Chapter 8

TRUST Courage

To me, there is no greater act of courage than being the one who kisses first.

Janeane Garofolo

The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

Henry Stimson

The act of trusting often requires letting go of our need to control outcomes or people, our defense mechanisms, and our preconceptions about what is “right.” For hard-driving controlling types, such as the coffee-clutching professionals who make up much of today’s workforce, this goes against the grain of everything they stand for. Trust runs counter to the take-charge ethos that typifies today’s business world. In many companies, the most valued employees are those who, when encountering challenging situations, control chaos, force order, and take decisive action. As the Roman poet Virgil said, “Fortune favors the bold.”

TRUST Courage, for managers, is a tricky thing. On the one hand, you need your employees to trust you so that they follow your direction enthusiastically. On the other hand, you have to monitor their performance, which, if done too closely, often feels distrusting. Plus many managers work in companies layered with systems that are inherently distrustful. It is more difficult to fill workers’ TRUST buckets if you’re an extension of a system that doesn’t trust them. “Sure,” your workers may say, “I’ll trust you … just as soon as you get the company to stop random drug testing, monitoring our e-mails, and making us submit time reports.”

New managers in particular are challenged with TRUST Courage. Consider, for example, how hard it is for new managers to delegate important tasks to employees. In such instances, if the employee screws up, it can reflect on the manager, not the employee. Consequently, many new managers struggle to fully let go of delegated tasks, choosing to hover above direct reports like smothering parents. In so doing, they become Spillers, thwarting employee development and keeping themselves mired in tasks that they should have outgrown by this stage in their careers.

Delegation involves not acting on the temptation to grab the task back from the employee. The ability to delegate is directly proportional to how much trust a manager has in an employee. Trust doesn’t come easily for new managers (or immature experienced ones), because it involves intentionally refraining from controlling an outcome (or a person). If the manager doesn’t trust that the employee will get the job done, he will grab the task back and do it himself—or worse, he won’t even give the task to the employee in the first place. The result is a sort of leadership dependency whereby workers wait to be told what to do, like baby birds waiting to be fed. When this happens, a dangerous Spill cycle begins; the leader keeps doing the tasks, which keeps the workers from gaining the skills to do the tasks, which keeps the leader from delegating the tasks, which keeps the leader doing the tasks, et cetera.

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TRUST Courage involves taking risks on other people and accepting that you might get harmed in the process.

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Trust is risky. When you trust, you become vulnerable to actions that are beyond your direct control. Your success becomes dependent upon someone else’s action. The challenge here is one of reliance; you have to give up direct control and rely on the actions of others. It is this lack of control that makes trust so difficult. Trusting you can harm me. Because of this risk, it takes courage to place trust in others. It takes TRUST Courage, for example, to let employees do their jobs without interference. It takes TRUST Courage to accept that, despite their best efforts, employees will make occasional mistakes.

Organizational Trust

Even on a broader scale, at the organizational level, trust is challenging. Because organizations are just as vulnerable (if not more so) to being taken advantage of, they often display the very same distrusting behavior as individuals do. For example, despite well-documented evidence of the benefits of telecommuting, many organizations still prohibit the practice due to lack of trust. After all, what assurances can the organization have that employees will actually be working instead of lounging around in their underwear eating Cap’n Crunch while watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island?

Organizations are made up of people, and just as some people struggle to trust, so do some organizations. This reluctance to trust characterizes companies that practice closed-book management, effectively keeping the workforce blind to the organization’s performance. Organizations follow such practices under the reasoning that employees might use the knowledge of the company’s finances to demand better salaries and more perks, which indeed could happen. But closed-book management practices only serve to lower employees’ TRUST buckets. Employees end up wondering, “What else are you hiding from me?” There is reciprocity at work here; workers give their companies only as much trust as their companies give them.

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Remember, workers give their companies only as much trust as their companies give them

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Sometimes the best way to understand how to fill a bucket with courage is to learn about what drains it. As the following story illustrates, honesty, when delivered ruthlessly, can be just as harmful to trust as dishonesty.

Ruthless Honesty

There are a number of factors that contribute to filling a person’s TRUST bucket. A history of promises kept, the credibility gained through a proven track record, and a positive reputation are all strong contributors. But among the things that build trust, honesty is premier. You trust people who are honest with you. Mostly. As strange as it may seem, and as this story illustrates, honesty, in toxic doses, can hugely undermine trust.

