a competency and a skill set rather than an inherited set of traits that high-performing organisations recognise and prepare their organisation accordingly. Organisations that have high levels of employee engagement enjoy high performance on every key performance indicator from employee turnover to return on investment and shareholder return. Creating an engaged environment is a culture, not a program and must be approached systemically not tactically.
In organisations that means building a common language of leadership at all levels to have an immediate and lasting impact on business results, not just knowledge, wisdom or behaviours.
A bad example of trusted leadership is the chaos that continued to erupt as hoards of employees exited from Twitter/X after Elon Musk’s iron-fisted demands.
So far Musk’s leadership style is headed in the wrong direction. Trust in a leader allows organizations and communities to flourish, while the absence of trust can cause fragmentation, conflict, and even war. That’s why we need to trust our leaders, our family members, our friends and our co-workers, albeit in different ways.
Trust is the new disruptor, one that businesses must master to realize the full power of data and new intelligent technologies.
As businesses and governments transform to meet new challenges, it’s essential to embed Trust Intelligence into the core of their operations.
In the workplace, team psychological safety must be a top priority if businesses want to create a successful enterprise. And, more importantly, psychological safety contributes to an inclusive, diverse, and accepting workplace. A workplace where team members feel safe to express themselves.
It’s crucial to prioritize high psychological safety to create a high-performing team.
As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Team cultures reflect the actions and reactions of their leaders. Leaders who fail to establish and support psychologically safe team environments can cause irreparable negative consequences and damage to the organization.
Enterprises powered by trust will be able to deliver on all three transformation drivers: people, technology and innovation. They’ll be able to leapfrog their competitors. To shape new markets.
Leaders must manage with stability and certainty during economic uncertainty, not add more confusion and disruption.
Trust is at the foundation of healthy relationships. At its core, trust is the willingness of one party to be vulnerable to the actions of another.
It is an expectation that two parties will act in a way that is mutually beneficial. For these reasons, trust is a key element of effective communication, teamwork, employee commitment and productivity. It leads to stronger working relationships and a healthier organizational culture.
Placing people at the centre of your corporate culture effort will enable positive shift and unlock long-term value for the organization. Culture work typically follows a major company event commonly a shift in strategy, a new CEO, a merger or acquisition, digital or functional transformation, regulatory changes, increasing calls for inclusivity, or unethical behaviour events.
On the flip side companies sometimes are forced to deal with narcissistic leaders whose behaviour can be relentless and ruthless. So is their legacy: it creates lasting organizational damage.
People embrace low integrity and individualism when both leaders and the company culture support those behaviours. Aligning culture across every level of the organization so that it enables your strategy is essential to moving with agility in a time of unprecedented change.
As external pressure mounts, leaders should take action to create a blueprint for purpose and culture that delivers short- and long-term value for employees, customers and investors. Culture isn’t the soft stuff, it’s the real, human stuff. And it’s time we got that right for each other.
As Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO, Airbnb once said:
“Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing.”
There is a strong connection between a high-trust culture and business success. In fact, the connection is so strong that strategy-minded leaders, who care deeply about the financial well-being of their business, should make building a high-trust culture a top priority.
The disruptive world that we all now operate within is a crucible within which resilient leadership is now forced to redefine. Acting without perfect information, often with only a few hours or days to spare, CEOs need to guide their organisations through the daily myriad of decisions and challenges, with significant implications for their company’s whole system; employees, customers, clients, financial partners, suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders, as well as for society as a whole.
Considering the fact that all entities are primarily made up of people, it is important for individuals in any organisation, nation or global community to trust each other and themselves to get the work done.
Indeed, not only is trust between people necessary for the success of any endeavour, but it is also essential for any entity to even exist.
Trust starts with transparency: telling what you know and admitting what you don’t. Trust is also a function of relationships: some level of ‘knowing’ each other among you and your employees, your customers, and your ecosystem. And it also depends on experience: Do you reliably do what you say?
In times of growing uncertainty, trust is increasingly built by demonstrating an ability to address unanticipated situations and a steady commitment to address the needs of all stakeholders in the best way possible.
Transformation and Change
The converse in high-trust cultures is equally true. When the trust goes up in an organisation, the speed will go up and costs will come down. Your ability to collaborate goes up, as does your ability to attract, retain and engage people. When trust goes up, you’ll see people sharing information, not being afraid to make mistakes, more creativity, higher accountability and greater energy and satisfaction. When you move the needle on trust, you move all kinds of other needles with it.
As businesses and governments transform to meet new challenges, it’s essential to embed trust intelligence into the core of their operations.
As humans we need a balance of skill, competence, morality and ethic behaviours to be truly effective in this new world, however, all these intelligences need to be within the TI umbrella to truly be effective.
Moral and ethical leadership is the key to a successful business, yet it’s clear from the news lately that the leaders of some of our most influential governments and corporations are making morally questionable decisions. These decisions will lose the trust of society, customers and employees.
Trust is the foundation of high-functioning relationships and can only be achieved by meaningful dialogue. It is clear that this is not happening. Instead, we’re using electronic communication, where it should never be used.
Enterprises powered by trust will be able to deliver on all three transformation drivers: people, technology and innovation. They’ll be able to leapfrog their competitors. To shape new markets. To lead to better futures.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how important trust is for a business. For business owners, a lack of trust is your biggest expense. It may take years for a manager or an executive to develop the trust of his or her employees, but only moments to lose. Without trust, transactions cannot occur, influence is destroyed, leaders can lose teams and salespeople can lose sales. The list goes on.
Trust and relationships, much more than money, are the currency of business.
Trust is the natural result of thousands of tiny actions, words, thoughts, and intentions. Trust does not happen all at once; gaining trust takes work. It might take years of calling on a certain client to break through and fully gain their comfort and trust. Yet in spite of the importance of trust in the business world today, few leaders have given it the focus and nurturing it deserves.
Building, maintaining, and sustaining trust is essential, and it is one of the central tenets of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory to actualize such organizations that have a high trust intelligence within them.
This means that HR professionals have the new task of building trust, and more importantly, maintaining and sustaining it so that organisations continue to thrive and differentiate in the new competitive marketplace.
While many factors determine whether a particular organisation is a high-trust or low-trust environment, the key aspect is the organisational culture which needs to encourage trust between the employees and the organisational stakeholders and within the employees.
Organisational Culture is the codified and implicit set of rules or codes of conduct by which organisations operate and hence, the way in which organizational culture is defined, maintained, and upheld is indeed important for organizations to function.
The importance of every organization and HR Function requires clear instructions from Boards, Senior Management and Executive leadership to codify policies and rules or codes of conduct that determine how employees must behave and act in their interactions with each other and with the larger organisational ecosystem.
This is contingent upon the HR function to first assist the stakeholders in defining the rules, and then ensuring that such rules are consistently maintained and enforced, and perhaps, the most important aspect here is that such codes of conduct must be upheld meaning that during times of crisis, the HR function must indeed “co-create” or must back up words with action and execution.
A key challenge for any HR professional is to ensure that cultural factors and socio-cultural influences do not come in the way of actualizing a high-trust organisation.
Authentic cultures are not formed by values posted on the wall; they are the result of leaders being purposefully committed to living those values and willing to personally change in order to model the behaviours and actions that maintain integrity.
When values are real, employees and customers know the enterprise is authentic and true to its culture. Especially in a crisis, comparing actions to values is a litmus test of a company’s authenticity.
Culture, we know, is the core of resilience, but it alone is not enough. Other work by our company has shown that organisations that accelerate performance during good times and bad are able to mobilise, execute, and transform with agility.
Today, a company’s foresight, ability to learn, and adaptability will set it apart.
Companies strong in these areas have leaders who are future-focused, demonstrate a growth mindset, are able to pivot quickly in times of rapid disruption, and maintain resilience to navigate their organisations.
Trust is the Glue
Trust is at the foundation of healthy relationships. At its core, trust is the willingness of one party to be vulnerable to the actions of another. It is an expectation that two parties will act in a way that is mutually beneficial. For these reasons, trust is a key element of effective communication, teamwork, employee commitment and productivity. It leads to stronger working relationships and a healthier organisational culture.
Because of the inherent vulnerability involved in trusting relationships, it is widely understood that trust must be earned. This is true whether it is between two colleagues, a manager and an employee, or even between an employee and the organisation at large. In some instances, it can be hard to build and sustain because individuals may not be aware of the unintentional ways that they have broken the trust of their colleagues.
Once Trust is Broken
A lack of trust in the workplace is the virus that can create a diseased workplace culture. It often begins with leadership and spreads throughout the team, leading to a cycle of unhealthy responses that affect engagement and productivity.
As a leader, if you don’t trust your team, you’re likely either micromanage or withhold information and work on initiatives on your own or with a select group of people. This can create a vicious cycle, as your team may respond by pulling back even further, so you’ve created a perfect storm in this self-fulfilling prophecy of distrust.
Trust helps to make challenging conversations easier – this has been written in my new book “The Trust Paradigm” : making teams more integrated and employees more engaged. Exploring ways in which trust can be built can help individuals and companies create stronger relationships and healthier cultures.
“It is my belief that an important part of empathy is the ability to trust and be trusted. When your employees feel that you care, then you have earned their trust. If they trust you, they will take more risks with you and be more open with you. People will talk openly with you only when they trust you. As trust builds, there will be more sharing of information, feelings, and thoughts. The more you share, the easier it is to relate to one another. Building trust is something that takes time and effort. It involves both you and the other person in the relationship. The level of trust is what makes each relationship unique.”
From swift decisions to shutter offices, institute work-from-home policies, and scale the technological tools to stay connected to customers and stakeholders, agile leaders have assessed the risk and pivoted quickly.
They must also reassess the medium and long term, building on past crisis interventions and associated learnings to evolve operations and innovate to meet changing needs, all while staying true to their culture.
