Good Things Happen When you Swing the Bat

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At a talk last week, new friend Petter Østberg told me an old story with a new twist. It takes a great sports metaphor for achievement – and steps it up a notch to leadership.

First, the metaphor at Level One.

If You Don’t Do A, You Can’t Get B

You’ve heard this one before as, “If you leave the putt short, you are 100% guaranteed to miss the putt; never leave it short of the hole.”

Or maybe you know The Great One, Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”  It’s not just about scoring percentage, in other words, it’s also – very much – about shots on goal.

You also know, “No pain, no gain.” “You’ve got to pay to play.” One of my favorites is the thundering voice from heaven that comes down to the whining loser who is kvetching about never winning the lottery: “Do me a favor – first, buy a ticket.”

All these metaphors remind us of the need to take risks. In our misguided efforts to avoid the risk of doing the wrong thing (call that Type 1 error), we end up not doing the right thing (call that Type 2 error). And in life, as in nearly every sport, it is that Type 2 error that ends up being the Big Bomb.

To not take a risk is the biggest risk of all.

Petter’s story started out this way. A deceased dear friend of his helped run the Little League programs in their town. One of the lessons he taught kids was, “Good things happen when you swing the bat.” If all you do is “take” the pitch, you’re likely to end up striking out.

(Apologies to the non-baseball countries out there, but you get the idea).

Good, good. The youngsters are being taught this Big Truth as well, all’s joy in Mudville.

Getting People to Take Risks

But as David Maister points out powerfully in Strategy and the Fat Smoker, the trick is not cognitive. Just realizing you’re fat and shouldn’t smoke doesn’t mean you’re going to stop gorging and emulating a chimney. Would that it were that simple.

The failure of most corporate training programs (not to mention the people who take them) is to believe that cognition implies action. Entire classes of professions (lawyers come to mind) believe that if they can simply understand something, they have acquired the only thing they need to act upon it.

When it comes to algebra, fair enough.  Maybe even learning a foreign language.

But when it comes to altering substantive human behavior, that belief is So – Not – True.

So it is with golf, hockey, baseball, and I’m sure with cricket and futbol. Armchair athletes from the business world nod sagely as they receive this wisdom from Tiger, the Great One, His Airness, you name it.

“Yup,” they say, “that’s just how it is in my world; you gotta take that risk.”

But they don’t. They really, really don’t.

So: how do you get people to take risks?

Leadership and Role Modeling are Key to Change

Answer: you do it through role-modeling, and you do it young.

Back to Petter’s story.

The Little League coach didn’t just encourage his team to swing the bat. He told the kids’ coaches and the kids’ parents to tell their kids to swing the bat, and with the passing of this dedicated coach just before this year’s baseball season, you now hear his mantra – “Good things happen when you swing the bat” – echoed on every playing field in his town.

The kids got the message, but here’s what he told the coaches:

Look, guys. I know you all mean well. But when a kid swings at a pitch a foot over his head, what do I hear you tell him?  “Lay off the high cheese,” you yell, gesturing with your hand high above your head, “wait for a good one – wait for your pitch. ”

And that is just wrong. These kids look up to you. You’re their leader. This is one of the few remaining times in their lives they’re going to listen to someone, and it’s you they’re listening to now.

These players are very young, and they’ll get more coordinated, that’s nature, but they won’t become better batters unless they swing the bat. There are plenty of other people who will teach them over and over the dangers of taking a swing; don’t you add to that.

Because if they wait for life to serve them up “their” pitch, they’ll lead wasted lives, waiting for that pitch. In life, that pitch rarely comes.

Don’t do that to them. Instead, teach them that if you swing, all things are possible. If you don’t, nothing is. Don’t you wish someone had taught you that?

I know I do. Thanks Petter for that story, and lesson.

Story Time: Innovation, Trust, and the Freedom to Fail

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Our Story Time series brings you real, personal examples from business life that shed light on specific ways to lead with trust. Our last story proved that he who eats with chopsticks wins. Today’s shows how trust can impact innovation, productivity, and staff retention.