André was the most arrogant executive I’d ever worked with. Giant Leap was brought in by the company André founded—let’s call it OSource—at the request of his HR director to lead a strategic planning session. As part of our Courageous Future services (which include strategic planning), we conduct one-on-one interviews with each of the attending executives—in this case, the twelve executives who made up OSource’s senior team.

During the up-front interviews, most executives expressed excitement about conducting their first official planning retreat. OSource was a fast-growing open-source software development company, and the competitive landscape was shifting too quickly to run the business with the same decide-on-the-fly management approach that had characterized the company’s early years. Many of the execs commented that the company was overdue for this type of planning session. OSource was living on venture capital and, as is often the case, spending money faster than it was taking it in. The fact that the session was going to be held at a rustic mountain inn made the idea of a planning meeting even more appealing.

But when the interview questions turned to the leadership team, it quickly became apparent that there were low levels of trust between the team and André. This was further validated in an anonymous survey administered prior to the session. André’s brilliance, apparently, was eclipsed by his ego. With a mixture of intelligence and verve, André, a native of France, had lived the American dream. He had come to the United States after getting his Ph.D. in computer technology. After a stint working in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom and bust, André had been left penniless. He started OSource out of his garage (literally) and had seen it grow to become a reputable player in the open-source movement. All this while he was still in his early thirties.

André was the kind of person who inspired both love and hate in the business world. His followers in the open-source software community loved how he made them feel like David taking on Goliaths such as IBM and Microsoft. In my interview with André, he talked pridefully of his software developers as “rock stars”—calling them “the best and brightest technical minds God ever created.” André’s opinion was backed up by the fact that the company was successfully siphoning off the Goliaths’ customers, to the extent that OSource was attracting much interest from companies wanting to acquire its elite talent and growing clientele. Indeed, a few years after our strategic planning session, the company was purchased for a reported $500 million.

Although most of his “rock star” developers loved him, the sentiments among André’s detractors were more visceral. A national business magazine described him as “brash, vulgar, and insulting.” The best illustration of André’s arrogance (and vulgarity) is from a story that solidified his near-mythological stature in the open-source software community, a story that became known inside OSource as the “SMD Incident.” After reading a customer complaint about OSource’s services on an Internet message board, André fired back a reply that if the bellyaching customer didn’t like it, he could “Suck My D---.”

Some of the executives on André’s management team had tired of his behavior and were becoming fearful that his brazen style would jeopardize the company’s chances of being acquired for big dollars. But mostly they had grown distrustful of André. Distrustful of his volatile mood swings and bludgeoning communication style. One exec commented that André could “rip you a new one faster than you could cover your old one.”

The first part of the strategic planning session was standard stuff. Review the competitive landscape, assess OSource’s current and desired places within that landscape, and identify company-advancing goals to forge the future. While the group worked with intensity, the real meat would come during the second part of the session, which was devoted to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the leadership team itself.

I knew how much the levels of trust on the team needed filling and how dangerous low trust can be for a leadership team, so when I presented the summarized results of the one-on-one interviews, I was careful to highlight the data that related directly to trust (or lack thereof). As I did, I could see André growing visibly annoyed. Finally he reached a boiling point, blurting out, “I am shocked. Shocked! How could this team have low trust? What’s not to trust?! I tell all of you everything. I am always honest with you, and you know it. If anything, these results prove that you’re not honest with me. No one had the guts to tell me these things to my face.”

The other team members were silent. So I prodded them. “Listen, prior to our interviews none of you knew me, but within thirty minutes into the interview you were telling me things that you’re not telling each other or André. Like I said at the start of the session, the most important guiding principle that we all must follow while we’re here is to be courageous. With that in mind, can anyone help shed light on the trust issue for André?”

Money can be a liberating thing. Scott, OSource’s senior vice president of business development, had made enough money in a previous tech venture that he had reached the point where he was working because he wanted to, not because he had to. Plus, he was a seasoned and talented guy. André needed Scott more than Scott needed the job. So the risk of upsetting André was much lower for Scott than it was for the other members of the team. Still, Scott chose his words carefully. “You’re right, André, you are honest with us. But a lot of times your honesty is brutal. We live in the South, André, and some people, myself included, get offended by both your ‘honesty’ and your profanity. The fact that you tell us the truth meets only a minimum standard of professionalism. Try wrapping some courtesy around the truth when you tell it, too—you’ll get a much better response out of us.”

Scott’s willingness to speak up to André caused others to chime in. One person talked about being mortified by the SMD Incident. Another talked about being humiliated when André gave him a verbal dressing-down in front of his direct reports. And another spoke of the opportunity that André was missing to be a positive role model for the rest of the work-force.