To explain, trust is as much a function of personality as it is about the societal culture from which people come.
Many sociologists have pointed out, most Western nations are implicitly high-trust ones, and while developing countries do have high-trust cultures, it is often the case that due to the diversity of such cultures, there are challenges arising from cultural norms as far as building and maintaining trust is concerned.
Clarity of thinking, communication, and decision-making will be at a premium.
Those CEOs who can best exhibit this clarity, and lead from the heart and the head, will inspire their organisations to persevere through this crisis, positioning their brand to emerge in a better place, prepared for whatever may come.
Crises like these, with deep challenges to be navigated, will also lead to opportunities for learning and deepening trust with all stakeholders, while equipping organisations for a step change that creates more value not just for shareholders, but for society as a whole.
From time to time, we lose our bearings as individuals, especially when facing overwhelming challenges, as we are today faced with a changing global environment; it is in these moments that we lean into our core, our character and personal values, to find strength and focus on what really matters.
Leaders facing the unprecedented times and circumstances of the moment are also looking to their organisation’s core, its communal culture and values, to inspire resilience, unleash agility, and help employees to thrive, not simply survive.
It’s also important to recognise and address the emotions of all stakeholders.
This is not just about charts and numbers. Narratives can be powerful ways to acknowledge the fears that naturally surface in times of crisis, while at the same time framing the opportunity that can be achieved if stakeholders come together and commit to overcoming the challenges that stand in the way.
A recent survey carried out by DataPad for and on behalf of International Business and Executive Management asked employees questions on ‘trust and respect’ in relation to their executive leadership, heads of department and their immediate line managers.
The closer the manager’s role was to the respondent, the more likely it was for the employee to answer positively. Immediate managers were trusted ‘a lot’ by 48% of those who responded and ‘a little’ by 36%. Sixteen percent of immediate managers are not trusted at all.
Working with CEOs over the years, I have found that thriving cultures are those that are purpose-driven and characterised by vitality and a growth mindset.
Organisations where leaders are purposeful and intentional and open to personal change, and where every employee has a voice and is actively engaged in living the organisation’s values, are those with thriving cultures.
Many organisations entered into this crisis with such a culture. Others were struggling. But, like the process of glass blowing, in which beautiful structures are created by manipulating molten glass in a hot furnace, we have observed healthy and resilient cultures emerge from the fires of crisis.
At their core, organisations are shadows of their leaders. Leaders who greet crisis with perspective and compassion, confront the current reality with optimism for the future, demonstrate personal resilience, and inspire that resilience among their employees are those who will make the difference.
In final summary, indeed, the necessity of maintaining trust is complemented by the behaviour of leadership during any business or economic cycle, when it becomes necessary to return to “First Principles” or the Raison D’etre of
Existence which when translated into plain English means the core of what it means to work for such organisations.
In the same manner in which government, business and personal crises threaten the character of individuals and how they respond is indicative of their personality, organizational impact is the core trust or the glue that binds the organisation, and hence, how the leadership responds determines whether the Trust intelligence has broken down or is very much in existence.
Leaders serve as role models for their followers and demonstrate the behavioural boundaries set within an organisation. The appropriate and desired behaviour is enhanced through the culture and socialisation process of the newcomers.
To conclude, leaders need to help bridge the trust gap, we recognise that organisations need to work with each other and with wider society to identify practicable, actionable steps that businesses can take to shape a new relationship with wider society: a new ‘settlement’ based on mutual understanding and a shared recognition of the positive role that business plays in people’s lives.
To create such a settlement, businesses need to see themselves as part of a diverse, interconnected, and interdependent ecosystem one that involves government, regulators, individual citizens, and more.
Trust within and across this ecosystem is key to its long-term sustainability and survival. That’s why trust needs to be restored to the heart of the business world.
As Stephen M.R. Covey once said:
“Contrary to what most people believe, trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don’t; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create.”
As leaders, our ability to deal with global disruption whether it impacts our organization’s supply chain, sales and distribution capability or cash flow is regularly being tested.
Whether we’re talking about disease outbreaks or financial crises, events beyond any individual or organization’s control can force us to sharpen our ability to lead in unpredictable times.
As global disruption ebbs and flows, what role should leaders play, and what strategies can you deploy to get ahead of this unpredictable curve?
Earlier this year, Odgers Berndtson released its Leadership Confidence Index 2022. It found confidence in leadership had almost doubled in the past two years, jumping from 24% in 2020 to 42% in 2022.
It is a striking statistic, and from it, one thing can be deducted with certainty; around the world, more leaders than expected are performing better than they were before the pandemic. Yet the statistic tells another tale. More than half of leaders did not perform well and lost the confidence of their teams and organizations. These juxtaposing circumstances reveal much about the global state of leadership performance and leadership acquisition today.
How we arrived at these circumstances is clear. COVID-19 resulted in a crisis where business as usual no longer existed.
In the newly created environment, many leaders rose to the challenge, adapted to the new state of play, and realigned their organizations with skill and purpose.
Ultimately, the pandemic provided an environment in which the best leaders could show ‘what they were made of’ and their capabilities shone through. If there was a single sentence summing up these types of individuals, it would be: “leaders who people will follow, not because they have to but because they want to.”
Yet 58% of leaders did not fall into this category. Unable or unwilling to adapt they stuck rigidly to the playbook of the past, applying outdated skills to a novel situation. Often, these were leaders more at home talking to their boards about share price and public opinion than having an honest conversation with those they led. Their capabilities centred around achieving market share and growth as opposed to managing disruption, or more importantly, inspiring teams to deliver results during disruption.
Many didn’t know what hit them, and were unable to swim in the current of the new world, and have or are currently being replaced. It has resulted in a new cohort of leaders worldwide.
This new breed of leader is organizationally facing. They understand that the board and their people are of equal importance. Their decision-making is often inclusive, they place trust in their senior executives and genuinely care about those they lead – not because it’s in vogue but because they genuinely value them.
These leaders often have a different thought process from their predecessors.
Their skills lie in reading market signals and adapting to them swiftly. They are strategists and change agents who can ‘see around corners’. They can extrapolate from major trends and take advantage of the findings, turning change into opportunity, and importantly inspiring others to deliver on that change. Behaviourally, they are more akin to an entrepreneur than a traditional manager; innovative, brave, humble, and naturally inquisitive with a desire to learn. Above all else, they embrace and even thrive on disruption.
Such a dramatic change to the leadership paradigm has dramatic consequences. Globally, the number of leadership searches has increased exponentially. Across APAC the search industry has seen 43% growth, while the reshuffle of executives in South America has resulted in double the normal number of searches we would make for general managers in Chile, Peru, and Argentina. In the UK, and across the U.S., the story is the same – explosive demand for new leadership talent.
Much of this demand can be laid at the feet of the pandemic. 58% of leaders were not up to the challenge and therefore need replacing. But another, more significant factor is also at play here; the expectation of the disruption to come. Our own Index reveals the majority of executives (79%) believe the level of future disruption will either increase or maintain at the same pace.
And we know that the majority of boards feel the same way and want to future-proof their organizations against this disruption with the sort of leader who can manage and take advantage of it.
But the supply is scarce, and on top of this, regional conditions have upended the leadership acquisition market. Across counties in APAC, zero-tolerance lockdowns and stringent work permits have resulted in an exodus of strong talent. Combined with a limited local supply and deglobalization shifting the traditional leadership footprint to other countries in the region, the pool of high-performing leaders is now almost completely different.
In South America, tourism has been in freefall, the cost of many raw materials has exploded, and crop yields are expected to be lower while the price of fertilizer has shot up. Political instability and a withdrawal of significant investment have added to the disruption. Even countries like Chile that have become accustomed to relative stability now face uncertainty. For leaders, the economic environment has been rewritten. Many are retiring and more are being replaced.
In the U.S. and the UK, technology transformation much like it is elsewhere in the world is no longer just a sector but a function of every industry. It’s challenging everything from business models and back-office operations to the very products and services a company sells. For years, the notion that leaders should be tech-savvy has been gaining momentum. Now it’s an absolute necessity, with a core skill being the ability to know which technologies to invest in, and which ones not to.
And across every industry and country, supply chain chaos, rising inflation, and the ESG and diversity agendas are near-universal challenges that are a leader’s responsibility to resolve.
The current climate has become a catalyst for exponential demand and short supply. What makes a high-performing leader is very different from what it was before the pandemic. At the same time, the business environment has altered who those leaders are, where they come from, and the types of skillsets they have. On the one side boards expect more of their leaders and on the other, there is a shortage of leaders who can genuinely deliver on these new expectations.
Yet they are out there. To find them, it will often require an organization to ‘go outside their lane’ and look for leaders in adjacent or even completely different industries.
It will mean genuinely leaning into diversity and inclusion and searching for leaders who are nothing like what has come before.
And it will mean enabling individuals from the second layer of senior management and helping them to step up. Above all, it means disregarding the traditional blueprint of what a leader should be and embracing the new leadership paradigm.
As a comparison, The Harvard Business Review recently released a study that examined how 1,890 senior executives around the world view their organization’s ability to manage disruption. The results were quite staggering: Only 15% of respondents expressed a reasonably high level of confidence that their leadership team is “fit to lead through future disruption,” while 61% reported being “tentative” and 24% are outright “worried.” The two top reasons given by executives who worry the most were lack of vision/buy-in and resistance to change inside their organizations.
The Conference Board, a global business membership and research association, noted similar findings in its C-Suite Challenge 2020 report: “CEOs’ internal concerns include talent and skills shortages, disruptive technologies, and building an innovative culture.”
Trust in our culture at large, in our institutions and in our companies is significantly lower than a generation ago.
In any normality trust is paramount, but given current world events, never has there been more need for increased trust, a shared understanding and language to talk about the specific behaviours that affect trust can result in more productive conversations about team performance. Those conversations can even create stronger bonds between leaders and employees.