A New Anthology

When it comes to trust-building, stories are a powerful tool for both learning and change. Our new book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust (Wiley, October 2011), contains a multitude of stories. Told by and about people we know, these stories illustrate the fundamental attitudes, truths, and principles of trustworthiness.

Today’s story is excerpted from our chapter on making the case for trust. It vividly demonstrates how providing the freedom to fail, take risks, and build on others’ ideas increases a team’s ability to innovate.

From the Front Lines: A Trust-Based Business Unit

In 2005, Ross Smith became Director of an 85-person software test team within Microsoft. His team had great technical skills, passion, and excitement, but felt underutilized and unchallenged. Ross set out to improve innovation and productivity. Exploring options, they ran across a University of British Columbia study by John F. Helliwell and Haifang Huang that equated the impact of high organizational trust to significant pay raises in terms of creating job satisfaction.

The team suddenly realized that innovation required freedom to fail, risk taking, building on others’ ideas—all behaviors grounded in high trust. That cognitive snap, that a high-trust organization would address underutilization and latent talent, was the beginning of the solution.

In a high-trust organization, individuals could apply their skills, education, and experience at their own discretion. They could take risks and change processes themselves because managers would trust them. The question was this: how to do it?

Ross asked the team to identify behaviors they felt influenced trust, positively or negatively. They realized that trust was subjective, situational, and very individual, and there was no single behavioral answer. As a result, the team put together a detailed playbook describing simple principles with discussion about how to implement.

They also modeled risk-taking and trust-building by using games to approach problems; everyone was allowed to play, experiment, and fail.

Microsoft is a heavy user of metrics, for Ross’s team as well as throughout the company. The first noticeable difference was a higher-than-normal level of retention. After two and a half years, other things started to change dramatically—new test tools and new techniques were developed, and a high level of collaboration and partnership was working. Productivity numbers started to rise. As the project finished, the team was rated at or near the top across virtually every Microsoft productivity metric.

When Ross and several others from the original team moved to another division, they set out to introduce the trust-building ideas and practices which had worked so well before. Once again, they saw a high retention rate, a broader application of talent, and higher productivity numbers.

The metrics followed the changes in mind-set and behavior—not the other way around.

—Ross Smith (Microsoft), as told to Charles H. Green

Find out more about Ross’s experiments in management innovation and trust, or read his blog on productivity games.

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Read more stories about trust:

Announcing eConsulting and eCoaching

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Starting today, I am offering a direct consulting/coaching service – one-on-one with me personally, via email – to a limited number of people.

Read more about the program at trustedadvisor.com/econsulting

All the detail is contained at trustedavisor.com/econsulting, but here are a few FAQs:

FAQs

Q. How does it work?

A. Up to one email interchange per day between you personally, and me, Charlie Green, for 8 weeks.

Q. What do you mean, you, personally? Doesn’t your team develop the answers?

A. Oh no. I mean me, Charlie Green, 100%, personally, individually, writing every email response with my own key-tapping fingers. Me. No one else.

Q. Is this a replacement for your existing coaching offerings?

A. No. We continue to offer excellent traditional coaching services through Stewart Hirsch. This is via email, more concentrated, more transactional, more action-based; read the full eConsulting page for more insight.

Q. Who is it for?

A. People who want very fast, very practical, very personalized advice on specific situations from me personally. Got a key client meeting or sales call coming up in two days? That’s what this is for. It’s all in the full eConsulting page.

Q. How many openings are there?

A. A one-digit number of slots; this will take time, and I’m not giving up my day job.

Q. How much does it cost?

A. Read through the full eConsulting page; it’s there, I promise you.

Solving Knowledge Management with Speed Dating: Interview with Clay Hebert

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Most corporate discussions about knowledge management (KM) are about databases, software, and IT. One mid-sized law firm I know took a different approach – getting partners to interact over lunch. It was very effective.

