How to Earn Trust
A Guide for Leaders
Summary
“The more people we can trust, the more successful working relationships we can have to unleash our best work.”
Kim Scott
Trust is architecture. It is built on relationships, keeping our word, and the strength of consistency. Without this baseline scaffolding, it’s hard to create a strategy, achieve a shared vision, or build the healthy culture and operational excellence needed to achieve our outcomes.
In this article, I make the argument that trust is more than interpersonal kindness and dependability. It’s also about building and running organizations of great impact in which our employees, customers, and stakeholders contribute and benefit meaningfully.
I lead the product community, a product development learning community designed specifically for associations. Let’s compare ideas and build something great.
What is Trust?
"When people honor each other, there is a trust established that leads to synergy, interdependence, and deep respect. Both parties make decisions and choices based on what is right, what is best, what is valued most highly."
Blaine Lee
This newsletter is about innovation, community, and product development. Trust helps us excel at all three. Trust is how we treat people, but it goes far beyond strong interpersonal skills and day-to-day management savvy.
Trust is rare. It is a combination of bridges, roadmaps, and horizons. It is built through action, communication, decisiveness, and risk-taking. As the world continues to evolve, trust is at the center of how we respond. Trust anchors our actions and serves as a basis for how we practice innovation.
Bridges are creating, strengthening, and preserving relationships. It is common decency, reliability, and consistency. It’s how we treat others, whether they are friends, foes, known, unknown, alike, or different. This foundational skill is grounded in kindness with a strong dose of inclusive decisiveness.
It’s easy to build bridges with those who belong to our affinity group or subscribe to our world view. It is much harder when we need to collaborate in a big tent organization with competing priorities.
Trust is earned, elastic, and dynamic. Signified by bridge-building, once we have our core values in place (practiced consistency), trust becomes a series of roadmaps. This is our strategy; it is the choices we make to build and sustain confidence and momentum. It is where engagement and innovation take hold and mature. With roadmaps, we use tools and frameworks to spark consistent and collaborative action. It’s where we navigate complexity and execute with professionalism and efficiency.
The third element of trust is horizons. This is our shared destination; it is a place we cannot reach unless we have bridges and roadmaps. The horizon is our compelling vision for who we are and how we will succeed. It is where engagement and innovation thrive and keep us connected.
How to Earn Trust
“Social capital is not just about who you know, but also about the bonds of trust and reciprocity that exist within a community.”
Robert Putnam
As any engineer will tell you, to get bridges to stand, we need both pressure (compression) and tension. Instead of focusing on the obvious features of trust (see aforementioned description of bridges above), I’d like to think of it as a series of essential tensions that great leaders learn to navigate on the road to success. The idea of essential tensions comes from the book Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs by Larry Keeley, Ryan Pikkel, Brian Quinn, and Helen Walters.
In it, they argue that innovators need to master seemingly contradictory qualities. How can one be both creative and disciplined? Is it possible to be practical and ambitious? Is from these, we gain agility, diplomacy, delegation, and decisiveness.
Creativity and discipline – New ideas are not scarce; discipline is. To maximize impact, we must be disciplined. Constraints amplify creativity: they never hamper it. It is fair, reasonable, and responsible to expect anyone to innovate and to pursue that mission with rigor.
Pragmatism and ambition – Innovation is committing to solving bold and complicated challenges. Don't let the natural anxiety of the moment reduce ambition. Use better methods and tools and trust your team. Tackle relevant challenges. Prototype and pilot to drive iterative value creation.
Top-down and-bottom up – Senior leaders should not be immersed in every detail, but articulate an inspired focus and hold teams accountable for results. It's critical for leaders to give teams the support they need to be successful and to encourage ownership at all levels.
Decisiveness and openness – Being open to new ideas is a vital skill for any leader, but too many ideas or an over focus on the current (shiny object syndrome) can hamper progress. Focused, inclusive, and consistent decisiveness balanced with new idea flow can optimize our culture.
Great leaders earn trust through consistency and follow through. They make decisions by creating compelling visions and building coalitions to achieve superior performance. Great leaders aren’t wishy-washy; they don’t focus on pleasing people, but achieve success by balancing the essential tensions. This is a way of building healthy culture, which is itself a source of innovation.
The Source for Innovation
“Solidarity built from the ground up strives for cohesion among people who differ.”
Richard Sennett
As much as trust gives us assurance in tomorrow, it should also provide enough tension to keep us motivated and ensure we put some skin-in-game. In this way, a positive multiplier effect takes hold and both our organizations and relationships thrive. We become both participants and beneficiaries.
Trust is a mountain to climb and the best way to climb a mountain is together. This is accomplished through preparation, communication, collaboration, and alignment. For trust to build and grow, we also need tools, guides, and models. Operating with baseline decency underscores good work. It’s how our organizations become reliable, self-perpetuating engines.
Not everyone gets what they want in a high-trust environment. In fact, the way to create a low trust environment is telling people what they want to hear. This can create favoritism and back channels and is a sure fire way to stoke division and cynicism.
Building bridges and using roadmaps help us get the best out of ourselves and our colleagues; this is the ultimate badge of excellence. It reinforces humility and creates a baseline emphasis on healthy collaboration. Only then can we reach our shared horizons.
I lead the product community; we are a learning community because we believe great relationships help us create the value our members want. Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us