But leadership trust isn’t a one-off initiative. It requires continued effort from all team members. And it takes leaders who are willing to show integrity, change behaviour, and take on the hard work of collaborating across boundaries and dealing with differences.
Research shows that trust represents a core human need we all have: to trust others, to be trusted in return, and to trust in ourselves. When trust is present, people align around the purpose of their team, embrace goals and objectives, willingly collaborate, and are empowered to do their best work.
When trust is absent, or made vulnerably, work becomes more difficult and takes longer to execute. With the pace of change in today’s organizations, leaders need trust more than ever before.
Trust means ‘uncompromised by doubt’. In the workplace, people can’t do their best work if they doubt others’ intentions or capabilities, the direction or viability of the organization, or, most importantly, if they doubt their own ability to keep up with the demands placed on them. This is especially true in today’s environment of complex change and ambiguity when employees are being asked to do more with less.
Leadership trust is reciprocal and created incrementally. To inspire trust from others, leaders need to also show trust in them. Over time these relationships build and maintain the trust that teams and organizations need to take action in a fast-paced world.
Our research underscores the need for trust in organizations. In high-trust environments, people show up and to do their best work. They gain productive energy, creativity, speed, and better results. They align around a common purpose, take risks, support each other, and communicate openly and honestly.
Effective leadership requires knowing how to build and keep trust, whether it’s with individuals, on teams, or across the organization.
Finally, there’s no question that disruption will continue to define the course of business and organizations. The challenge for you as a leader is to develop the mindset and organizational culture that will turn the forces of disruption into a catalyst for strategic thinking and creative execution. The term ‘trust’ has been overused forever and, during the last decade, considerably devalued. In The Trust Paradigm book, the authors aim to take the concept back to its essentials and to re-evaluate how real, meaningful trust can be incorporated into management and leadership.
A great quote by American Academic – Clayton M. Christensen:
“We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don’t have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action.”
There is much debate and discussion about leadership styles, in particular, the styles recognized as the most important factor in determining workforce productivity and in establishing an organizational environment.
At IBEM we believe if people understand the bounds of their position they have full authority to make decisions within those guidelines. The wider those guidelines, the more accountability an employee has earned to make decisions and take action in the company’s best interests.
We believe in the power of leadership to make things happen. That power should be in the hands of everyone, not the few.
Leadership is a competency and a skill set rather than an inherited set of traits that high-performing organisations recognise and prepare their organisation accordingly. Organisations that have high levels of employee engagement enjoy high performance on every key performance indicator from employee turnover to return on investment and shareholder return. Creating an engaged environment is a culture, not a program and must be approached systemically not tactically.
In organisations that means building a common language of leadership at all levels to have an immediate and lasting impact on business results, not just knowledge, wisdom or behaviours.
Researchers have observed a significant shift in the approach organizational leaders need to take to communicate with their teams.
The would-be analyst of leadership usually studies popularity, power, showmanship or wisdom in long-range planning. But none of these qualities is the essence of leadership. Leadership is the accomplishment of a goal through the direction of human assistants a human and social achievement that stems from the leader’s understanding of his or her fellow workers and the relationship of their individual goals to the group’s aim.
To be successful, leaders must learn two basic lessons: People are complex, and people are different. Human beings respond not only to the traditional carrot and stick but also to ambition, patriotism, love of the good and the beautiful, boredom, self-doubt, and many other desires and emotions. One person may find satisfaction in solving intellectual problems but may never be given the opportunity to explore how that satisfaction can be applied to business. Another may need a friendly, admiring relationship and may be constantly frustrated by the failure of his superior to recognize and take advantage of that need.
Exercising power and being a leader is not about winning a popularity contest. A lot of leaders are generally and not necessarily nice people.
For decades, many businesses adhered to a rigid leadership style, one that was hierarchical, where managers gave orders, enforced inflexible policies, and didn’t welcome input from employees.
This type of command and control leadership took hold in the 1950s and ’60s, started by people who returned from World War II and stepped into business leadership.
“Command-and-control” is the phrase informally used to describe the status quo style of leadership that exists within modern organisations: organisations generally characterise command-and-control by the following:
• Centralised decision making
• Have a pyramid-like organisational structure, but they may also be flat (command-and-control is more a culture than a structure)
• Increasingly privatise information the higher you go
• Allow more autonomy the higher you go
• Take a top-down approach to virtually everything, especially strategic thinking
• Create a strong distinction between (senior) management and workers
• Increase salary, perks, and flexibility with seniority
• Have specialised internal departments such as Human Resources
• Standardise and coordinate the monitoring, measuring and motivating of employees
• Do not let anyone other than senior management set the rules
• See employees working to please their boss as a priority
• Do not have a culture that allows room for failure
• Police its employees’ movements
Leadership is not about control
However, this style of leadership is a relic of a bygone era of business and is no longer even used to the same extent by the military. Employees no longer want to work at organizations where they simply must do as they’re told, have no input on their role or the direction of the company, and must follow orders because they came from a superior.
Do you believe that being in charge means you are in control?
If you find yourself frustrated about losing power in situations, it’s because leadership is not about taking control; it’s about influence.
The best leaders know that their role is not to dictate, but to inspire and motivate others to act. When you surrender control, you invite people to discover their potential. You create a culture where your team looks to go above and beyond, not just do the minimum to meet your demand. You will draw out a culture of communication that fosters and encourages innovation.
However, if you fear that creativity and collaboration are a recipe for chaos, then you need to revisit why you chose to become a leader in the first place. Real leaders don’t take on leadership roles to be in control of people or command them; the best leaders know that leadership is a privilege. The most influential leaders in history didn’t achieve greatness with whips and force. The masses followed them because of their enormous influence.
Command and control may have worked in the past, but it’s on its way out and companies that don’t adjust quickly may find it very hard to recruit and retain talent. Not only does it damage employee morale, it also leads to inferior results. Here’s why:
Employee mobility.
Command and control leadership was often used extensively in companies where employees expected to spend their entire careers and be rewarded with a pension. Before the internet, employees didn’t have as many options to change jobs, and leaving a company in search of greener pastures was less common, as employees valued stability and tenure over flexibility.
This is not true anymore – workers are more comfortable exiting jobs, and more than half of employees are actively looking for a new job. Many workers are happy to join the gig economy and be their own boss. In response, innovative leaders have succeeded by changing their strategies to keep employees happy and willing to stay.
Today’s workers don’t need to tolerate command and control leadership. Employees who feel micromanaged or strictly scrutinized by their managers feel comfortable jumping ship and finding a new job where they have more autonomy, respect, and a sense of purpose and ownership.
Businesses must be integrated and innovative.
With the exception of very large industries such as aerospace and government contracting, it’s very hard to maintain a competitive advantage these days without being able to constantly adapt.
Command and control don’t just make employees unhappy- it also can hurt your team’s decision-making. The best leaders solicit multiple perspectives and know that differing opinions can improve a team’s ideas over time. Leaders who suppress dissenting voices often keep valuable ideas from surfacing.
Most leadership experts agree that allowing dissent and productive conflict is vital to decision-making. Legendary CEO and leadership expert Ray Dalio said, “The greatest tragedy of mankind comes from the inability of people to have thoughtful disagreement to find out what’s true.”
Command and control leadership’s greatest failure comes from exactly what Dalio critiques. Leaders who insist their teams follow their decisions without question are shutting off constructive feedback that could reshape an idea, pre-empt a poor decision, or even change an entire company for the better.
Employees should be empowered to make decisions.
Command and control leadership is by design inflexible. While that ensures all members of a team are dedicated to the same goal, it also limits employee autonomy. If employees have to get permission for every decision they make, decision-making will grind to a halt.
The fast pace of the modern business world requires employees to adjust course constantly to meet changing demands. The best businesses empower their employees to trust their own judgment, guided by their core values to make decisions independently based on the best information they have at the time.
Even the military, the foundation of modern command and control leadership, has recognized this – in an interview, American general Stanley McChrystal said he told his troops, “If and when we get on the ground the order we gave you is wrong, execute the order we should’ve given you.”
McChrystal, a decorated general, certainly was not encouraging insubordination or disrespect of superiors. But he recognized that it’s impossible for leaders to be correct in every case, and the best organizations empower employees to make judgment calls when it seems their instructions don’t fit the situation.
Command and control leadership doesn’t allow this flexibility – it requires adherence to rigid orders, and that can lead to massive mistakes.
We’re way past the time when leaders succeed by commanding their teams to follow their instructions and never deviate. Employees want to be respected at work, have the autonomy to make their own decisions, and work in an environment of psychological safety, where they can be candid with their managers. The companies where leaders foster that type of environment are winning the talent war.
A more flexible style of leadership is better for everyone in the long run. Engaged and dedicated employees are critical to exponential growth, and command and control leadership will only push away top talent. It’s time to adapt.
Toxic workplace cultures are everywhere in America. With one in five Americans having left a job in the past five years due to unhealthy work culture, and with 49% of employees having thought about leaving their current organization, it all adds up to a poisonous churn, according to a new report from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) examining workplace culture and how it impacted the cost of doing business.
Toxic workplace culture costs businesses billions in employee turnover: $223 billion over the last five years. Some of those turnover costs can be broken down into employee overtime to fill in the gaps, costs for temporary employees, recruiting costs, hiring manager time, recruiter time, and advertising costs.
What does a toxic workplace culture look like? There are overt signs like discrimination by sex and by age, but the most common sign is a breakdown in communication.
Manager nightmare
Trust in leadership is at an all-time low, according to research by multiple sources. Yet, employees attribute them with a high amount of power. The vast majority – 76% – say that their leaders set the culture of their workplace.
Still, over a third (36%) of workers say their CEO and line manager doesn’t know how to lead a team
Leaders are the reason 60% of employees want to leave their organization.
Four in 10 workers say their management do not frequently engage them in honest conversations about work matters.
