Building Trust in Leadership: A Conversation with Randy Conley

CommLab Podcast with Randy Conley

Sherna Varayath 0:26
Hello listeners, welcome back to the eLearning Champion Podcast, where we dive deep into strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of learning and development. In today's episode we are going to see the power of building trust in leadership, and I am sure you won't want to miss the insights and expert perspectives we are about to unpack. I am thrilled to introduce our speaker for today, Randy Conley. Hi Randy.

Randy Conley 1:10
Hi Sherna, it’s wonderful to be with you today.

Sherna Varayath 1:12
Thank you. Randy Conley serves as the Vice President and Trust Practice Leader for Blanchard. He is Blanchard’s subject matter expert in trust and is the co-author with Ken Blanchard on the book, Simple Truths of Leadership – 52 Ways to be a Servant Leader and Build Trust. He received a lifetime achievement award from Trust Across America as a top thought-leader in trustworthy business behaviour and is a founding member of the Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts. Inc.com recognised him as a Top 100 Leadership Speaker and thinker. He was included in the American Management Associations’ “Leaders to Watch” in 2015. He actively blogs at Leading with Trust. We are glad to have you on board, Randy.

Randy Conley 2:02
Well, it's my pleasure to be here. I'm very thankful for the invitation.

Sherna Varayath 2:08
Before we dive in, dear listeners, make sure you are a true eLearning champion by hitting that Follow button wherever you are listening in from. So to start off, Randy, why is trust so important for a leader?

Randy Conley 2:23
I believe trust is the foundation of any healthy, productive, successful relationship, and even more so in a leadership context. Because if we expect people to follow us, to give their best energy and effort in what they're doing, they absolutely have to trust us. And trust is a 2 way street, it has to go both ways. Leaders need to be able to trust their people, and people need to be able to trust their leader. So, it's absolutely essential that we have a high level of trust in our relationships.

Sherna Varayath 3:01
Right. So what does servant leadership look like in today's organizational structure?

Randy Conley 3:11
Servant leadership can sometimes be a very polarizing topic. Just the word itself conjures up different images. Some people hear the term servant leadership, and think that's some religious movement or think servant leadership is letting the inmates run the prison, which is a horrible analogy for work, right?

Or they think servant leadership is just leaders kind of letting people do what they want, leaders being nice. That's not the case. It's really important to look at the 2 parts of servant leadership. The first part is the strategic part, that’s the leader part. That’s setting the vision, the direction, the goals of where the team or the organization is headed. And then the servant part comes in, that's the operational part where leaders do what they can to serve the needs of their people. They remove roadblocks, they provide resources, they provide training. And so, servant leadership is really flipping that traditional organizational pyramid where the leader’s at the top and all the employees are at the bottom. We flip that upside down to where the leader is now serving and being responsive to the employees. So that's what it looks like in organizations. It looks like leaders who are there to help their people be their best.

Sherna Varayath 4:56
Coming to your book, what are some of your favourite simple truths from your book?

Randy Conley 5:05
Now that's kind of like asking a parent to pick out which child they love the most, right?

Sherna Varayath 5:12
Yes, that's a tough question, I agree.

Randy Conley 5:13
Yeah, you love them all right? You just love them differently. So, a few of my favorites. One is around trust and control. The Simple Truth says the opposite of trust is not distrust, the opposite of trust is control. Most people, when they think of trust in a relationship, they think well, either I have trust, or I don't. If I'm not trusting someone, then I must distrust them. The opposite of trust is really control. And here's why. Because for trust to exist in a relationship, someone has to take the risk of first extending trust. And until someone extends trust to the other, you're at a stalemate, both people are just waiting for the other one to extend trust. So someone has to let go of control, they have to take that risk and extend trust. And so, whenever you feel or sense you don't have trust in a relationship, it's really important to think about the control issue. Am I not wanting to give up control and put myself at risk? Is the other person not wanting to let go of control?

That's a really powerful, simple truth. The opposite of trust is control.

