Nobody Believes You: Being Trustworthy and Credible S5 EP7

In the seventh episode of Season 5, Jenni explores the critical role of trust in credible leadership. She defines what it means to be trustworthy, highlighting the importance of reliability alongside character and competence. 

Jenni discusses the detrimental effects of lacking trust in an organisation, sharing a story about Peter, a CEO whose oversight led to a slow erosion of trust. She also provides three actionable strategies for building trust: making the first move, transparent communication, and being reliable. 

Episode Timestamps:

When there is trust in leaders, people will be engaged in the work and the organisation. So without trust, there is disengagement. And this is important for leaders who might be looking at the numbers of an employee engagement survey or any of those sorts of data, because if it’s low, it means that they don’t trust you. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

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Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about the role of trust in credible leadership and why being trustworthy is part of the eight practices. 

Now, in this episode I’ll share with you the definition of trustworthy that I use, the chaos that happens when you don’t have it, which I’ll do with a little bit of a story from my own work, and then we’ll go into the three things that you can do to really build trust.

What does it mean to be trustworthy?

Well, trustworthiness is more than just not lying. Let’s start there. Trustworthiness and credibility really go completely hand in hand. They’re so related, they’re sort of intrinsically linked together. But trust is what comes from sort of that proven competence again and again over time. 

A trustworthy leader is someone whose words are not just believed when they speak to you, but they are words that you will act upon without really doubting them. There’s a real sense of belief in that leader. It’s also a sense of transparency that comes from honesty which enables that feeling of trust. If you’re trustworthy then you’re reliable as someone that tells the truth and you can be relied upon. 

Now, that’s how I talk about trustworthy. That’s based on all the research and reading that I’ve done. But Stephen M. Covey, who is the author of Speed of Trust, defines it as a function of two things: character and competence. Character including your integrity, your motive, your intent with people, and competence including your capabilities, skills, results and track record. He says that both of these are vital. 

Now, I don’t dispute this definition, but I think it lacks a core aspect of what makes someone trustworthy, and that’s reliability. People are placing their trust in you when you lead, and that means that they’re looking at you to be honest, transparent and reliable. You know, they’re looking up. They’re looking for you to catch them if they fall, to guide them, and they want you to be the person that they want to believe and follow.

So, that reliability piece for me is really important when we start to think about trust. How reliable are you in order for me to trust you?

Now, there’s a well-known phrase about trust that’s often shared inside organisations, and it’s that trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. Now, sometimes this is the case, and I’ve recorded other podcast episodes on trust and rebuilding it, which I’ll put links to in the show notes, but it’s not always the case. It doesn’t always take years to build, seconds to break, forever to repair. It’s easy to think about situations where trust was completely shattered really quickly through some sort of catastrophic big event. But what I see happening more in organisations is this slow erosion of trust over time.

And because it’s a slow erosion of trust over time, it’s much harder to spot and it’s harder to stop. And it leads to really significant long-term challenges for organisations. You know, people are putting their trust in you as a leader, which means inherently that you have some power over them, a power to take their job away, to control how they spend time, a power over their future success, all of those things. 

And ignoring that and trying to sort of quash that away with a modern view that we don’t need hierarchy does a real disservice to that relationship. And it’s that power that’s important when we think about the slow erosion of trust that can happen. That power relationship is so important when we’re looking at leadership and trustworthiness as two together.

What’s the chaos that happens if you’re not trustworthy? 

Well, when there is trust in leaders, people will be engaged in the work and the organisation. So, without trust, there is disengagement and this is important for leaders who might be looking at the numbers of an employee engagement survey, or any of those sorts of data, because if it’s low, it means that they don’t trust you. So, when it comes to driving engagement, we have to focus on our communication being honest and transparent, and we have to be reliable. We communicate when we say we will. 