It turns out the 1-to-1 nature of speed dating is perfect for mega-companies that want to improve KM.

That’s the kind of insight Clay Hebert has come up with. I met with him recently in his coffee-shop office so far on the West Side of Manhattan it might as well be in the Hudson. Here are excerpts.

Charlie: We’ll get to the speed-dating thing soon; but first, how’d you get to this point?

Clay: The quick story? I spent ten years at Accenture, a massive consulting company. Even though I was surrounded by smart, hard-working people, the work wasn’t stimulating. I was a “Mac” soul stuck in a “PC” company.

In January of 2009, I had my big break. My business hero Seth Godin offered a unique and exclusive MBA program, and I was accepted. There were more than 500 applicants and I was one of nine who were chosen. For six months, nine of us sat around a table in Seth’s office learning from the marketing master (and each other). It completely changed my life. After that, there’s no way I could go back to corporate America.

Now, I’m building a technology startup called Spindows.com – an enterprise video chat platform that will change the way organizations collaborate and share knowledge.

Sharing Knowledge

Charlie: I hear collaboration, I hear video-chat; I can infer speed-dating, I think. But tell me more.

Clay: After a decade at Accenture, I only knew about 100 colleagues, 1/20th of 1% of the company. This is astonishingly inefficient when you think about the skills and expertise that should be shared across the organization.

The single most valuable asset for most companies is the knowledge of its employees. Most companies understand this, but their current KM solutions consist of clunky file-shares and databases.

It’s a tremendous opportunity wasted.

Charlie: You’re right, it is an astonishing waste; every big company I know reverts to massive databases then worries about incentives to get people to load the data, or hires support staff to do it.  Lately, they’re all trying various social media. But it’s still kind of artificial, or time-consuming, or just not interesting.

So, what’s the answer?

Clay: Well, I’m hoping Spindows will be at least part of the answer.

There are three main problems with the current KM process:

    1. You need high quality information
    2. You need that information input into a system in a timely manner
    3. Other employees need to be able to find it.

In short, the KM process is broken due to quality, speed, and search. Here’s an example of each:

    1. Quality – Here’s a common KM scenario: the lowest level analyst or intern gets assigned the task of uploading project summary documents to a database or file-share. There is limited correlation between these often-insipid documents and the true learnings from the project. The KM process itself is treated like an administrative burden instead of a golden opportunity.
    2. Speed – This process often happens at the end of a long project. If anyone does find the information, it’s outdated at best. In our fast-paced world, knowledge transfer should happen in real-time, or close to it.
    3. Search – The search algorithms to find the knowledge are woefully inadequate. I recently heard that one big consulting firm actually outsourced these searches of their own KM systems to an outside vendor. Think about that for a second. The search algorithms are so bad that they pay a third party to help find their own internal information. Now that’s broken.

Spindows cures these three problems, through a video speed-networking platform where you rapidly meet relevant people in your own organization via a series of quick 1-on-1 video chats.

First, everyone fills out a user profile with simple attributes (tags) that describe their knowledge and skills as well as things like their title, industry and personal interests.

A Spindow is a completely new kind of meeting. Instead of inviting people, you invite these tags or attributes. Anyone matching these tags is invited to attend the session.

In the Spindow itself, the 1-to-1 video interactions are rapid and timed, say 4 minutes each, so at the end of a one-hour Spindow, you’ve met 15 relevant colleagues. By attending just one Spindow per week, over the course of a year, you can meet everyone in a 780 person division.

Spindows reduces friction and increases serendipity by being the easiest way to find and connect with relevant colleagues.

Charlie: Wow, very cool indeed! Where do you stand in terms of status? Have you gotten written up? Funded? Testing?

Clay: Spindows has received some great press from Business Insider, and excellent feedback from events like Startup Riot, Startup Camp, and Under 30 CEO’s startup pitch event, where we scored second place.