Another one of my favorite simple truths is around forgiveness. So when we talked about servant leadership and trust in our book, we also wanted to talk about how do you repair trust if it's been broken? And one of the most critical steps is forgiveness. So our Simple Truth says forgiveness is letting go of all hope for a better past. We can't change what happened in the past, right? It's done, it's over. A lot of people think, well, I'm not going to forgive someone because of what they did to me. So I'm just going to hold on to this unforgiveness and by doing so, I think that's punishing the other person because I'm not granting them my forgiveness. Who's the only person that that's hurting? Yourself, right? You're only hurting yourself by not forgiving someone else. So when you can understand that forgiveness is really all about you, it's not about what the other person does, not about whether they apologize or admit that they were wrong, forgiveness is all about you. I think that's a really, really powerful concept that we don't talk about at work. I like to joke and say forgiveness is the F word that we don't talk about at work, right?

But it's really powerful. So those are a few of my favorite simple truths. There's 50 other ones that we could spend all day talking about, but they're all short little bits of leadership wisdom that really pinpoint what it means to be a high trust servant leader.

Sherna Varayath 9:12
Got it. What gets in the way of leaders building trust with others?

Randy Conley 9:22
Wow, so many things. But I think one of the biggest ones is our own ego. Our ego gets in the way. Leaders, it's easy for us to think that we have to be the smartest person in the room, that we have to have all the answers, that if we express any doubt, if we admit to our mistakes or admit that we don't know something, then people are going to think less of us. And that's not the truth. Actually, when we are willing to admit our mistakes, show some humility and recognize that we're not the smartest, best person in the room, that creates a whole different perception on the part of people about how they trust us. Because they look at the leader and they're like, well, Sherna’s just like me, wow, she makes mistakes, she doesn't know everything, she doesn't have all the answers. I can relate to that, it's relatable. We've got to get our ego out of the way. Just remember that we’re people just like everyone else. Leaders are just like everyone else. They have a different set of responsibilities, a different focus of their job. But they're still people. And so I think we get our ego out of the way. That's a big way to open the doors to building trust.

I think the other thing that gets in our way is many leaders have this idea of, I can't have a friendship with my team members, I have to keep it professional, so I can't develop any emotional attachment to my people. I'm the boss, I'm not their friend. I think it's possible to be both. I don't think it's an either or situation. I think it can be both, and you are both a leader and a colleague and a friend. There needs to be proper boundaries for each. People need to be clear on roles and responsibilities and all that. But we don’t always have to have this distance between us. Because the further distance we have, the harder it is to create trust in that relationship. So get our ego out of the way. Don't get hung up on, I can't have a personal relationship with my team members. These are the two big things that get in our way of building trust.

Sherna Varayath 12:32
Right. Speaking of culture, what role does culture play in building trust?

Randy Conley 12:42
It plays a tremendous role. We have to be culturally sensitive and culturally aware of what trust looks like in different cultures.

And so generally speaking, in Western cultures, we have a few trust cues. Things like a firm handshake or direct eye contact are signs of, Oh, I can trust that person. Whereas in Eastern cultures, it's a little different, right? Maybe a little softer handshake, maybe eye contact not as direct. Maybe communication styles are more indirect communication versus being direct. And so, trust looks a little different in different cultures, and we leaders, especially today when most organizations are working with people from around the globe, have to understand what trust looks like in those particular cultures. There's lots of wonderful resources on the Internet that anybody can search and find how to build trust with whatever culture you're looking for.

So I really encourage people to do that because it brings out this important point about trust. Trust is based on perceptions which are formed by the behaviors we use. And so if I'm working with colleagues in India and I'm expecting them to behave just like my colleagues in the United States, it's not going to work, right? I'm going to be looking for all the cues from the US of what trust looks like for us, and that's not what it looks like for folks in India. And so it's really super important to be culturally aware and educated in order to effectively build trust with people from different cultures. Trust is very contextual, it's situational. And even within the same culture, within the same organization. Organizations have little micro cultures, the finance team may have a culture that looks like this. The marketing team, their culture is a little different. The sales team, their culture is really different. So you have to understand that building trust is very situational and contextual, and adapt your behaviors and your style to meet whatever situation or context that you're in.

Sherna Varayath 15:48
Yes, absolutely. How can trust be repaired when it’s been broken?

Randy Conley 16:07
Wow. Well, there are very specific steps that we can take to repair trust. Before I share those steps, I think it's important to understand that when we talk about trust being broken, there's a very wide spectrum of what that looks like.