But if the impact of a lack of trust is disengagement, then it means that the annual surveys that we’re looking at are actually measuring levels of trust in organisation. So, if they’re not moving, then it’s sort of time to start looking at trust and the behaviours, the relationships, the people in positions of leadership, and all of the things that contribute to how you communicate.

Now, when I was sharing some employee feedback with Peter, who was the CEO of a public sector organisation, the slow erosion of trust was the issue for him. There was no big event, there was no big decision that meant trust came crashing down. It was a really slow sort of drip feed that eventually led to a huge bucket overflowing and the trust disappearing. As Peter and I discussed results from feedback in detail, it was clear that was the root cause of the issue. 

The root cause was his lack of face to face time with the team. He’d been really focused on external stakeholders, and focused on the tasks that he was having to do, that he had forgotten that he had to sort of turn around and look behind him. So he was spending all of his time thinking about the people he was accountable to, and not the people that were trying to follow him. 

And even though those people were really trying to follow him, he just hadn’t turned around to see them. He’d been moving forwards, you know, and forgetting what he’d said to some or going back on decisions, trying to do things quickly, being very, very task focused. And that was making it very difficult for people to trust him.

Now, in truth, Peter was really drowning in a tremendous amount of pressure. And there’d been no one there to support him in his own leadership journey. But the result of that was that the trust was really broken, certainly from the team that he was leading, but a lot of one to one relationships as well. It just was all slowly eroding away. 

Now, there’s things we can do to build it, there’s things we can do to rebuild it. But the strategies we apply to leading and building our trustworthiness will be really personal to us. So they have to link to our behaviour and our communication and our language. And these three aspects are the core, really, for trust building. But importantly, they need to be genuine based on how we work. And they have to be right for us. What might work for me to be able to demonstrate trust based on my behaviours, communication and language might be different for you. And it’s important to understand what yours is, so that it’s very genuine. 

What are the three things that I’ll often advise and talk about when it comes to demonstrating trustworthiness, to be a credible leader? 

1. Making the first move. 

So, if you’re rebuilding, or you’re just getting started in that position of power, this means that you have quite a lot of weight in that relationship, the power is sort of in your court. So, because of that, you have to make the first move. You have to be the person to go to them. I hear this a lot, especially if I’m talking to frontline or deskless workers, in factories, as we’re doing sort of audits and things. 

They’ll be saying, you know, there’s a new supervisor, I’ve not seen them, they’ve not come to see me. And it might have been three, four or five weeks since that new supervisor started. But it’s that power dynamic where people are looking to you to make that first move to show that you can be trusted, relied upon. And that’s really important. 

2. Transparent communication. 

So this doesn’t mean you have to share everything. Transparency is another one of those easily weaponized words. But it means that you can share what you can share with your team. And this is about being very clear about what you can, what you can’t, and kind of trusting them with that information and knowledge. 

We can often hold back information without really realising why we’re doing it. So it’s always worth challenging some of our own preconceptions about why we’re not sharing things. But being very clear about what you can share, what you can’t, and the why behind some of the decisions is really important.

3. Being reliable. 

So this is one of those foundations of trust for me, because I think that if you’re trustworthy, people will feel safe in your presence, and they’ll feel that there’s some element of reliability, I can rely on you to almost look after me. And that reliability piece is important. 

So, we have to let people know that you will deliver, you can be relied upon. And that means that you have to stay motivated on your own way, really, to be reliable, you have to be motivated to keep doing what you need to be doing as a leader. 

Thank you for listening!

There’s lots of other things around trust, it’s a hugely complex piece. And I will, as I said, pop the link in the show notes to some of the previous podcast episodes that I’ve covered this topic on. But if you want to find out more about the research or take our online Credibility Gap Assessment, or find out more about the book, you can access all of that information in the link in the show notes. 

In the next episode, we will look at the practice of visionary, what that really means. Why it’s an important part of credibility and how to build it. 

So, thank you for listening. And if you haven’t already, please do join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. All of the details are in the show notes.