We’re thrilled. Right now we’re working with a minimum-viable product (MVP). It’s functional, and we’ve done some testing.

Going forward, we plan to invite a select group of early enterprise customers to try the product at discounted pricing. This is win-win because the early adopters will be allowed to take advantage of this great new technology before it’s available to the public. And it’s great for us because that early customer feedback will allow us to shape the product direction and roadmap.

Trust Works

Charlie: Let’s talk about why this makes so much sense. In my view, it’s allows super-high bandwidth – human interaction – in a socially acceptable casual wrapper. You can be ‘promiscuous’ with your interactions, and still get far deeper than if you just relied on databases and social media. You’re talking to real people. This has tons to do with trust.

Clay: Exactly. You’ve nailed it. I believe people will be more open and trustworthy when talking directly to their colleagues. We’re combining high bandwidth human interaction with big data and analytics. Companies will be able to track how many Spindows someone has participated in, who they have met and, who they still need to meet.

We’re working with PhD’s at Wharton to design valid tests to track how quickly the expertise tags are spreading throughout the organization, effectively proving that trust leads to better KM.

Charlie: Speaking of trust: you’re a heavy user of Airbnb, a Sharing Economy business whereby you rent out your apartment to others, and vice versa. Do you worry about people trashing your apartment? How do you prevent that?

Clay: It’s all about trust. Before they arrive, we establish a personal bond with the people who use our place. Before they come, we ask them what DVD’s they’d like us to get for them on Netflix. We leave a bottle of wine and neon Post-It notes all around the apartment encouraging them to drink the wine, read our books, surf the internet, etc.

We write notes to people on our white board and they always leave us notes when they leave, usually describing what they did on their trip. Airbnb is extremely safe in general, but these extra steps make the interaction inescapably, richly human.

Charlie: This is great social proof of “the best way to make someone trustworthy is to trust them.” Trustworthiness and trusting-ness are intertwined –

Clay: – You get what you give –

Charlie: – and each is both cause and effect.

Clay: – and you want to give what you get.

Charlie: Clay, no wonder you’re a leader in some of the new social media arenas. Next time we’ll talk about your experiences in some of the New York incubator labs for new technologies.

Clay: Can’t wait!

Attract! Attract! Why Attract is the New Retain

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The mantra of “attract and retain” has been around the HR community – and its general management constituency – even longer than the unfortunate rush to refer to people as “talent.”

It used to make sense. But it doesn’t anymore and the implications are significant.

Why Retention?

It’s been awhile since anyone dusted off the basic retention rationale, so let’s review the bidding. Here are some commonly stated reasons why companies should pursue employee retention:

  1. It costs more to hire than to retain people
  2. The more experienced the hire, the more it costs to retrain replacements
  3. Experienced employees know the ropes, the lingo, how things are done
  4. Experienced employees form deeper relationships with customers
  5. Retained employees are motivated, which helps customer relationships.

Of course, a few of these tenets were always subject to qualification – number 5, for example. Longevity can just as easily drive complacency and myopia as well as it can drive motivation.

But that’s not the Big Story. The Big Story lies in the assumptions underlying all five of those beliefs. Those assumptions are:

  1. the benefits of retention increase in direct proportion to longevity, and
  2. the pace at which new employees become productive is relatively fixed.

Both beliefs are looking a lot less true these days.

What’s Changed?

Two things have changed: work and people.

Work. Work has become outsourced, modular, plug-compatible, horizontal, contracted, bite-sized, for-hire, project-based. Employers shun fixed costs and value flexibility.

This is partly because they can: technology has made work-sourcing a global phenomenon, freed from space and time. It’s also partly because they have to: global sourcing means competitiveness is also global. The global economy has undergone a massive make/buy analysis and has come down heavily on the “buy” choice. If you’re not working with the world’s best/lowest cost doer of some key task, then you’re at a disadvantage.