This divide to a lack of proper training and the inability of some leaders to bridge the gap between their previous role as an individual contributor and their current role as manager.
More importantly, many managers haven’t been trained to work with people.
About two-thirds of working Americans say they have worked in a toxic workplace, with 26% reporting they have worked in more than one. It’s an environment that seemingly drags a significant portion of a workplace’s workers down:
– A quarter dread going to work
– A quarter don’t feel safe or secure voicing their opinions on work-related matters
– A quarter don’t feel respected or valued on the job
This environment bleeds into their home life: nearly a third of Americans say their toxic workplace makes them feel stressed and irritable at home.
In fact, they’re so stressed about their work-life that many would rather play hooky: one in five calls in sick when they just can’t face work that day.
Of course, unhappy workers feigning sick costs money: at companies in the U.S., the cost of productivity loss due to unplanned absences costs approximately $431 billion per year. And up to $86 billion of this lost productivity can be attributed to employees calling in sick when they don’t feel like going to work.
How to build a strong workplace culture?
Organizations must define their purpose. As well as figure out what’s acceptable and unacceptable within their organization. I think organizations can have much clearer conversations about what they believe in. What is their purpose? And what are the behaviours and the principles that they hold absolutely dear as fundamental to the organization? And also create examples of, ‘here’s what we don’t value in the workplace and won’t accept’.
The organization’s leadership is responsible for building good workplace culture.
Culture is the environment that surrounds us all the time. A workplace culture is the shared values, belief systems, attitudes and the set of assumptions that people in a workplace share. This is shaped by individual upbringing, social and cultural context.
In a workplace, however, the leadership and the strategic organizational directions and management influence the workplace culture to a huge extent. A positive workplace culture improves teamwork, raises the morale, increases productivity and efficiency, and enhances retention of the workforce. Job satisfaction, collaboration, and work performance are all enhanced. And, most importantly, a positive workplace environment reduces stress in employees.
Research by Deloitte has shown that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct corporate culture is important to a business’ success. Deloitte’s survey also found that 76% of these employees believed that a “clearly defined business strategy” helped create a positive culture.
A positive culture in the workplace is essential for fostering a sense of pride and ownership amongst the employees. When people take pride, they invest their future in the organization and work hard to create opportunities that will benefit the organization.
By identifying and rewarding those who are actively striving towards creating a positive work culture, and supporting others around them, companies can encourage others to do the same. Positive attitudes and behaviour in the workplace are the direct results of effective leadership and a positive management style.
Trust is at the foundation of healthy relationships. At its core, trust is the willingness of one party to be vulnerable to the actions of another. It is an expectation that two parties will act in a way that is mutually beneficial. For these reasons, trust is a key element of effective communication, teamwork, employee commitment and productivity. It leads to stronger working relationships and a healthier organizational culture.
Because of the inherent vulnerability involved in trusting relationships, it is widely understood that trust must be earned. This is true whether it is between two colleagues, a manager and employee, or even between an employee and the organization at large. In some instances, it can be hard to build and sustain because individuals may not be aware of the unintentional ways that they have broken trust with their colleagues.
Trust helps to make challenging conversations easier – this has been written in my new book “The Trust Paradigm”, teams more integrated and employees more engaged. Exploring ways in which trust can be built can help individuals and companies create stronger relationships and healthier cultures.
Final thought, placing people at the centre of your corporate culture effort will enable positive shift and unlock long-term value for the organization. Culture work typically follows a major company event commonly a shift in strategy, a new CEO, a merger or acquisition, digital or functional transformation, regulatory changes, increasing calls for inclusivity, or unethical behaviour events.
On the flip sid,e companies sometimes are forced to deal with narcissistic leaders whose behaviour can be relentless and ruthless. So is their legacy: it creates lasting organizational damage.
People embrace low integrity and individualism when both leaders and the company culture support those behaviours. Aligning culture across every level of the organization so that it enables your strategy is essential to moving with agility in a time of unprecedented change. As external pressure mounts, leaders should take action to create a blueprint for purpose and culture that delivers short- and long-term value for employees, customers and investors. Culture isn’t the soft stuff, it’s the real, human stuff. And it’s time we got that right for each other.
William Courtney Hamilton Prentice was formerly the president of Bryant and Stratton Business Institutes in Buffalo, New York, the president of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and the dean of Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, who once said:
“Effective leaders take a personal interest in the long-term development of their employees, and they use tact and other social skills to encourage employees to achieve their best. It isn’t about being “nice” or “understanding” — it’s about tapping into individual motivations in the interest of furthering an organization wide goal.”
Can a company be successful and competitive in the market and at the same time trusted?
Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal and Naval Officer once said about resilience: “We all have battles to fight. And it’s often in those battles that we are most alive: it’s on the frontlines of our lives that we earn wisdom, create joy, forge friendships, discover happiness, find love, and do purposeful work.”
There are two ways to look at the world we are living in in the present moment.
At one level, we are facing unprecedented opportunities. An interconnected world with tremendous, possibly unlimited, potential. Our ability to communicate instantly through multiple mediums is phenomenal. Online educational capabilities can elevate entire nations. An internet connection and a phone can give anyone access to the greatest literature, music, and art ever created. The speed with which electric cars have been adopted, internet-based video as a communication method has been embraced by an aging population, and the ability to start a business in one’s home and grow it online is astounding.
At another level, we are facing unprecedented risk – a war with no end in sight, raging inflation, fractured supply chains leading to food insecurity, millions of migrating people seeking safety, opportunity, or both, and climate change resulting in stronger hurricanes, floods, wildfires and other catastrophes, not to mention deep political divisions in many countries, as well as a seemingly never-ending pandemic risk.
The challenge for people and businesses today is how to navigate through these two views, both of which are very real. We clearly cannot predict the future, given that in early 2019 no business had been expected to be shuttered for months at a time in 2020 and 2021 due to a pandemic. Perhaps only a few military and political experts were expecting a Russia – Ukraine war but the unified free world response to Russian aggression, was not expected, nor were the resultant rising fuel costs.
What this means is we live, work, build our careers, and operate our businesses in a time that is highly unpredictable. So, how do we thrive despite this uncertainty?
This is the question that we pondered over coffee recently. As two authors, one of whom specializes in leadership and teamwork learnings from famous Polar explorers and other events in history such as the building of the Panama Canal and the great railways, and the other one, highly experienced in the management of modern global businesses, we concluded that there were two key skills needed. These are resiliency and trust.
Resiliency – three strategies
Resiliency is in great demand at the individual, team, manager, executive, and organizational levels. It is the ability to bounce back from any setback or contingency encountered. Resiliency is a skill that can be learned, and the more one exercises their resiliency fibers, the more adaptable a person or entity becomes in a world brimming with opportunity, yet subject to grave risk.
Here are three strategies to build resilience gleaned from our experiences.
First, stop striving to make the perfect decision. Instead, focus on having the skills to recover quickly from bad decisions. When there is an unpredictable future, like in present times, there may only be a 50-50 chance of a decision-generating a positive result in the first instance. A three-step ability, to assess, refine and try again, forged in the knowledge that you and your team have the wherewithal to “have another go,” is what successfully saved many polar expeditions as well as polar explorers’ lives.
Second, being able to inspire is key, and that inspiration has to be spoken communication, not email or text. Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s, Winston Churchill in the 1940s, and John F. Kennedy in the 1960s were the great orators of their generations. They didn’t have email or text in those days, but they certainly could write telegrams and letters. Yet their inspiring words were spoken.
That ability to inspire resilience through words is becoming a lost art. Theodore Roosevelt talked about individuals being able to “dare mighty things” in pursuit of “glorious triumphs”, and stated it’s not the critic who counts, it is the person “in the arena” who is to be admired, even if they fail in their pursuit. It only takes one dynamic leader with the right words to inspire a generation to overcome setbacks.
Third, plan that every endeavor of any merit will inevitably hit obstacles. Resiliency comes not from never encountering adversity, but from repeatedly overcoming it in pursuit of a noble goal. Individuals, teams, and organizations build resiliency by pursuing goals they believe in, and while doing their best to avoid challenges, being firm in their belief that the goal is what matters, and discomfort, in whatever form, whether it is financial risk or physical discomfort (in the case of the Antarctic explorers), these were just part of the day-to-day pursuit of the goal, and to be taken in stride.
The other side of the equation is trust.
Trust – three strategies
Trust matters. There are just a few elemental forces that hold our world together. The one that is the glue of society is called trust. Its presence cements relationships by allowing people, organizations and nations to live, work and collaborate together. Trust enables a feeling of safety and standards and enables belonging to a group.
Trust allows organisations and communities to flourish, while the absence of trust can cause fragmentation, conflict and even war. Our focus is organizations. Based on our experiences in looking at C-level leaders, organizations, stakeholders, managers and teams, co-workers, suppliers, customers, industry bodies, regulators and other groupings, it becomes clear that for trust to flourish, it needs to be multi-directional. Trust needs to flow among and between all these sectors.
Here are three strategies to invest in, rebuild, and renew trust.
First, recognize that trust is personal, In the words of British writer George Eliot, “Those who trust us, educate us.” Truly building trust with our stakeholders—understanding their concerns and their priorities—involves a willingness to listen, learn, and hear. Building trust requires business leaders to make conscious daily choices, and especially to act on those choices.
And it needs to be mutual. When leaders trust their stakeholders, they enter an exchange that engenders opportunity: Leaders can prove their trustworthiness, and stakeholders in return can empower their strategic choices and innovations. In essence, mutual trust creates a followership that allows organizations to break new ground, traverse the seismic changes taking place, and emerge thriving on the other side of crisis.
Second, trust becomes established through vulnerability and honesty. Business leaders willing to acknowledge what they don’t know are more likely to create trust with their stakeholders than those leaders who mistakenly believe their greatest source of influence is knowledge—or at least acting as though they know.
