The Three Trusts of Leadership

            In an economic, political and social climate as challenging as the current one, it’s hard to keep our bearings as leaders and all too easy to succumb to a string of “ideas of the month” put forth by well-meaning but short-term thinking colleagues.  Notwithstanding that some of these might be excellent and worth doing, how do we avoid being trapped in such tactics and stay true to our values, keep good people and continue to achieve optimal results?  By remembering one guiding principle that has been in play in the dynamics of great leadership from the beginning of human life on this planet.  What is this principle?  Trust.  Our workforce, from the person with the least responsibility to the one with the most, must trust us.
            There are three essential aspects of trust we must embody in our daily actions.
            First, the commitment and talent of our people will flower for someone whose basic decency they trust, someone who believes in being fair, open, honest, caring of the individual and the greater good of the group.  Let’s call this Trust of Heart. 
            Second, our folks will give their all to someone whose sense of vision of the organization they truly believe in.  By vision, we mean not only specific achievable (not pie-in-the-sky) targets profits, volume, return on investment, market share, productivity, growth and customer loyalty.  On a broader scale, Vision asks, “Who do we want to become as a workplace community?  What kind of people are we?  What should our relationship be to our customers, community and county?”  This particular trust embraces a clear sense of the kind of personalities and talents we’re looking for in every position, from department heads on down, because those personalities will be the raw materials from which we form who we are to each other and the outside world.  Let’s call this Trust of Vision.
            Third, and lastly, diverse talents and personalities need to have faith in their leader’s real-world competency to turn his heart and vision into congruent and timely action.  It isn’t enough to be a wonderful, caring person who has a beautiful vision of how to create a high-performance community that fully honors the humanity of the individuals that comprise it.  Leadership is not a noun; it's an action verb.  It must deliver and do so consistently with steady, balanced hands that fashion short-term solutions serving long-term goals and timeless values.  Let’s call this Trust of Stewardship.
            It’s also not enough to just be a person of action.  Actions must embody the kind of heart and vision that make people eager to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for us.  In other words, each of these three is necessary but not sufficient unto itself.  The three are joined at the center and unfold with equal vigor in great leadership.
            Now, if you spend some time thinking about these Three Trusts of Leadership, you’ll begin to realize that whatever previous model you’ve looked at—whether from Tom Peters, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Warren Bennis, John Kotter, Robert Greenleaf, James O’Toole, Daniel Goleman, Robert Quinn, Michael Hammer, John Maxewell, Jack Welch, Andrew Grove or any number of other business thinkers—they all fit here. 
            Each of the Three Trusts has its own field of competencies, some of them overlapping, to be sure.  Let’s get right to the essence. 
            For people to trust your Heart, your gifts and skills must be strong in what is now called Emotional Intelligence.

·        Know yourself, be yourself, allow yourself to be known broadly.  People
           will give you more if feel they know you.

·        Speak your truth and speak it consistently.

·        Connect deeply with others. 

·        Let the truth of your point of view do most of your persuading.

            ·        Err on the side of over-communicating. 

·        Listen to your people, see them, inspire, grow and guide them with
           unfailing empathy.

·        Be humble and give away credit for accomplishment.

·        Be willing to openly and sincerely apologize as soon as you realize you’ve
           erred.

·        Be willing to ask for help, recognizing you can’t do it all yourself.

            For people to trust your Vision, your talents and competencies must be strong in…

·        The spirit of inquiry…conducting yourself as an eternal student.

·        Big picture thinking.

·        Synthesizing the best ideas in the air at any given moment without
           concern over getting the credit.

·        Strategy development.

·        Entrepreneurial imagination.

·        Listening and connecting empathetically.

·        Consistently inviting participation and co-authorship.

·        Consistently comunicating with clarity.

 It’s worth saying a bit more about the necessary communication skills to win trust in your vision. You must be confident enough to allow people to see in detail how your mind works, where your ideas come from, how you developed as a human being and how that development serves you in formulating a view of the future and how to get there. 

            For people to trust your Stewardship, you must…

·        Consistently go the final yard to the goal line and get the job done, often
           right at the sides of your front line.

·        Possess a strong intuitive capacity for making tough decisions with
           appropriate input in a timely manner. 

·        Focus your passion for living your Heart and Vision. 

·        Have an advanced talent for hiring great people, coaching them and
           delegating responsibilities equal to their maturity and skills. 

·        Be firm in your insistence on excellence but never mean-spirited.

            ·        Have conviction but at the same time be capable of flexibility and   

           adaptation.

·        Stay the course in the face of temporary set-backs…not lurch from pillar to post based on short-term developments.