The nature of work has shifted from a “job” focus to a “project” or “task” focus. Employers no longer need “someone who can do…” but rather “someone who has done, and will do…”  The new work model is not semi-permanent vertical employer silos of people; it is the model used by the film industry and by consultants, a constantly shifting nexus of tasks and resources.

Recruitment comes to resemble an ongoing speed-dating event.

People. I think we’re finally past decrying the lack of employee “loyalty;” it’s so last millennium.  People are “loyal” to their professions, their technologies, maybe their customers – but not to the constantly morphing corporate entities that sign their paychecks.

The skills of the new generation have evolved to fit the new workplace. The Facebook generation, adept at mass-scale peer relationships, doesn’t relate well to authority, no matter which side of the relationship they’re on. Geography? Twitter is everywhere and while not every 20-something can afford time in Europe, they all know someone who can and does, and can all Skype it and tweet it 24-7 in the meantime.

The oldsters may not like the verbal promiscuity of “friending,” but it fits perfectly with the new workplace. While society may pay a price in the dearth of deep, vertical relationships, the market place is demanding breadth.

Attraction and Retention Redux

Let’s put these trends together. What the economy needs, and what people are organizing to offer, is the ability to form relationships at the speed of transactions.

To companies, the attractive employees are not those with deep potential; they are those who can hit the ground running in a plug-compatible world, instantly connecting with thousands of like-minded peers within the company and without.

To people, the attractive employers are not those who offer long-term “commitments” (usually just relationship-disguised transactional offers anyway) but those who offer the ability to be instantly productive, while offering personal growth opportunities in the form of autonomy and new activities.

There is an obvious match here. What is no longer obvious is the relevance of “retention.”

Why would an employer want to retain people when the changing market requires ever-changing skills that can be bought quickly with precision rather than trained over time with generality?

Why would an employee want to be retained, when (s)he can find ever-changing opportunities to gain experience in a world thousands of times bigger than one employer alone could ever hope to offer?

Attract! Attract! Three New Strategies for Companies

The above are massive trends. The trend is your friend. The challenge is to ride the trend, not fight it. Here are three strategies for doing so:

1. Aim for zero cost onboarding and training. Zero works well as a stretch goal, but it’s not enough. How can you get people to pay you to join your company? (This is not as crazy as it sounds: how much do people pay to go to Harvard? So, become the “Harvard of YourNiche.”)

2. Reverse-hire search firms. Tell Russell Reynolds you want every employee to get one bonafide offer from an outside firm every year to keep them motivated. If they stay with you, they have re-upped, and become re-attracted. If they leave, you can choose either to recalibrate your attractions program, or wish the employee well and let them tell the market how employee-dedicated you are. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Tony Hsieh already does a version of this at Zappos, paying people not to take a job offer).

3. Up your knowledge management game. Tenure is such an expensive way to gain company knowledge. Figure out how to make it available to every employee, from day one.

And don’t assume that means AI and databases. Try the same thing that works in the outside world: massive horizontal networking. Invent intra-LinkedIn and Intra-Tweet. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Clay Hebert is working on SpinDows)

Attract and retain? That sounds like a motto for a roach motel. The new mantra is Attract! Attract!

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ [email protected].

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 2 of 5

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It’s not impossible to find a high-trust team in a low-trust organization – we’ve seen a few – but not too many. For the most part, low-trust organizations are made up of low-trust teams.

This is the second in a series of five, totaling 25 warnings signs in:

Team Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look around the teams in your environment. Do they have some of these characteristics? Then you might be a member of a low-trust organization.

1. A low-trust team isn’t productive.

  • It misses milestones. It doesn’t deliver on time, or on spec. The team doesn’t do what it says it will do. The team is unreliable.
  • It produces mediocre work. It settles for what looks to be low risk, getting the lowest common denominator. It chokes off innovation in the name of risk, often masking jealousy and NIH (not invented here) Syndrome.
  • It fails to achieve its goals. Goal failure is more than milestone failure writ large. It speaks to a failure of common purpose and common commitment.