A similar paradox exists for organizations responding to a one-time breach of trust. Stakeholders are likely to regain—and even strengthen—trust in the organization when leaders admit the mistake, are apologetic, and are transparent in how they move forward.
Third, authenticity is essential, and this matters most to your stakeholders. Intent connects the leader to their humanity and the importance of acting with transparency. But at the end of the day, intent is just a promise; leaders must be able to act on that promise, and do so competently, reliably, and capably. And they must be able to do so in the areas—whether physical, emotional, digital, or financial—that matter most to their stakeholders at that given time.
Resiliency and Trust – an unbeatable combination
A discussion and running theme that seems to be on every executive’s mind is, “What is required to be an effective leader in today’s totally disruptive business world?”
Businesses of all shapes and sizes in all regions of the world are responding to a vision and set of common values across resiliency and trust. Companies have reported that the combination of embedding resiliency and regaining trust is the new guiding star for a world in constant change, and for dealing effectively with the interconnected environment in which all businesses operate.
Organisations can gain resiliency and trust through having sound leadership at all levels and strong cultures founded on purpose, responsibility, and accountability. Long-term agility and growth come from that.
If this is implemented in conjunction with clear, concise direction from top management, and in such a way that the middle and lower layers within the company are fully engaged, then the results can be meaningful. However, it is not a one-and-done endeavor. Even after the company is fully aligned behind a compelling strategy, leaders must continue to reinforce resiliency and trust from the top. You can’t just adopt it. It must be driven, operationally and in-depth, by the CEO and the top leadership team.
After all, the goal is not to simply navigate today’s needed changes but also to create an organization poised for more change. A resilient and trusted team ready for the next battle – whenever that may be.
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Geoff Hudson-Searle
Geoff Hudson-Searle is a senior independent digital non-executive director across regulation, technology, and internet security, C-Suite executive on private and listed companies, and serial business advisor for growth-phase tech companies.
With more than 30 years of experience in international business and management. He is the author of six books and lectures at business forums, conferences, and universities. He has been the focus of TEDx and RT Europe’s business documentary across various thought leadership topics and his authorisms.
Geoff is a member and fellow of the Institute of Directors; an associate of The International Business Institute of Management; a co-founder and board member of the Neustar International Security Council (NISC); and a distinguished member of the Advisory Council for The Global Cyber Academy.
He holds a master’s degree in business administration. Rated by Agilience as a Top 250 Harvard Business School thought leader authority covering blogs and writing across; ‘Strategic Management’ and ‘Management Consulting’, Geoff has worked on strategic growth, strategy, operations, finance, international development, growth and scale-up advisory programs for the British Government, Citibank, Kaspersky, BT and Barclays among others.
Brad Borkan is the co-author of two award-winning books. His books provide business and decision insights from the endeavors of extraordinary people: “When Your Life Depends on It: Extreme decision making lessons from the Antarctic”, and “Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results: How an explorer, an engineer and a statesman shaped our modern world”.
A former senior director at leading high tech companies, Brad is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Vice-Chair of the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute, and a member of the Society of Authors.
Brad has presented at business and Antarctic conferences and appeared on numerous historical and business-focused podcasts. Brad’s expertise is in the themes of leadership, teamwork, and the modern lessons we can learn from people who dared greatly and succeeded against all odds.
The global pandemic triggered by Covid-19 presented the world with the ultimate test of leadership across industries and geographies. From health care to government, school systems to non-profits, almost every organization has experienced unprecedented challenges over the past few months that have tested the values and skills of its leaders. Navigating this uncertainty requires mental and emotional stamina, courage and compassion.
In our company Douglas and I often debate the importance of the intelligences – the very reason ‘The four Intelligences; IQ, EI, SI, DI and why we need Wisdom Intelligence (WI)’ was written, was based on why as human’s we need a balance of skill, competence, moral and ethic behaviours to be truly effective in this new world, our conversations continue as whilst trust is not a new subject, there are just a few elemental forces that hold our world together. The one that’s the glue of society is called trust.
As Douglas Lines once said: “The importance of trust, integrity and experience has always been critical at IBEM, in my experience, this is ethically and morally important, but it is also our business mantra.”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said ‘“To earn trust, money and power aren’t enough; you have to show some concern for others. You can’t buy trust in the supermarket.”‘
Trust in a leader allows organizations and communities to flourish, while the absence of trust can cause fragmentation, conflict, and even war. That’s why we need to trust our leaders, our family members, our friends and our co-workers, albeit in different ways.
Trust is hard to define, but we do know when it’s lost. When that happens, we withdraw our energy and level of engagement. We go on an internal strike, not wanting to be sympathetic to the person who we feel has hurt us or treated us wrongly. We may not show it outwardly, but we are less likely to tell the formerly trusted person that we are upset, to share what is important to us or to follow through on commitments. As a result, we pull back from that person and no longer feel part of their world. This loss of trust can be obvious or somewhat hidden, especially if we pretend to be present but inwardly disengage. And those who have done something to lose our trust may not even know it.
On the positive side, trust makes people feel eager to be part of a relationship or group, with a shared purpose and a willingness to depend on each other. When trust is intact, we will willingly contribute what is needed, not just by offering our presence, but also by sharing our dedication, talent, energy, and honest thoughts on how the relationship or group is working.
The dynamics of trust are delicate in important relationships, and the loss of trust can be costly — not only psychologically, but also financially and in terms of work and livelihood. What’s helpful to remember is that trust is an ongoing exchange between people and is not static. Trust can be earned. It can be lost. And it can be regained.
Trust is the new disruptor, one that businesses must master to realize the full power of data and new intelligent technologies.
Markets face complex and accelerating change. This is fuelled by “intelligent technologies” such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence (AI), including speech recognition, natural language processing, and computer vision based on machine-learning algorithms and enabled by limitless cloud-based computing capacity.
The proliferation of inexpensive sensor technology has generated massive amounts of data, which AI consumes to learn from experience, make decisions, and deliver enhanced insights. But can this intelligence be trusted?
Those able to exploit how new intelligent technologies use data are gaining a competitive advantage. But they also face a new set of risks. For some, the mode and speed at which intelligent technologies digest and act on data are creating unexpected outcomes — fracturing trust with customers, markets and across ecosystems. For example, would you use online banking if you didn’t trust the bank? Would you get into a self-driving car you didn’t trust?
A key question for executives has emerged: can you trust the intelligence driving your enterprise?
We are living in a time of increasingly intelligent technologies when an organization’s ability to be trusted really matters. But the way data and intelligent technologies such as AI are being used is creating significant trust gaps. For example, the public feels that intelligent technology is moving too fast and that regulators can’t keep up, as documented in the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer.
There are plenty of high-profile examples of data misuse and unintended outcomes from AI usage that have contributed to these gaps. One small example took place this June when an AI tool to reconstruct pixelated photos turned a photo of Barack Obama into a white man. It became a matter of hot debate in the AI community: was the bias towards creating more photos of white people than people of colour the result of incomplete data or indicative of the racial bias baked into AI from non-diverse datasets and development teams?
Trust gaps have reframed the question of “Can tech do this?” into “Should tech do this?” It’s no longer about capabilities. It’s about trust in the intelligence that a business uses, and that customers, markets, regulators and ecosystems rely on. Can companies and government organizations ensure the outcomes of their technologies? Do they have reliable methods for identifying, tracking and correcting unintended outcomes? Without trust, the ability of an organization to operate and innovate is reduced and slowed down.
In low-trust environments, you’ll see low morale, disengagement and a lack of commitment. You’ll also see people manipulating, distorting facts and withholding information. There will be resistance to new ideas, blame culture, finger-pointing, overpromising, underdelivering, and, often, tension and fear. Everything will take longer to do and everything will cost more.
Increase trust within your team: Stephen M. R. Covey
The converse in high-trust cultures is equally true. When the trust goes up in an organisation, the speed will go up and costs will come down. Your ability to collaborate goes up, as does your ability to attract, retain and engage people. When trust goes up, you’ll see people sharing information, not being afraid to make mistakes, more creativity, higher accountability and greater energy and satisfaction. When you move the needle on trust, you move all kinds of other needles with it.
As businesses and governments transform to meet new challenges, it’s essential to embed Trust Intelligence into the core of their operations.
Enterprises powered by trust will be able to deliver on all three transformation drivers: people, technology and innovation. They’ll be able to leapfrog their competitors. To shape new markets.
To lead into better futures.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how important trust is for a business. For business owners, a lack of trust is your biggest expense. It may take years for a manager or an executive to develop the trust of his or her employees, but only moments to lose. Without trust, transactions cannot occur, influence is destroyed, leaders can lose teams and salespeople can lose sales. The list goes on.
Trust and relationships, much more than money, are the currency of business.
Trust is the natural result of thousands of tiny actions, words, thoughts, and intentions. Trust does not happen all at once; gaining trust takes work. It might take years of calling on a certain client to break through and fully gain their comfort and trust. Yet in spite of the importance of trust in the business world today, few leaders have given it the focus and nurturing it deserves.
Business strategist and author David Horsager speaks internationally on the bottom-line impact of trust. He has developed a system with which he teaches leaders how to build the Eight Pillars of Trust:
• Clarity – People trust the clear and mistrust the ambiguous
• Compassion – People put faith in those who care beyond themselves
• Character – People notice those who do what is right over what is easy
• Competency – People have confidence in those who stay fresh, relevant, and capable
• Commitment – People believe in those who stand through adversity
• Connection – People want to follow, buy from, and be around friends
• Contribution – People immediately respond to results
• Consistency – People love to see the little things done consistently
Finally, it is crucial to understand that trust is fundamental to the genuine success of any kind. The trust you have with your team, colleagues or family, traditionally, businesses have relied on a “command and control” management style, focusing on rigid hierarchies and compliance from employees.
