Page 165 - Fearless Leadership

152 FEARLESS LEADERSHIP

Purposefully Expanding the Circle of Trust

Here is another area in which we think backward. Our automatic behav-
ior with trust is “You must earn my trust.” But for many, earning trust takes
a long time, sometimes years or even a lifetime. If we must wait to develop
trust in working relationships, we have a problem. We must reverse our
thinking of expecting trust to be earned, for which we place the burden
of proof on the other party, and learn how to grant trust based on shared
commitments and agreements.
One of the distinguishing features of committed partners is the way in
which they grant trust to one another. All issues are put on the table; noth-
ing is taboo. If the issue impacts performance, execution, or the quality
of relationships, it is immediately discussed and resolved.
I must warn you: granting trust is not natural or comfortable; it is out-
side our scope of “reasonableness.” Why would you trust anyone when you
do not have sufficient information or data? Common wisdom says do not
trust until you have evidence, and a lot of it, that a person is trustworthy.
But here is where we must blot out the “logic” of demanding that trust be
earned and supplant it with an urgency to grant trust in a partnership based
on shared rules of engagement.
Pure and simple: committed partners do not have the need to earn trust.
They act with urgency and grant trust based on precise and shared agree-
ments for how they will work together. Committed partners understand
the significance of trust as displayed in the sidebar “Granting Trust in
Committed Partnerships.”
How many trusted colleagues—people you can count on uncondition-
ally—do you have on your team or in the organization? If you are like most
people, you have only a handful of trusted partners. If you imagine trust
as a large circle with concentric circles inside of it, whom would you place
in your inner circle—the bull’s-eye portion? And whom do you distrust—
those in your outer circle?
Most people have only a small fraction of the people they interact with
on a daily basis in their inner circle of trust. When people and teams do
not trust one another, they compensate for low trust levels by second-guess-
ing leaders, making redundant efforts, micromanaging, and locking on to
tactical issues rather than maintaining a strategic focus. The cumulative