2. Low-trust teams typically form sub-groups and cliques within them.

  • There are flurries of private emails and hushed conversations. This is sub-team bonding, not even tribal – it is transient, shallow, and superficial – Mean Girls bonding.
  • Team members are guarded in their communications. They are concerned someone else might hear, and that would be in principle a bad thing. It’s the ‘in principle’ part that’s worrisome.
  • Information is hoarded as a source of political power, rather than shared to create greater team power and organizational success.

3. Low-trust teams are less than the sum of their parts.

  • A great team – even a just pretty good team – can accomplish so much more than simply the sum of its parts. But a low-trust team can’t.
  • They choke off innovation and personal growth – things that happen organically even in a neutral, social organization. A low-trust team isn’t benign, it’s toxic.
  • People are massively influenced by those around them – a group of low-trust people can bring even a strong team player down to their level of low trust.
  • If the team is bureaucratically protected from competition, it will have low turnover among a core group and high turnover from the occasional newcomer. If the team is in a competitive environment, it will show high turnover everywhere. No one likes staying.

4. A low trust team is addicted to faux team-ness, happy talk, not real team walk.

  • We can’t prove this, but we sometimes wonder if the presence of those motivational posters isn’t negatively correlated with team behavior (or is that just us being cynical?)
  • Lip service is the coin of the realm, because to be honest would be to acknowledge the existence of low trust. Honesty is what distinguishes a merely critical team from a low-trust team; the latter is disengaged.
  • The opposite of low-trust teams isn’t competitive, meritocratic teams; it is teams who know enough to wish they were trust-based, and try to pretend to appear so.
  • There is frequently a high-performer, one who achieves great results but does not follow the values. This manifest unfairness results in resentment among the rest of the team.

5. A low-trust team has trouble collaborating.

  • Low-trust teams are likely to prefer individual compensation schemes; they don’t believe in, or trust, the ability of the team to do well for them, preferring to fend for themselves.
  • Collaboration drives innovation; but low-trust teams exalt solo work, thus buying into the “solo inventor” myth of innovation.

If teams in your ecosphere look like this, you may be hanging around a low-trust organization.

For some ideas on how to improve trust, see Three Strategies to Improve Business’s Trust.

In the next post we’ll explore Five Warning Signs in Leadership that suggest a low-trust organization.

 

Why We Don’t Trust Politicians: the Case of Healthcare

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Stephen M.R. Covey, in his recent Trust Matters interview, notes that politicians rank lowest in trust among all professions. He identifies counterfeit behavior as the underlying cause.

He’s right; and of all the high-visibility disagreements today – wars, abortion, debt – none has inspired more flagrant counterfeit behavior than health care. It’s a polarizing issue in itself – and its abuse by politicians puts added stress on the social compact.

A Massive Inconvenient Truth

Never mind climate change. Here are a few far greater inconvenient truths that everyone knows, but no one will admit:

  • Only a very small portion of the US population could afford to pay for the health care they have come to expect
  • The health care system as it exists could not survive without massive government subsidies
  • Health care is an economic good – as with housing, food and consumer goods, what you get is what you can afford.

Our collective inability to admit these truths in a socially useful manner means that the cost of health care is killing jobs and crippling American competitiveness.  Like parasites choking their host, the politicians are too tied up with reality-as-we-like-to-pretend to speak the truth – even though we all know it.

Result: bad health care, bad economics – and bad social trust.

How We Got Here

Albeit with the best of motives, Medicare, ERISA, and subsequent regulations greatly expanded the proportion of the population who could seek health care. Health care usage exploded as people took advantage of a service seen as low cost and already paid-for. With that expansion, hospitals, insurance carriers, drug companies, device makers and health care providers were able to train doctors, fund research and invest in marketing programs; all paid for with government and employer dollars.