We must shift from a “command and control” to a “trust and inspire” leadership model.
Trusting and inspiring your team is defined by the commitment from both sides, with a focus on effectiveness and fostering a growth mindset. It is based on the belief that employees are creative, collaborative, and full of potential; through trust, you can inspire them to do their best work, and reinforce the need for trust.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, philosopher, who served as the third president of the United States, once said:
‘Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.’
There are just a few elemental forces that hold our world together. The one that’s the glue of society is called trust. Its presence cements relationships by allowing people to live and work together, feel safe and belong to a group.
Trust in a leader allows organisations and communities to flourish, while the absence of trust can cause fragmentation, conflict and even war. That’s why we need to trust our leaders, our family members, our friends and our co-workers, albeit in different ways.
In 2020, resilient leadership has been tested in the extreme, and the challenges continue. As I write this, many countries around the globe are contending with the resurgence of COVID-19 and the prospect of continued, new, and extended lockdowns—against a backdrop of social, political, and economic upheaval that makes the terrain even harder to navigate.
Challenges for leaders won’t end with a COVID-19 vaccine. Underlying societal issues that have long been simmering below the surface are raising questions and imperatives that will last long after the pandemic ends. The implicit social contract between institutions and stakeholders is rightfully being questioned.
We are in an unprecedented era of the need for leadership to step up. Rapid, disruptive change is today’s normal. To cope, leaders need to be agile and resilient. For years, the focus has been on speed and agility. But globalisation, technology and social-political changes are disruptive. They require resilient leaders, emotionally intelligent people able to absorb complex change and help others move forward to achieve success.
Resilient organisations have sound leadership at all levels and strong cultures founded on trust, accountability, and agility. They have a foundation of meaningful core values that all members of the team believe deeply in and a sense of team unity beyond what you find in many organizations. They also have a tendency to show consistent and better-than-average profitability year after year.
Resilient leaders are well-prepared for change. Regardless of the type or magnitude of the transformation an organisation is facing, one of the ultimate goals is to prepare the company for long-term strength and agility – a core function of leadership and management in the 21st century. The goal is not to simply navigate today’s needed changes but also to create a resilient organization poised for more change. A team that is ready for the next battle – whenever that may be.
In a previous life, I spent time with Navy Seal’s team 3 and 6, their mantra is clear ‘I serve with honour on and off the battlefield. The ability to control my emotions and my actions, regardless of circumstance, sets me apart from other men. Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honour are steadfast. My word is my bond.
I am not saying all business leaders need to be trained by special forces, but the learnings for survival have transferable learnings in business. Below I have listed the ultimate Navy SEAL guide to exceptional success and achievement – combining the key advice from some of the most storied and prolific members of this elite force. Learn their lessons, follow their lead – and you’ll find you’re more likely to succeed.
1. Develop mental toughness.
Roughly 75 percent of people who make it into the initial six-month SEAL training course, known as Basic Underwater Demolitions/Seal Training (BUDS), wind up washing out. In his book, Navy Seal Training Guide: Mental Toughness, author Lars Draeger says there four pillars of mental toughness: goal-setting, mental visualization, positive self-talk, and arousal control. We’ll tackle them in turn.
2. Set (and achieve) micro-goals.
SEALs, according to Draeger, learn to focus on one thing at a time, avoiding all distractions. They do that by determining the overall objective, breaking it down into smaller pieces, and repeating as needed until they get to minute-by-minute pieces. That’s the kind of planning that allowed Navy SEALs to capture and kill Bin Laden and also the same kind of strategy that can help you achieve your goals.
3. Visualize success (and overcoming failure).
During SEALs training, there’s an exercise in which students are required to accomplish a series of difficult tasks…
underwater…
while wearing SCUBA gear…
while instructors attack them and try to destroy their equipment and keep them from breathing.
Become flustered, and you fail. So, the successful ones learn not to visualize ahead of time how they’ll handle each calamity. As the folks at Examined Existence wrote:
Navy psychologists discovered that those who did well and passed the exercise the first time used mental imagery to prepare them for the exercise. They imagine themselves going through the various corrective actions and they imagine doing it while being attacked. Once the exercise (and the attack) happens, the mind is ready and the [SEAL] is in full control of their physical and mental faculties.
4. Convince yourself you can do it.
As entrepreneurs, how many times do we hear that you should fake it until you make it? That’s part of how you get through SEALs training, apparently. The folks from Examined Existence summed it thusly:
Those who graduate from BUDS block all negative self-talk … and … constantly motivate themselves to keep going. … They remind themselves that should be able to pass no problem because they are more physically fit than their predecessors. They remind themselves to go on and not quit, no matter what.
5. Control your arousal.
Arousal. Heh-heh. We’re talking here about all kinds of sensual distractions – thinking about the lost love back home, or the things they could be doing besides training, or even the warm bed they had to leave in order to go through the day’s training.
Once more, Examined Existence:
When our bodies feel overwhelmed or in danger, [we] release … cortisol and endorphins. These chemicals … cause our palms to sweat, our minds to race, our hearts to pound, and our bodily functions to malfunction. This is the body’s natural response to stress, developed over millions of years of human evolution. But SEALS learn to control this natural response to arousal so that they are poised even under the most stressful of circumstances.
6. Be aware.
The next two are pretty basic, but I guess if you’re a Navy SEAL, it’s why they work. If you want to be in a position to overcome danger, be aware of your surroundings.
So, few other people pay attention to their surroundings anymore. In fact, I should take a photo of the slow-moving people I see on the subway each morning, immediately and obliviously checking their devices as they get off the train.
“Get your head out of your phone. … Just look up,” former Navy SEAL Dom Raso told TheBlaze . “It’s just a very, very simple thing to do and no one does it anymore, and it’s really scary.”
7. Avoid bad stuff.
This one also is obvious – so much so that former Navy SEAL Raso seems pretty upset about that others don’t do it. And it goes against the uninitiated, who might believe that a Navy SEAL’s first reaction is always to fight.
“Avoid, avoid, avoid,” he said. “I want to avoid any [bad] situation before it happens.”
8. Practice humility.
Given that last bit of advice, the next one makes sense. Success as a Navy SEAL leader means recognizing that you’re not the solution to every problem. Fail to recognize that, and you’re likely to flat-out fail.
“What it has to do with is the fact that the person is not humble enough to accept responsibility when things go wrong, accept that there might be better ways to do things, and they just have a closed mind,” says Jocko Willink, coauthor of Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. “They can’t change, and that’s what makes a person fail as a leader.”
As his co-author, Leif Babin added: “No leader has it all figured out. You can’t rely on yourself. You’ve got to rely on other people, so you’ve got to ask for help, you’ve got to empower the team, and you’ve got to accept constructive criticism.”
9. Find your three mentors.
Tim Ferriss, author of ‘The Four-Hour Work Week’ among other giant mega-bestsellers, interviewed General Stanley McChrystal, along with McChrystal’s aide, former Navy SEAL officer Chris Fussell, who offered him some key advice:
You should always have three people that you’re paying attention to within your organization:
– Someone senior who you would like to emulate
– A peer who you think is better at the job than you are
– A subordinate who is doing your previous job better than you did
“If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of and who you’re constantly learning from,” Fussell said, “you’re gonna be exponentially better than you are.”
10. Do small things right.
The last items on this list come from a speech that Admiral William McRaven, a Navy SEAL commander who was in charge of the raid that killed Bin Laden, gave in Texas last year.
His first commandment – a fairly famous one, in fact – is that you should make your bed in the morning.
Why? Because if you do that, “it will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.”
11. Be smart about assessing others.
Next up: Don’t adopt others’ knee-jerk assessments. McRaven talked about being in SEAL training and reflecting on a crew of physically small classmates, none of whom was more than five-feet-five.
“The big men in the other boat crews would always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim,” he said. “But somehow these little guys, from every corner of the Nation and the world, always had the last laugh – swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us. SEAL training was a great equalizer.”
12. Suck it up.
This is probably the part of military training that people who’ve never gone through military training think of–the part they’ve seen in the movies where sadistic drill instructors put you through hell. McRaven talks about a punishment during SEAL training known as a “sugar cookie.”
The student had to run, fully clothed into the surf zone and then, wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of your body was covered with sand. … You stayed in that uniform the rest of the day – cold, wet and sandy.
The point of that training? To learn that when you’re uncomfortable and discouraged, sometimes you just have to suck it up and get through it.
13. Sometimes, go head first.
Another McRaven story. The record for going through the SEAL obstacle course in the fastest time had stood for years. One of the trickiest parts was to maneuver yourself safely but quickly into a rope obstacle known as the slide for life.
The record seemed unbeatable, until one day, a student decided to go down the slide for life–head first. Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted the TOP of the rope and thrust himself forward.
It was a dangerous move–seemingly foolish, and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury and being dropped from the training. Without hesitation–the student slid down the rope–perilously fast, instead of several minutes, it only took him half that time and by the end of the course, he had broken the record.
The point? It’s the same in business and in any facet of life. Sometimes if you want to excel, you simply have to accept the risks and dive in anyway.
14. Take on the sharks.
Long before the television show, Navy SEALs learned to be afraid of sharks. There’s a part of their training when they have to swim in the waters off of San Clemente, California, which they are told is a breeding ground for sharks.
But you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position–stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid. And if the shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts towards you–then summons up all your strength and punch him in the snout and he will turn and swim away.
This is the story of life. Bandits and bullies are all around. Usually, the only way to beat them is to take them head-on.
15. Identify the moment that matters.
One of the keys to success is consistency – but of course, we all know that there are some moments that simply matter more than others. One of the toughest during SEAL training involves training to attack an enemy ship – by swimming two miles alone underwater and, in the dark, approaching it from below.
“The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight – it blocks the surrounding street lamps – it blocks all ambient light,” McRaven explained. “To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel – the centre line and the deepest part of the ship.”