To his credit, André was taking it in. Until that moment, André had always prized “intellectual honesty” above all leadership virtues. But he had never considered the impact, emotionally and financially, of extreme honesty. Then I shared with him the story of another CEO, who had written a brutal e-mail to his managers that quickly got posted on a Web site, and how his action wiped out 25 percent of the company’s shareholder equity within three days. Like many senior executives, André thinks in cause and effect and dollars and cents terms. He had no interest in wiping out any of the potential value his company could fetch. Shaping up his behavior was the best way to prevent that from happening.

A few weeks after the planning retreat, I visited with André to see how the plan was taking hold. “Come on, Bill,” he said, “let’s be honest. Any first-year grad student can lead a strategic planning session. The plan is great and will help us achieve our goals, so you’ll get your money. But the real value of the offsite was where it took us as a leadership team and me as a leader. I was absolutely shocked by so many things. I was shocked that I was the only one who thought we had a lot of trust on the team. More shocked that until the retreat no one had confronted me before. And even more shocked that in all my years in business I had never discovered the relationship between honesty and distrust. It is humbling, Bill. I always prided myself on having the guts to say what no one else would. What I couldn’t see was that how I said those things mattered as much as what I was saying. The truth doesn’t mean squat if it isn’t delivered with respect.”

André’s story illustrates some important points about filling up buckets of TRUST Courage:

Match Honesty with Courtesy: Honesty, when delivered with brutality, tears trust down. It’s a copout to deliver a message with contempt and violence and then justify it by saying, “I was just being honest.” People’s expectations have evolved past the minimum standards of “just being honest.” Honesty doesn’t build trust unless it is also delivered with tact and courtesy. Words matter, and when they are used to control, subjugate, punish, or harm, they only serve to obliterate trust, even if the sender was “just being honest.” As a manager, you’ll build trust more effectively by matching truthfulness with courtesy.

Practice Respectful Management: One of the primary characteristics of emotionally abusive relationships is the use (or misuse) of power to control the behavior of others. André communicated obnoxiously because he could. On the surface, such a strategy made him more powerful. But despite his brilliance, André was blind to the negative impact his arrogance was having on his own team. Loyalty produced by fear is, in the long run, unsustainable. As a manager, you’ll get deeper levels of loyalty and trust by treating people with respect. Respectful behavior is a great courage filler.

Build TRUST Courage from the Get-Go: It’s been said that there’s no such thing as “instant trust.” I disagree. Under the right conditions, trust can be gained surprisingly quickly. Because I am a consultant, people often trust me more in the first few minutes of knowing me than they trust teammates they’ve worked with for years. Partly this is a function of the expectation that comes with my role as an outside, assumedly neutral, party. As a manager, you’ll find that clarifying the expectations you have of each team member helps to create a trusting environment. From the get-go, establish the ground rules with regard to keeping confidences, as well as your expectations regarding the professionalism with which workers communicate with one another.

Courage is contagious. As mentioned in the previous chapter, one person’s courageous act often spawns whole bunches of courageous acts by other folks. This next story revisits Cayuse Technologies and shows how the TRY Courage of a leader frequently results in TRUST Courage among followers.

Mighty Horses Running

In the last chapter you were introduced to Cayuse Technologies, the company owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. You also learned about Randy Willis, the Accenture senior executive who, applying TRY Courage, birthed the idea of solving a problem for his clients by setting up an onshore call center on tribal lands. As mentioned, the TRY Courage of one person—typically a leader—often requires the TRUST Courage of others to be successful. With Cayuse Technologies, Randy’s vision required a whole lot of trusting from the tribal board and the American Indian employees.

It is fair to say that many American Indian people are distrusting of white people, justifiably so. Their history with the U.S. government is marked by one broken treaty after another. Many tribes were forcibly removed from their native lands and transported to remote places that were barely habitable. During the 1800s, the government aggressively pursued policies to eradicate indigenous languages and cultural practices in order to “civilize” the tribes. On top of that, early contact with white people introduced foreign diseases like smallpox and typhoid fever, killing hundreds of thousands of Native people. It is not an overstatement to say that the U.S. government, and the white men who led it, decimated the American Indian people.