Laudable though the goals were, the legislation also forced mid-sized and large employers to devote an ever-increasing proportion of their compensation expense to employee benefits – with a resultant decline in real wages. Until the Affordable Care Act, small employers could avoid the non-discrimination rules through the purchase of insured health plans.

The inconvenient (again) truth is: this tangled web of intertwined interests has become so pervasive that the “private” health care industry would implode without the government.  Health care in the US has become an entitlement program for both individuals and for industry – and no longer perceived by most Americans as an economic good paid for with wages or profits.

Where We Stand Now

Health care contributes to both our slow job growth and our growing income inequality. When health care costs grow as a proportion of compensation, rising lower-wage employee costs begin to overwhelm the value they can add. Naturally, employers then shift to exempt part-timers and contractors. Small employers, once exempt from the rules, now simply avoid adding workers.

The experience of every other nation is that health care rationing is an essential element of any solution; we can’t outrun it. We have not faced up to that inconvenient (yet again) truth in the US.

Enter: the Politicians

Health care is a fault line around which our two primary political parties have entrenched themselves. The GOP has the problem in its sights – but can’t stomach the solution. Democrats misstate the problem – and thus propose ever more expensive solutions. Both are hostage to ideologies.

Republicans look knee-jerk to the private sector, touting doctor choice and the doctor/patient relationship as a panacea. Their inconvenient truth is that the system will fail without the government – and that most of their voters will be unable to afford coverage.

Democrats insist on universal coverage with equal benefits for all, and the right to sue if things don’t go well.  Their inconvenient truth is that the system is unsustainable – and that their children will have to disavow it.

Neither solution is viable.  We all know it, but bury our head in ideological sands.  And yet the same time – because we really do know the truth – we don’t trust our leaders because we know they are lying to us. They refuse to speak the truth.

Getting to the Solution

Our politicians give only the answers we want to hear.  We know they aren’t true, but we fear the other side’s answers more, so we cheer for the answers we fear less.  We don’t want to “lose.”  Which means we all don’t trust anyone – and we all lose.

The strongest force against trust is the willingness to leave the truth unspoken.

Is there any candidate, anywhere, willing to say simply that not everyone can have the same health care? Can any candidate achieve escape velocity from our debilitating ideological prison? And would the rest of us be willing to acknowledge the truth if someone had the courage to speak it?

In a following post, we’ll discuss one potential solution and why our politicians will give up our trust in order to avoid it.

The Evolution of Trust-based Leadership

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In 2000, I co-wrote The Trusted Advisor, with David Maister and Rob Galford. At the time, it was aimed largely at external professional services advisors. The word “leadership” appeared exactly once in the book (I checked).

This month, Andrea Howe and I published The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook. The subtitle is, “A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust.” “Leadership” occurs 19 times, and the l-word itself appears many more times in its various forms.

What changed?

Trust Didn’t Change

The dynamics of trust are the same. I’ve developed the Trust Quotient and the Trust Principles since 2000, but the fundamentals are the same. The Trust Equation, the ELFEC process for creating trust, the dynamics between trustor and trustee are unchanged.

That’s hardly surprising. Trust is a fundamental human relationship that’s been around since well before the written word.

The World Changed

My Trusted Advisor co-author Rob Galford was more prescient than I; he wrote The Trusted Leader way back in 2003. Or, maybe he was ahead of his time. In any case, by 2011, the world looked radically different than it did in 2000.

In particular, the business world is:

  • Flatter – more horizontally linked, less vertically integrated
  • More inter-connected: think Linked-In, outsourcing, offshoring
  • More wired – Windows XP was then; the cloud and iPad are now
  • More independent – Boomers ruled then; millennials rule now
  • More collaborative ­– YourCo against the world is DeadCo
  • More transparent – Facebook, data scraping, digitized everything
  • More networked – a competitor in one line is a partner in another.