On the one hand, we've got very minor unintentional erosion of trust. Maybe you're a little late for a meeting, you miss a deadline, little things like that, unintentional, very minor. On the other end of the spectrum, you have things that can be very intentional and very serious, like fraud or embezzlement from the organization or violating specific laws and company policies.

And for most of us in our everyday interactions at work, those breaches of trust are in the middle and over towards the minor side of the scale, right? The ones on the major side are the exceptions. So when I talk about repairing trust, I'm talking about sort of that middle of the road and the more minor cases.

So the very first step that we can take is to admit and acknowledge that we have a trust gap. So Step number one, you have to acknowledge it because you know what ostriches do when they get scared? When they're frightened, they stick their head in the ground, they find a little hole and they stick their head in the ground and they act like nothing's wrong. That doesn't work when it comes to repairing trust. So you have to acknowledge that you've had a breach of trust, and you have to pinpoint what are the behaviors, what are the actions, that caused that breach of trust.

Step 2 is to address the situation. You need to apologize if necessary. If you did something that caused the erosion of trust, own up to it. Apologize for what you did. Acknowledge and apologize for the impact that it had on the other person.

And the 3rd step is to put in a plan of action for how are you going to rebuild trust moving forward. That's the most critical step. Because the trap that many of us fall into is, we apologize, we acknowledge trust has been broken. And then we just move on and sort of forget about it and oftentimes repeat the same behavior that caused the trust gap in the first place. So we have to change our behavior moving forward. That's having clear agreements with the other person, clear expectations of what we are going to do differently so that we don't have this same situation happening again. It's easier to remember by 3 As. You acknowledge, you apologize, and then you act differently moving forward. That can be a helpful process for getting trust back on track.

Sherna Varayath 20:03
Interesting, the 3 As. When we talk about trust erosion, what are the most common ways that people end up eroding trust?

Randy Conley 20:24
My experience has shown that most of the breaks in trust that we have are the accumulation of all these little things that just build up. It's the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. So things like being late, missing deadlines, not doing what we say we're going to do, not following through on commitments, being rude or harsh with people. Not walking the talk, that's a big one. We say that something's important, but then we don't act that way, or we don't act in alignment with our own values or with the organization's values. Or we don't give our best effort, we don't produce our best work that we know we're capable of producing. It's just these little things that, every once in a while on their own, no big deal. We all make mistakes. We're human. We all do those things sometimes. But it's the repeated instances of that, over and over again, that creates the perception. Remember, I said trust is based on perceptions, those perceptions are formed by the behaviors that we use. So those repeated erosions of trust create the perception of, wow, I can't trust Randy to meet his deadlines, he's constantly late. And when we start to feel that way about an individual, it starts to take on a life of its own. And rather than just thinking, oh, Randy has trouble meeting deadlines, our mind starts to blow it up out of proportion. We say, oh, well, Randy is not a very ethical person either, he's really not very competent in what he does. And then suddenly, I don't trust Randy at all, when really it's just Randy's problem with not meeting deadlines. So, we have to really be mindful. Trust should be top of mind in all of our interactions. But it's often not.

When does trust often sort of become top of mind? When it's not there, when it's been broken. It's sort of like oxygen. We don't really think about oxygen. We just breathe, we take it for granted, right? But if we suddenly can't breathe or we're swimming, we're underwater, and suddenly we can't breathe. And we feel this need to breathe. Oxygen becomes super important, right? And that's the same way with trust. We take it for granted until it's been broken and then suddenly we realize how important it is. So we've really got to stay on guard to keep nurturing and building trust.

Sherna Varayath 23:55
Interesting. Wow. So that brings us to the end of another insightful episode of the eLearning Champion Podcast. From simple truths to trust gap, we have covered a lot today. Thank you so much Randy for sharing your amazing insights and simple truths that I am sure a lot of our listeners will connect to it.

Randy Conley 24:17
It's been a real pleasure to spend some time with you.

Sherna Varayath 24:21
Dear listeners, I hope you are walking away with some fresh ideas and actionable steps to build trust in leadership. If you found value in today's conversation please do share this episode with your fellow peers. Connect with us on your favorite social media platforms. We love hearing from you. Thank you so much for tuning in to the eLearning Champion podcast. Until next time, take care and happy learning.