Distrust is a byproduct of betrayal. Given such a stark history, the American Indians’ distrust of the white man’s way of life makes sense. Although they have long been skilled traders, they have little “corporate” experience beyond gaming. Big business, from the perspective of many in the American Indian community, is too similar to the U.S. government to be trusted without scrutiny. The distrust is magnified by the knowledge that the values and ideals of big business are, at first glance, at odds with the Indian way of life. Indians are about close-knit community, environmental harmony, and personal nobility. Business is about maximizing profits, exploiting resources, and creating demand through marketing.

Distrust simmers beneath the surface between people, directing behavior in subtle and even unconscious ways. Harbored resentments, moody behavior, and abrasive communication are all examples of what happens when distrust, consciously or unconsciously, imbues relationships. In business settings, distrust can take many forms, such as uncooperative behavior, passive or active resistance to company directives, or, in the worst instances, sabotaging company goals.

For Cayuse Technologies to be successful, ensuring high levels of trust throughout the enterprise will be critical. Knowing this, Randy contacted me to lead a two-day kickoff meeting with Cayuse employees to create the company’s core values. Randy and I had worked together during my years at Accenture, where I had spent six years as an executive in the company’s change-management practice. During that time, I had come to admire Randy for his knack for creating business opportunities and his commitment to workforce development. So when he explained his goals for the session and gave me the background on Cayuse Technologies, I knew that it would be something special for Giant Leap to be involved with.

Although Cayuse is solely owned by the Umatilla people, the operation was to be managed by Accenture. Call center management is one of Accenture’s core competencies, and its depth of experience in the area would help accelerate Cayuse’s entry into the market. But without strong and trustful relationships between Cayuse’s mostly Indian workforce and Accenture’s mostly non-Indian management, the venture could fail. Success would come down to having TRUST Courage between people.

TRUST Courage involves taking risks on other people. It is most often found in situations where the actions of others, despite their good intentions, can harm you. If Cayuse Technologies were to fail, not only would a good number of American Indians be out of work, but it would also be a poor reflection on the reputation of the tribe as a whole. Trusting Cayuse’s leadership to make good business decisions would take courage on the part of the workforce. At the same time, trusting the workforce to dedicate themselves to working hard would take courage on the part of leadership. The stakes were high, and each group was at risk.

Deep trust is gained over time. Unfortunately, start-up ventures do not have the benefit of a shared history to help in the creation of strong, trusting bonds the way more mature organizations do. Knowing this, we decided that the core values session needed to be a memorable experience that people could reference as a seminal moment in the company’s emerging history. Gaining people’s trust would require harnessing their fears. To do that, the session would need to honor the heritage of the Native people and give them a true voice in charting the company’s destiny. So, to the delight of the participants, after a few brief words of introduction Randy led the entire workforce out of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute (where the meeting was held) to a small field where an anthropologist was waiting with two horses. In drawing distinctions between the two horses, a mustang and a Cayuse horse, she created a metaphor that the participants would draw from throughout the meeting. She talked about how the Cayuse horse was small but mighty, how it was fiercely loyal, and how—because of its large chest—it could outlast bigger horses when traveling up steep mountainsides.

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Building TRUST Courage involves releasing control to others, giving them a voice, and sharing vulnerabilities.

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People are more apt to trust you when they feel heard. Developing a solid set of core organizational values that people could uphold and honor would require that the values be reflective of their own individual values. So, to start the session, we asked questions that would help us discover what each person’s values were. In small groups, they answered questions like these: What drew you to Cayuse Technologies? What are your greatest hopes for the venture? What concerns do you have that need to be addressed? What values would make you so proud to follow that you would stay personally invested when the going got tough? Each question, gently but intentionally, moved them beyond the comfort of preconceptions they might have been holding about American business. We were modulating their comfort by asking questions that influenced them to consider and create new reference points.

The discussions that followed were rich and compelling. One man, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher, spoke of wanting to create a more stable life for his seven children. A middle-aged woman spoke of having just returned to the tribe after the death of her husband and after spending twenty-two years living in Oakland, California. For her, working at Cayuse would allow her to reconnect to life on the reservation while feeding her passion for business. Many spoke of the opportunity being a once-in-a-lifetime chance to better the lives of the people on the reservation.

Having worked with more than a few companies whose core values were nothing more than stale and uninspired words adorning the corporate hallway, we decided that the core values Cayuse would create would need to honor the spirit of the American Indian people while establishing the company as a viable business enterprise. The questions we had asked thus far were all lead-ups to the key question that would help define Cayuse’s core values: On your journey to become a world-class commercial enterprise, what aspects of your heritage do you need to take with you? Again, the answers were rich. People talked about the need to work harmoniously, as they do on the reservation. They talked about wanting to create a close-knit, family-like environment. And they talked about the desire to be fierce, loyal, and mighty, like the Indians of their heritage.

