Behaviours of A High Trust Leader

SUMMARY

Do you just trust everybody with the title "leader", or are there certain behaviours that you look for before they tick your boxes and give them your trust?

Well, people who you lead are doing the same thing.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, emotional intelligence speaker and trainer of the year and master coach trainer. And today, I want to continue our conversation around building trust by giving you my list of the behaviours of a high trust leader.

What I want to do this week is give you the benefit of my experience from reading some great books and from working on my leadership and working with leaders all around the world, and give you my top six of the behaviours that I look for and your people are looking for from you when they look into a leader before they trust them.

1. Be real.
2. Show empathy.
3. Keep commitments.
4. Admit mistakes.
5. Value Accountability.
6. Extend trust.

Trust is vitally important. People will follow you anywhere if they trust you.

Remember, a leader is all about who I need to be so that these people want to follow me, not my position and what I need to get them to do so that we get the results that we want.

Being able to have trust in you as the leader, and therefore have that permeate out into your team and create a culture of trust, reduces all the stress and conflict, and you're going to get the results that you want faster.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around building trust by having a look at trust makers.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you just trust everybody with the title "leader", or are there certain behaviours that you look for before they tick your boxes and give them your trust?

Well, people who you lead are doing the same thing.

So, stick with me because in this week's episode, I want to show you what people are looking for.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, emotional intelligence speaker and trainer of the year and master coach trainer. And today, I want to continue our conversation around building trust by giving you my list of the behaviours of a high trust leader.

We started a conversation last week about the importance of trust. People need to know you, like you, and trust you before they want to buy into anything that you're doing. And definitely, before they want to go on a journey with you.

Trust is vitally important for every leader in every organisation.

So, we talked about shifting our mindset and making sure that we put building trust up where it needed to go in terms of its importance in the skillsets that we want to build as a leader and within our entire team.

So, what I want to do this week is give you the benefit of my experience from reading some great books and from working on my leadership and working with leaders all around the world, and give you my top six of the behaviours that I look for and your people are looking for from you when they look into a leader before they trust them.

Last week, I reminded us all that we've just recently had an election here in Australia, and that election was totally and solely based on trust. And the government was overtaken and overthrown because people had lost trust in the leaders.

So, it didn't matter what policies they had. It didn't matter what promises they made because that trust had been eroded. People went with an alternative.

And now that new leader is going through the same challenge to build that trust.

Trust is vitally important in a team, and we need to understand this.

We need to look at what we're doing to gain that trust and what we might be doing to break it.

So, let's have a look at this list and then we can get in the comments and have a conversation about what you agree with and what you might add instead.

1. Be real.

I've talked about many times the performance trap, the approval addiction, the people pleasers who, like me in my corporate career, pretended to be who I thought people needed me to be. And therefore, I would put on a mask and a persona depending on who I was working with. And it was hard to keep that up because I had to remember who I am for this person, what I am pretending to be, and what role I am playing.

And that isn't a way to build trust because people want authenticity.

People want you to be real with them.

It's okay as a leader not to know everything.

It's okay not to have it all together.

Hey, I'm a coach who works with people all around the world in senior positions. And I also develop other coaches, but I don't have it all together.

And in fact, the vulnerability that I use, the way that I share, and my humility, I believe, are my greatest assets in being able to help people.

And they're definitely a great indicator of the ability of people to trust me.

Because if I'm trusting you with my insecurities, my frailties, the areas that I need to work on, if I'm upfront and transparent with you, there's a lot greater chance that you're going to do the same with me.

So to build trust, just be you. It's the role that you've been given.

Everybody else has got their role. So be real, and people will trust you more.

2. Show empathy.

Empathy is all about saying, “I really want to understand what it is that you're going through.”

It's about looking at every situation, not just through your own lens but through the lens of others.

We've done a lot of talking about empathy and work in previous episodes. So, if you want to learn more about that, you can go back and just search empathy, and you'll find that.

But for me, empathy is so important for a leader to be trusted.

So, we've got apathy on one end of the scale that says, "I don't really care." And then we've got sympathy that says, "Well, look, I really feel sorry for you," but empathy says, "I'm listening, and I'm trying to understand. Please give me more so that I can help you and I can work with you."