The “darkest part of the mission” is the hardest – and the most important. We all have them in our lives.
16. Be happy.
Truth to tell, SEAL training sounds flat-out sadistic at some points. During his training, McRaven talked about his entire team being forced to stand in freezing water up to their necks, while their instructors told them they wouldn’t let them out until five trainees gave up – and quit the entire course.
Their reply? They started to sing.
“The chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything and then, one voice began to echo through the night – one voice raised in song,” he said. “The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two and two became three and before long everyone in the class was singing. We knew that if one man could rise above the misery, then others could as well.”
Standing in the surf and mud and freezing cold still sucked, but it sucked a little less McRaven said, and that’s how they made it through – because they gave each other hope.
17. Persevere – don’t ring the bell.
One way that SEAL training is a lot like the rest of the world is that there is an easy way to quit. You can simply give up, ring a brass bell in the middle of the compound in front of all of your peers, and walk away.
All you have to do to quit – is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT – and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell.
The vast majority of trainees ring the bell. The very few who don’t become U.S. Navy SEALs. They face even greater challenges, and someday people write about their example.
“If you want to change the world,” McRaven says, “don’t ever, ever ring the bell.”
This YouTube video translates the focus, How Navy SEAL Hell Week builds indestructible teams – Brent Gleeson
Elite Navy Seal teams demand very high levels of performance, but in assembling their teams, team members value trust even more highly than pure performance. A trustworthy person will be selected to join a Seal team, even if that means giving up a little bit of performance. On the other hand, individuals who are extraordinarily high performers but not trustworthy, diminish the team’s chances for success. Untrustworthy individual high performers are toxic to team performance, and not selected.
Therefore, re-establishing trust is even more critical now. Far from being a static, unchanging force, trust is dynamic and flows in multiple directions. The characteristics of being trusting and being trustworthy require us to make choices to invest in relationships that result in mutual value. Trust is a tangible exchange of value; it is actionable and human across many dimensions.
Let’s examine how we can invest in, rebuild, and renew trust.
Trust is personal: A call for leaders
In the words of British writer George Eliot, “Those who trust us, educate us.” Truly building trust with our stakeholders—understanding their concerns and their priorities—involves a willingness to listen, to learn, and to hear. Building trust requires leaders to make conscious daily choices, and especially to act on those choices.
Through mutual trust. When we as leaders trust our stakeholders, we enter an exchange that engenders opportunity: We prove our trustworthiness, and stakeholders empower our strategic choices and innovations. In essence, mutual trust creates a followership that allows us to break new ground, to traverse the seismic changes taking place and emerge, thriving, on the other side of crisis.
With vulnerability and honesty. Business leaders who are willing to acknowledge what they don’t know are more likely to create trust with their stakeholders than those leaders who mistakenly believe their greatest source of influence is knowledge—or at least acting as though they know. A similar paradox exists for organizations responding to a one-time breach of trust. Stakeholders are likely to regain—and even strengthen—trust in the organization when leaders admit the mistake, are apologetic, and are transparent in how they move forward.
Authentically, and where it matters most to your stakeholders. Intent connects the leader to their humanity and the importance of acting with transparency. But at the end of the day, intent is just a promise; leaders must be able to act on that promise, and do so competently, reliably, and capably. And they must be able to do so in the areas—whether physical, emotional, digital, or financial—that matter most to their stakeholders at that given time.
By connecting as humans. Leaders who aspire to be trusted by their stakeholders take responsible actions that consider and, where possible, acknowledge the needs of each of those stakeholders. This requires an understanding of what is important to different stakeholders, and an ability to walk alongside them rather than an attempt to “walk in their shoes.”
At an institutional level, value-creation discoveries, mindset shifts, collective agility bring together resilient organisations and their ecosystems into an interconnected web of resiliency and strength.
At an individual level, five of the most common traits in resilient leaders are adaptability, preparedness, collaboration, responsibility, and ethics to meet today’s challenges; preparedness connects tomorrow’s resources to potential future scenarios; collaboration connects the whole system; and both responsibility and ethics connect individuals, organizations, institutions, and society.
Final thought, trust-based leadership should also be understood through the lens of its influence over other leadership theories. Being trusted is a core part of other leadership styles and a strong trust foundation is required for styles such as transformational and charismatic leadership.
While the strong trust outlook is required for these leadership theories, trust leadership places the biggest emphasis on implementing trust values to every aspect of leadership.
Can a company be successful and competitive on the market and at the same time trusted?
Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal and Naval Officer once said on resilience:
“We all have battles to fight. And it’s often in those battles that we are most alive: it’s on the frontlines of our lives that we earn wisdom, create joy, forge friendships, discover happiness, find love, and do purposeful work.”
Today’s business leaders are faced with an ever-growing list of challenges, with each one adding a layer of complexity to the day-to-day running of their business.
Traditional issues such as dealing with competition, change management, and staff development have been joined by more complex, current matters such as cybersecurity and digital transformation.
For a lot of modern businesses, this means looking outside their organisation to access the necessary guidance and skills to help drive their business forward, such as the recruitment of an experienced executive coach.
Confucius sums up the need for excellence in one of his quotes when he stated: ‘The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.’
One of the best ways to better company performance is to improve the impact of an organisation’s leaders and managers, but as the coronavirus pandemic has shown us, leadership is getting harder.
There is most likely no going back to the old normal after this crisis and this leaves us in a predicament. Our leaders are having to dig deeper, find new ways of working, grapple with new skills and make sense of what is a complex and challenging time.
COVID-19 has fired a warning shot that crises and uncertainty are going to be common events in the future and that means we need to find better ways of equipping our leaders to cope with change.
This is not driven by ambition, but by necessity. COVID-19 offers us a sizable opportunity to transform our leadership styles, philosophy and leadership development programmes so that in the longer term, our leaders and businesses will be more resilient, will recover more quickly and that the aftershock to the economy will be lessened.
If we are going to do this right, then the natural starting point is to refine key learning blocks built into many of our leadership development programmes.
Historically excellent for focusing on the strategy, business continuity and operations, some leadership development initiatives are not always as far-reaching when it comes to how to get the best out of yourself and your people.
Leadership development needs to be sharpened up so it is more relevant to the new era of work with a reinforced emphasis placed on developing people skills, building the right competencies and behaviours to lead others with confidence and embedding learning through more practical application.
Today I have the distinct pleasure of introducing another Guest Blogger, Salma El-Shurafa, who is an executive coach and confidant, facilitator and speaker.
Salma El-Shurafa is an experienced Executive Coach and founder of The Pathway Project, which focuses on providing leadership development and executive coaching. TPP was born as a vessel, focused on guiding the region’s talents.
Through TPP, she was able to apply her professional experience to support emerging leaders in the Middle East on their own journeys to self-discovery.
Salma draws on 15 years of extensive experience as an HR professional, entrepreneur, coach and facilitator. She has coached hundreds of professionals, teams and groups across the Middle East, Asia and Europe, ranging from C-Suite executives to mid-level managers.
Working with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and leading organizations in the region.
She is a Professional Certified Coach by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach from The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and a graduate of CTI’s Co-Active Leadership program.
Salma is going to talk to us the importance of executive coaching in today’s fast-paced world and why.
Being a leader means building traits and skills that make you stand out from the rest. These competencies and qualities include adaptability, time management, empathy, open-mindedness, self-awareness, and being results-oriented.
However, if you want to be a successful leader, you shouldn’t be spending all your free time developing these skills. You also need to work on overcoming obstacles that can prevent you from harnessing and maximizing your full leadership potential.
Leadership Barriers to Overcome
As a long-time executive and business coach, I have mentored and worked with numerous clients aiming to be the best leader they can be. I have taken notes of the common obstacles that my clients say have been the biggest hurdles they faced as they climbed up the leadership ladder.
Below are the top six challenges you have to overcome as you strive to be an effective leader:
1. Taking on the roles of manager and leader
Managers and leaders have different roles and mindsets.
For instance, managers create goals, direct and build processes and systems. Leaders, on the other hand, set visions, coach, and create relationships.
Although you are aiming to be a leader, being proficient in these two roles will help you a lot. After all, you need to be a visionary but, at the same, manage people and duties. Due to this reason, you have to learn and sharpen both your leadership and managerial skills.
To overcome your doubts about taking on both roles, you have to know the importance of using your managerial know-how to lead effectively. This means learning to stay on top of all your and your team’s day-to-day activities. And this is where becoming a manager will help you.
2. Developing employees and teams
The happiness and growth of employees impact the potential success of any business. Leaders often have to shoulder the huge responsibility of motivating their staff to ensure they are always being productive and performing well in the workplace.
Additionally, you can’t only focus on individual members. You also have to build and coach teams: you have to guide them as they learn to work together to achieve all goals. Your failure to inspire and lead these groups will affect the productivity of the organization, as well.
Building, coaching, and leading individuals and teams won’t be easy, especially if you have several people under you. As such, this is one of the toughest hurdles you have to overcome.
Proper time management and dividing your attention equally with each team and member can help you support employees better and encourage them to stay motivated. Avoid playing favorites; guide every employee to be the best worker they can be.
Even if you are looking for your possible replacement and want to mentor him or her, do not ignore the others. Try to spend an equal amount of time with every one of your employees and teams.
3. Losing confidence in your employees
Once you become a leader, your desire to get things done right away and perfectly may increase. Because of this, you may end up taking everything on your shoulders, which can lead to mediocre results and frustration.
Moreover, you will start losing the trust and confidence in your employees. This will lead to other problems that can be difficult to resolve.
To overcome this hurdle, you have to work on and allow your trust in others to grow. Continue assigning regular or new work to your employees or team and avoid interfering with their tasks or processes unless they ask for your assistance.
Also, do not be embarrassed to ask your employees for help. When you are swamped with work or need to take on other jobs, have someone take some tasks off your plate.