Leadership Changed

In 2000, “leadership” conjured up images of #1 leader Jack Welch pacing the floor in front of high-potential candidates at Crotonville, violating the chain of command with exhortations for “boundarylessness” – as long as it stayed within the boundaries of the corporation known as GE, that is.

Today, “high-potential” sounds not just elitist but out of whack with reality. Just as everyone today is a salesperson, everyone is in customer service – so too everyone is a leader.

That’s not corporate double-speak; it has meaning. The leadership skills of today are persuasion, influence, collaboration, the ability to create alliances, to join forces, to create environments that encourage collaboration, the ability to play nicely together in the sandbox, to forge agreements, and to play long-term win-win rather than screw-your-customer to jack up the quarterly numbers.

Leadership Skills are Trust Skills

Those skills are trust skills. We don’t need fierce competitors, we need fierce collaborators. We don’t need to ‘win one for the gipper,’ we need to win one for all of us. We don’t need vertical skills, we need horizontal skills.

Certain leadership skills are constant: the ability to inspire, to create and articulate visions and stories, for example. But others have been replaced. Being good at vicious infighting to gain the top job is – on balance, in most companies – a lot more dysfunctional these days than valuable. Making “tough decisions” isn’t the virtue it used to be; sometimes it just reflects a failure of imagination.

Today organizations are less about being led and more about cultures that foster leadership throughout.  Such cultures are driven by what we call Virtues and Values.

But that’s another story for another blogpost.

Three Star Leadership

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Charlie and I were recently interviewed by Wally Bock of Three Star Leadership Enterprises on the subject of trust and leadership. He wanted to know what bosses in general can take away from our new book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust.

From the Front Lines

Wally and I met via Twitter—he was a distinctive and caring voice in the crowd when I first joined the fray. Wally is a coach, consultant, and popular speaker to audiences in North America and elsewhere. He focuses on front-line leadership, and brings to his work all that he indelibly learned as a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps—first and foremost that a leader’s job has two parts: accomplish the mission and care for your people.

Wally’s latest book, Ruthless Focus, features companies that have been successful for years by training their sights on a single, simple, core strategy. Wally also created the Working Supervisor’s Support Kit, among other resources. He’s committed to providing day-to-day practical advice on how to be a great boss.

Wally blogs thoughtfully and regularly on the subject of leadership at all levels in his Three Star Leadership blog. His aim: to give you insight, information, and pointers to resources to do a better job and live a better life. Example blog posts include:

Q & A

Wally asked us provocative and wide-ranging questions. He wanted to know:

  • How is The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook different from the original The Trusted Advisor?
  • What, exactly, makes this a “fieldbook”?
  • What can a boss take away from here, regardless of the level where they find themselves on the org chart?
  • In addition to the things any boss will get, is there something for each of the following:
    • A first line boss such as a police sergeant, call center boss, utility company crew chief or sales manager?
    • A middle manager, probably with a technical specialty such as accounting, marketing, or logistics?
    • A general manager in any size organization?
    • What is the single most important take-away from the Fieldbook?

Check out Wally’s blog post today to find out how we answered.

Connect with Wally on LinkedIn and Twitter.

How to Create a Culture of Trust

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We’re pleased to announce the release of our latest eBook: How to Create a Culture of Trust.

It’s the sixth in the new Trusted Advisor Fieldbook series by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe.

Each eBook provides a snapshot of content from The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, which is jam-packed with practical, hands-on strategies to dramatically improve your results in sales, relationship management, and organizational performance.

How to Create a Culture of Trust reveals:

  • Two key levers: virtues and values
  • The difference that leading from principles makes
  • The biggest trust-destroyer in an organization

P.S. Did you miss out on Volumes 1 through 5 of The Fieldbook eBook series? Get them while they’re still available:

    1. 15 Ways to Build Trust…Fast!
    2. How to Sell to the C-Suite
    3. Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust
    4. How YOU Can Raise Trust in Your Organization
    5. The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking

Take a look and let us know what you think.