When a leader shows empathy, trust goes up because people know that you care, and caring is a great indicator that you can be trusted.

3. Keep commitments.

Often in my corporate career, I overpromised and underdelivered or overpromised and then I burnt myself out to make sure that I got it done.

The reason is it was based on my need for approval.

So I was performing all the time to get people's approval. So I said, “Yeah, I can do that.”

I took on everything.

However, when we say we're going to do something and then we don't do it, it erodes trust.

So, keep your commitments.

To do this, firstly, what you've got to do is make sure that your expectations are where they need to be - expectations on others and on yourself, so that you're able to, within the bandwidth that you've got, give what you say you're going to give.

Commitments are all about time.

If you say, you're going to show up somewhere on time, get there. If you say you're going to bring something, bring it.

Commitment is vitally important for people to go through that know – like – trust.

4. Admit mistakes.

Yes, leaders make mistakes, and it's okay.

People will not judge you on the mistakes you make. However, they will judge you on the mistakes that you don't own.

Being someone who externalises everything, points the blame at someone else, "No, it wasn't me!" because once again, I felt that I had to be perfect, which meant that people didn't get along with me very well at all.

Taking credit for great things but not admitting when you make mistakes that are not going to build trust at all.

But when you go, “You know what, I think I'm wrong here. Can you help me to work this out?” Wow! That escalates you in the mind of the people that you're working with.

Admitting mistakes is not a sign of weakness. It's actually a sign of strength, and saying that you're wrong reminds me of the Happy Days show many, many years ago, where Arthur Fonzie found it challenging to say "wrong."

It's not a problem to get it wrong. The problem is to get it wrong and say that you got it right.

So, if you really want to escalate trust in the eyes of your people, tell them when you make mistakes because mistakes are something that you can learn and grow from and are particularly helpful for them to learn and grow as well.

One of the greatest things that I bring my clients is to help them not make the same mistakes that I did. So to do that, I need to share those mistakes first.

So as a leader, it's okay to tell people when you got it wrong.

5. Value Accountability.

Nobody wants to be accountable for anything anymore. Everything's everyone else's fault. Everything's flexible.

No.

As a leader, you have to value accountability in your own life, and you have to keep people accountable in your team.

When you allow others to keep you accountable and hold you accountable for what you say and do, that elevates your trust.

People know that you can be trusted because it's okay for you to be checking on them.

There's transparency there.

There's a mutual respect that says, "Hey, if I'm getting this wrong, pointed out to me."

You know, one of the things I love to do when I'm working with people and getting their feedback is set up a structure that, as I'm growing and learning in that particular area, I ask them to point it out if I keep doing that or I'm not doing what I say that I'm going to do.

I make sure that there are checks and measures in my leadership that others can help me with.

So valuing accountability is not just about valuing it for others. It's about valuing it yourself and going, "It's a good thing to have accountability."

6. Extend trust.

You know, it's a simple thing, but it's so powerful that if we want people to trust us, we have to trust others.

As a leader in my corporate career, I found this very challenging to trust others. And here's the thing: I was not trusting them with their ability to represent me in a way that I wanted to be represented.

What I'm talking about there is, once again, feeding that performance trap that says, "Oh, if I get them to do this and they get it wrong, I'm going to get judged here."

So, if you want to be trusted, it stands to reason.

The first thing you need to do is trust others.

Trust others that they're going to do what they say they're going to do.

It's pointless to just make it a one-way street, where you want everyone to trust you, but you're not trusting in return.

Just like many other attributes of a leader that when it's one-sided – it doesn't work, this is particularly important.

It's like if you value giving feedback, but you don't like getting it.

It's the same thing.

If you value being trusted but not giving it, it will not work.

Well, there you have my top six behaviours that, as a leader, are going to build trust fast.

Trust is vitally important. People will follow you anywhere if they trust you.

Remember, a leader is all about who I need to be so that these people want to follow me, not my position and what I need to get them to do so that we get the results that we want.

Being able to have trust in you as the leader, and therefore have that permeate out into your team and create a culture of trust, reduces all the stress and conflict, and you're going to get the results that you want faster.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around building trust by having a look at trust makers.

I'll see you then.