Open and constant communication is crucial for building trust. Schedule regular meetings and encourage everyone to speak up. Whether you want their input on a new project or know if they are having difficulties with some areas or processes, allow them to say what is on their mind.
4. Creating and maintaining genuine relationships in the workplace
Once you become a leader, your interactions with your employees may be reduced. After all, you have the huge responsibility of looking at the bigger picture while your managers and workers handle the daily operations.
Due to this reason, you will start feeling isolated and lose connection with your team. You may have difficulty starting new relationships in the workplace.
Constant communication with your team members can help you maintain your good relationship with them. Moreover, you need to be intentional when connecting with other people in your workplace.
Also, don’t forget to keep and strengthen your relationships with your peers. Whether you are working with them or they are part of other organizations, you will feel less lonely and have people you can turn to for help when you need it.
5. Staying humble and open-minded
Being at the top can increase your confidence a hundredfold. Although being self-assured and assertive can help you in various ways, you need to keep a check on these traits, too.
Having an extremely high sense of self-confidence can impact the way you work with others. Losing trust in your employees is only one possible effect; you may also have difficulty collaborating with and getting feedback from other people.
Being humble can be challenging, but simple practices can help you cultivate humility. Show respect to everyone, regardless of their position, work, or background.
Always help your employees so they know they can still rely on your assistance or guidance, even if, say, you advanced from being a simple line manager into one of the company’s VPs.
Also, stay open-minded. Be open to feedback and collaboration so you can earn the respect of the people around you and learn new things that can help you become a better leader.
6. Managing changes
Change is ever-present and affects how a company functions. As a leader, you need to anticipate these transformations and stay on top of them.
Moreover, you have to guide the organization to weather these changes and overcome any obstacles along the way.
Being aware of the current and expected trends in your industry can help you avoid problems in the future. Moreover, staying updated with industry trends will enable you to define them and articulate any challenges to your team effectively.
With these strategies in place, you will also be able to set goals and create a plan that will allow you and your organization to deal with these changes successfully.
When you are aware of these six obstacles and know how to deal with them, you can become an even better leader — someone that others can look up to, and one you can be truly proud of being.
You can contact Salma El-Shurafa via LinkedIn or by email:
salma dot AT pathwayproject dot ae (removing all the spaces) linkedin.com/in/salmaelshurafa
website: pathwayproject.ae
Tel: +971 50 462 5698
COVID-19 is a crucible within which resilient leadership is refined. Acting without perfect information, often with only a few hours or days to spare, CEOs have to guide their organizations through myriad decisions and challenges, with significant implications for their company’s whole system: employees, customers, clients, financial partners, suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders, as well as for society as a whole.
Clarity of thinking, communications, and decision-making will be at a premium. Those CEOs who can best exhibit this clarity, and lead from the heart and the head, will inspire their organisations to persevere through this crisis, positioning their brand to emerge in a better place, prepared for whatever may come.
Crises like these, with deep challenges to be navigated, will also lead to opportunities for learning and deepening trust with all stakeholders, while equipping organisations for a step change that creates more value not just for shareholders, but for society as a whole.
From time to time, we lose our bearings as individuals, especially when facing overwhelming challenges, as we are today with the coronavirus pandemic; it is in these moments that we lean into our core, our character and personal values, to find strength and focus on what really matters.
Leaders facing the unprecedented times and circumstances of the moment are also looking to their organisation’s core, its communal culture and values, to inspire resilience, unleash agility, and help employees to thrive, not simply survive.
Setting a regular cadence with a clear voice is critical. Incomplete or conflicting communications can slow the organisation’s response rather than providing better guidance.
In a time of crisis, trust is paramount. This simple formula emphasizes the key elements of trust for individuals and for organizations:
Trust = Transparency + Relationship + Experience
Trust starts with transparency: telling what you know and admitting what you don’t. Trust is also a function of relationships: some level of “knowing” each other among you and your employees, your customers, and your ecosystem. And lastly, it also depends on experience: Do you reliably do what you say?
In times of growing uncertainty, trust is increasingly built by demonstrating an ability to address unanticipated situations and a steady commitment to address the needs of all stakeholders in the best way possible.
It’s also important to recognize and address the emotions of all stakeholders. This is not just about charts and numbers. Narratives can be powerful ways to acknowledge the fears that naturally surface in times of crisis, while at the same time framing the opportunity that can be achieved if stakeholders come together and commit to overcoming the challenges that stand in the way.
A survey I carried out by DataPad asked employees questions on ‘trust and respect’ in relation to their Executive Leadership, Heads of Department and their immediate line managers. The closer the manager’s role was to the respondent, the more likely it was for the employee to answer positively. Immediate managers were trusted “a lot” by 48% of those who responded and “a little” by 36%. 16% of immediate managers are not trusted at all.
Working with CEOs over the years, I have found that thriving cultures are those that are purpose-driven and characterised by vitality and a growth mindset. Organisations where leaders are purposeful and intentional and open to personal change, and where every employee has a voice and is actively engaged in living the organisation’s values, are those with thriving cultures. Many organisations entered into this crisis with such a culture. Others were struggling.
But, like the process of glass blowing, in which beautiful structures are created by manipulating molten glass in a hot furnace, we have observed healthy and resilient cultures emerge from the fires of crisis.
How can an organization maintain or build a thriving culture in this crisis? At their core, organisations are shadows of their leaders. Leaders who greet crisis with perspective and compassion, confront the current reality with optimism for the future, demonstrate personal resilience, and inspire that resilience among their employees are those who will make the difference.
Authentic cultures are not formed by values posted on the wall; they are the result of leaders being purposefully committed to living those values and willing to personally change in order to model the behaviours and actions that maintain integrity.
When values are real, employees and customers know the enterprise is authentic and true to its culture. Especially in a crisis, comparing actions to values is a litmus test of a company’s authenticity.
Culture, we know, is the core of resilience, but it alone is not enough. Other work by our firm has shown that organisations that accelerate performance during good times and bad are able to mobilise, execute, and transform with agility.
During today’s pandemic, agility matters more than ever. Amidst rapid-fire health updates, market volatility, and the extreme spread of the coronavirus, a company’s foresight, ability to learn, and adaptability will set it apart.
Companies strong in these areas have leaders who are future-focused, demonstrate a growth mindset, are able to pivot quickly in times of rapid disruption, and maintain resilience to navigate their organisations.
From swift decisions to shutter offices, institute work-from-home policies, and scale the technological tools to stay connected to customers and stakeholders, agile leaders have assessed the risk and pivoted quickly.
They must also reassess the medium and long term, building on past crisis interventions and associated learnings to evolve operations and innovate to meet changing needs, all while staying true to their culture.
In any time, thriving organisations are true to their purpose, rely on their values, and model agility. Today’s pandemic, which will reduce profits all over the world, is a searing test of every organisation’s culture and values.
Leaders who have laid a solid culture foundation, authentically committed to a set of values, and defined and depended on an inspiring purpose are leading through this crisis by making a difference in the lives of employees and the communities they serve.
This crisis also serves as a furnace for change for those companies that haven’t yet laid the foundation for a thriving culture.
Uncovering authentic organisational purpose can come quite simply from finding ways to be of service. What’s needed today is for all leaders to look beyond profit and ask, “What do I have that could help someone right now?
Where can I practice abundance where there is short supply?” Organisations will be changed by their actions to make a difference in these times of crisis. Connecting with employees at a human level as we enter into one another’s home offices and living rooms, meeting children and pets on the screen, is organically changing and strengthening cultures.
It’s happening today by default; tomorrow leaders can shape their cultures with lessons learned by design. Leaders and organisations that count on their core culture and values and make a difference while pivoting to solve for the future will emerge from the fires of this crisis and thrive.
Yet amid the crisis, a company’s purpose should remain steadfast: It’s never negotiable. Purpose is where the head and the heart unite. While many organizations today have articulated a purpose beyond profit, purpose risks getting ignored in day-to-day decisions.
In a recent survey, 79 per cent of business leaders believe that an organization’s purpose is central to business success, yet 68 per cent said that purpose is not used as a guidepost in leadership decision-making processes within their organization.
Making decisions that tie back to the organization’s purpose is particularly important during a crisis when companies are under increased pressure and stakeholders are paying close attention to every move. We know from research on purpose-driven organizations that they tend to thrive during challenging environments:
Purpose cultivates engaged employees. When companies are cantered on an authentic purpose, employees feel that their work has meaning. Research shows that employees who feel a greater sense of connection are far more likely to ride out volatility and be there to help companies recover and grow when stability returns.
Purpose attracts loyal customers who will stick with you in a downturn. Evidence-based research have shown that eight in ten consumers are more loyal to purpose-driven brands, which can help sustain customer relationships in a downturn and beyond.
Purpose helps companies transform in the right way. Companies that are guided by their purpose when they face hard decisions have a sharper sense for how they should evolve, and their transformation is more cohesive as a result. When purpose is put first, profits generally follow; when profits are first, the results can be more elusive.
Finally, moral and ethical leadership is the key to a successful business, yet it’s clear from the news that the leaders of some of our most influential governments and corporations are making morally questionable decisions. These decisions will lose the trust of society, customers and employees. Trust is the foundation of high functioning relationships and can only be achieved by meaningful dialogue. It is clear that this is not happening. Instead we’re using electronic communication, where it should never be used.
My latest book, Purposeful Discussions, demonstrates the relationship between communications (human 2 human), strategy and business development.
It provides a holistic overview of the leading methods and techniques. It is a hands-on guide for business professionals, and those in higher education, to help guide them through the next decade and the 4th industrial revolution
Any period of volatility can create opportunities that businesses can leverage if they are prepared.
In the case of the COVID-19 outbreak, organizations that take a more assertive and longer-term approach can spark innovations that will define the “next normal.”
A great quote by Stephen R. Covey, sums up the thinking behind trust:
“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.”
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