            Stewardship skills comprise what Dr. W. Edwards Deming called “constancy of purpose”.  I think this is one of the most beautiful phrases in our language.  It can be applied to every realm of life, personal and professional.  Put simply, great leaders know what they are about and keep at it.  They have a passion for culture, process and results.  They hire people who share that passion and create an environment in which collaboration is as ever-present as oxygen.
           Congruency is a key factor in all of this.  If you say you really care about people but are mean-spirited and down-putting, you will sacrifice all Three Trusts.  If you say you want your people to have rich personal and family lives but establish or tolerate eighty hour work weeks, you will sacrifice all Three Trusts.  Through direct experience, people will come to see you as a hypocrite.  The same would be true if you espouse openness and participation but dominate meetings with your own ideas…or if you talk up innovation but lack the courage to take a chance on a bold new idea…or if you espouse commitment to a comprehensive strategy but then lurch reactively away from it every time things don’t turn out as you hoped.  For our politicians I will add that when you use lofty language about "what the American people want" and yet consistently act as if you're largely interested only in what a few of the American people want (the one's with the campaign contributions), people will see you for the hypocrite you are.
          The Three Trusts challenge you to keep asking these fundamental questions that will ultimately determine your degree of success as a leader.

·        What inspires trust in my Heart?

·        What inspires trust in my Vision?

·        What inspires trust in my Stewardship?

There is no better example of leadership embodying the Three Trusts in American political life over the last sixty  years than when President John F. Kennedy publicly took full responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  Kennedy learned his lessons well, a fact that was lost on the Russian premier, Khrushchev.  Not long afterwards, when the Russians were caught trying to secretly set up missile bases in Cuba, they encountered a JFK who was much sharper and clearer, mobilized all the brilliant people at his disposal and brilliantly threaded the needle of excruciatingly difficult  decision.  The Russians backed down and a potential nuclear war was averted.

            Trust-centered Leadership applies to any setting and any endeavor, from how you lead your family to how nations are led.  It reminds us that we must constantly work to be worthy of our followers, for without them, we are alone with our dreams.
            Great leadership is a complex and continuous dance.  But these Three Trusts can serve as the basic steps on which elegant moves can be based to create beauty in the face of dissonant times. 

C 2011 Bob Kamm

The Central C?

   So, yes, our language lends itself to some wonderful alliterations and clusters around topics as I have pointed out with the letter C and how it stimulates language to describe great leadership.  In the last blog, I listed 14 C's.  The one to which I most frequently refer with my clients and colleagues is Clarity.  Great leaders have the capacity to reach clarity on complex topics and usually faster than most of the people around them.  They also have the accompanying skill of achieving clarity in their communication about their ideas.  Without clarity of understanding and communication there is no vision and, as the good book says, "Without vision, the people perish."  So does this make Clarity the "central C?"  Tempting, but remember, while we love our Powerpoint presentations and the idea of one C being central to all the others offers some tempting simplicity for some overhead slides, The C's are an organic whole.  No one is more important than another.  It can seem so, but the resounding truth is that only when they are all vibrantly present in someone are we likely to be able to say, "That is a great leader."
  So at this writing, we have fourteen C's of Great Leadership. Do we need another list of descriptors for great leadership?  Sure we do.  We need an ongoing discussion to continuously remind ourselves of the subtlty and breadth of specific energies that must be mobilized to master this particular art...and it is an art.  It's a good idea to err on the side of over-communicating on topics of substance. On my website, http://www.bobkamm.com/,  I have a discussion of the 4 E's (Entrepreneurship, Efficiency, Effectiveness and Empathy...available from the leadership consulting page) which takes a  little different look at this, as well as an article called "Trust Centered Leadership" on the home page. 
   Of course, there are many great books that have taken a look at this, not the least of which would be Covey's Principle-Centered Leadership, Executive EQ by Cooper and Sawaf, and Good to Great, by Collins, in which he reveals what he calls Level 5 Leadership, Primal Leadership by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee, and Servant Leadership by Greenleaf.  This is an ongoing discussion humans have been having about the topic probably dating back to our early tribal ancestors.  Maybe we'll eventually distill it down to just a few C's or other words that contain or imply all the rest.  But for now, better to keep the conversation big, broad and voluble.  Let's have our own conversation. 
   To recap, here are the C's of Great Leadership, in random order...because they are all important and they each are necessary but not sufficient to achieve great leadership.  They constitute a living breathing organic whole.
   1.Curiosity
   2.Collaboration
   3.Compassion
   4.Commitment
   5.Connection
   6.Conviction
   7.Consistency
   8.Constancy
   9.Creativity
  10.Clarity
 11.Consciousness
 12.Competency
 13. Courage
 14.Core Values. 

  I'm going to write about each and all as time unfolds, but I will not do so sequentially.  My own mind functions better when I let it follow its own impulses, rather than having to put everything in neat order...life is not neat.  Leadership is not neat. My mind is associational in nature.  In the mean time, feel free to jump in and offer some thoughts and examples regarding any that are immediate for you.