There was more going on here than creating core values. People, managers and workers alike, were getting vulnerable with each other at a basic human level. This is how TRUST Courage is built. Trusting others is much easier when you know their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. Trust also comes more easily when you know what others value, and when those values are compatible with your own. If I don’t know you, I may assume the worst in your motives. But after I find out that, like me, you love your children, or that you’re taking care of an ailing parent, or that you just lost your husband, I’m much more likely to trust you and see that behind your actions are good and decent intentions. This was not a session about “getting workers on board” or “understanding what leadership has in store for us.” This was about people connecting with people through their values. This was about building strong bonds of trust through shared vulnerability and mutual reliance. This was a session about building TRUST Courage between people.

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We are more apt to trust people when we know their hopes, dreams, values, and fears. And they are more apt to trust us when we share those things in kind.

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Giant Leap has had the good fortune of working with some of the most respected and admired names in business. We have led sessions in places as diverse as London ad Talkeetna, Alaska. Our work as courage builders has been extremely gratifying. Yet, working with the employees of Cayuse Technologies on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in rural Oregon was extra-special, broadening our insights beyond our ordinary scope of awareness. The core values they established reflect all that’s good about people and business. Sprinkled throughout the core values of Cayuse Technologies are words that reflect the spirit of the American Indian people—words like mighty, loyalty, harmony, pride, heritage, heart, community, and fiercely committed.

More meaningful than the words were the images that accompanied them. To solidify the positive memories about the session, we gave each small group a matted canvas, containers of colorful paints, and a bunch of paintbrushes. Each group was asked to create an image that would reflect the spirit of a particular core value and honor the people’s heritage. The images were bold and poignant. The core value of quality was shown as a feathered arrow piercing the middle of the sun. Diversity was shown as horses of different colors, prancing according to different temperaments. Teamwork was illustrated by a bald eagle with three Native people dancing above it. The only thing that could soar above the mighty eagle, as was explained, was a strong, unified, and happy team. The pictures allowed the group to honor the spirit of the meeting in an enduring way and to create visible ideals to which to aspire. Here are some steps you can take to fill your workers’ buckets with TRUST Courage in the same way as Cayuse Technologies has:

Strengthen TRUST Courage through Vulnerability: People trust each other when they become willing to be vulnerable with one another. Knowing coworkers’ values, hopes, and fears helps you to understand their deepest motivations and intentions. What betrayals, real or perceived, might they have experienced in the past? As a manager, instead of having people “prove” their trustworthiness to you, spend time learning about who they are and what they value. Understand the criteria that each person uses to decide whom they will trust. Ask each person on your team to complete the following statement: I will trust you when …

TRUST First: Jumping First is important when it comes to trust. It is tempting for you as a manager to want to turn trust into a quid pro quo: I will give you trust after you give me trust. Such strategies usually produce a stalemate, with no one person fully trusting any other person. Is it possible that your workers need more trust than you are currently giving them? If so, what is blocking your ability to be the first one to trust? What would it take for you to Jump First and trust first?

A Final Thought about Trust

Trust is always a risk. But not trusting is far more dangerous. When trust is lacking, distrust fills the void and suspicion reigns supreme. Without trust in ourselves, our dreams languish or die. Without trust in others, we become joyless and isolated people.

TRUST Courage requires assuming the risk of getting harmed by others. It also means growing up and accepting that people are imperfect beings. Some people will hurt you unintentionally, and others, far more rarely, will hurt you with malice. Either way, people will hurt you. But the benefits of trusting courageously far outweigh the risks. For it is in trusting ourselves that we validate our own self-worth. And it is in trusting others, or entrusting them, that we validate their worth as fellow human beings. Ultimately, TRUST Courage satisfies the need that distrust aims to achieve: protection. For in courageously trusting each other, we deepen our relationships and strengthen our communities to the point that the harm that any one member of the community could inflict is made irrelevant.

As discussed in this chapter, TRUST Courage involves taking risks on other people. While there are dangers in doing so, there are also deeply enriching rewards. At work, full TRUST buckets result in deeper loyalty and commitment. High levels of trust also result in less time being spent dealing with the inefficiencies that typify suspicious work environments. More important, TRUST Courage provides you with access to the best qualities that relationships have to offer, like friendship, support, joy, and love.

In the next chapter you’ll learn about the third type of courage, TELL Courage. It puts words to the first two types of courage, and for some it is the most difficult courage of all.