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Developing High-Trust Organizations: Five Laws for Leaders Who Want to Build Trust, with Joel Peterson, Former Chairman, JetBlue Airways, and Author, The 10 Laws of Trust
1. Invest in respect.
You can actually develop a high trust organization. You can build trust. There are laws, there are rules. If you want to be intentional about building trust, you need to respect these rules. They’re like the guard rails.
So one of the guard rails is showing respect. I think it’s very tough to have a high trust organization where people are disrespectful of others. So you find in high-trust organizations, people show respect to the receptionist, to the newest hire, to competitors, to suppliers, to lenders, to shareholders, and you can tell it in the language they use about them. You can tell it in how the interactions go. You can tell in whether or not they know their names or anything about them. Highly respectful organizations tend to generate trust.
2. Measure what you want to achieve.
Another rule is the idea of measurement. And a lot of people think that that is actually antithetical to trust. If you trust somebody, why should you have to measure what it is they’re doing? Unless it’s clear about what’s being measured, people tend not to trust.
So if you ask me to build a building, I go out and I think I do a great job, and I come in with what I think is on time and on budget and I build a great building, but it isn’t what you wanted. It was six months late. It cost a million dollars more than you wanted, the clear heights on the ceiling aren’t right. It doesn’t work for your operation. All of a sudden, I haven’t delivered. I haven’t done what you wanted and therefore, your trust in me goes down. I’m not as empowered.
So the only way that I can really trust, is if you tell me what is expected. So having these measures and being clear about them and posting them and giving feedback and talking with me about those, allows me to trust you as a leader.
3. Communicate lavishly.
If you want to build high trust you have to communicate, you have to communicate lavishly. So you keep this flow of information immediate and current, and you’re not afraid to be transparent. You have to communicate bad news as well as good news. You have to communicate before, during and after events. I used to have experiences where we would go on a sales call or something and do feedback immediately after the sales call. If you can create that kind of an environment, trust levels go up.
If people don’t talk about things, they assume the worst. And the real conversations happen around the water cooler, they happen by rumor, they happen by spin. A lot of organizations try to spin employees. My experience is, employees are really smart, they figure it out and you’re a whole lot better off communicating lavishly all the time, never surprising them, never allowing them to read it in the newspaper something about the company.
4. Strive for win-win negotiations.
Another element of building a high-trust organization is building high-trust negotiations. A negotiation is a conversation, nothing more. We have conversations all the time and they’re usually is kind of a give-get. We’re expecting something out of it. It may just be that we want news out of it. We want to build a relationship, but I think the more that you think about negotiations as conversations, the better you are at building high-trust negotiations. Then I think you think win-win, how can you help people get what they want?
I think in a good negotiation, you’re solving for fairness, you’re trying to help somebody get to where it is they want to go. And you’re just putting a price on what it is that you need to do to get them where they want to go. Usually that means a lot of listening. The best negotiations you’re doing a lot of listening and understanding and solving for what it is the other party wants. High-trust organizations tend to negotiate in that way. They tend to be organizations where the best idea wins.
5. Listen, learn, and improve.
Humility is actually another element of trust. We tend to trust people who are learners, who are influenced by things, who are teachable, who listen. And I think a lot of times people confuse humility with self-deprecation and insecurity and unwillingness to take risk. There are a lot of humble people who are quite willing to just listen and learn and improve and everyone is really vulnerable.
I often tell my young entrepreneurs, “You are like a cork on the ocean.” The idea that you have that you can sail to wherever it is you want to go is a fallacy. You are going to be moved about by the winds and the waves. And so you ought to be humble about that. And any leader who isn’t vulnerable to what’s going on around them is actually a leader who is going to take you over the cliff. The really confident leaders recognize that humility and vulnerability is a part of the process.
And it also allows for failure, allows people to admit failure, allows them to learn from failure. Leaders who tend to be good at this, when they get a 360 degree feedback session, they share it with their direct reports and they say, “This is what I’m going to be working on. I’m going to be working on these three things. Give me feedback along the way. Let me know if I’m doing better.” And they’re quite intentional about improving. Well, that requires a significant amount of humility. The leader who’s not humble, who won’t express vulnerability, who will not share that people, consequently, they won’t be trusted as much.