Leading Success: How the Math of Trust Is Already Transforming Your Teams
This is part 1 of The Math of Trust: A Leader’s Guide. Read the headlines for the main ideas. If you want details or justification, dig into the paragraphs that follow the headline.
"Is this a woo-woo touchy-feely thing?"
TLDR: this is not a woo-woo essay; it is a practical guide for leaders to own trust in their teams.
Trust is fundamental to any team working to get things done. This is true for any size team, from startup to enterprise. Trust is the factor that either accelerates or blows up a team's ability to deliver results.
Many good writings explore trust as a big abstract idea. These tend to focus on the emotions around trust and useful concepts like "psychological safety." These writings have value. However, speaking with hundreds of our customers and hundreds more CEOs and leaders in the global workplace, I believe something is missing for most people at work. That missing piece: building trust even when things are challenging.
This guide is for CEOS and senior leaders, but leadership is a choice anyone can make; and any leader can use this content.
This guide is primarily for CEOS and leadership team members. That said, authors like Robin Sharma and Jocko Willink are correct in saying that anyone can display leadership, even if they are individual contributors. Leadership is a mindset more than it is a title. The difference between these two audiences is that these elements are non-negotiable for someone with a leadership title.
This guide gives you simple ways to think about trust so you can take action.
That includes understanding how trust erodes and how to build it up brick by brick. Leaders will learn specific ways to weave trust-building into the fabric of every day "getting stuff done." These techniques will accelerate your path to results.
If you use ResultMaps, our software, learning, and coaching platform, that is outstanding. However, if you don't, you'll still be able to learn and elevate your teams.
I originally put this together for some customers and clients to help them elevate team performance. There were no concrete how-tos in all the articles, writings, and videos on trust, and I wanted to close that gap.
I've noticed this piece missing, especially when well-intentioned leaders fall into one extreme or another in how they behave and communicate. I felt the challenge myself through my journey. What is the missing piece? A way to address trust from the perspective of
a)the millions of interactions that can undermine trust each day in the world place, and
b)the glaring trust killers that go ignored.
In other words, we need some simple guidelines to address the root cause of these problems.
These ideas matter because, without trust, few initiatives will work, and with trust, it's hard to fail.
It is not hard to get leaders to agree on these points. Without trust, a "shitake parade" of issues begins. Each issue stacks up on a wall that blocks the path to success. Teams need to do extra work to climb over or around those walls. In the worst cases, those walls grow too big to overcome—too frequently.
When trust is present, it becomes a superpower that blows away any obstacle. Teams with trust get stronger as they face (and overcome) obstacles. This truth is part of the reason professional sports and the military value tough training and challenging schedules. Teams come together through the experience of facing challenges.
The Math of Trust is the key idea, and we will use it to measure trust:
Trust equals time plus consistency.
I call the set of ideas in these essays "the Math of Trust." Coach Steve Sarkisian's approach to trust inspired the "math" element. In an interview about how he transformed the culture of a losing football program into a winning one, he outlined trust as a simple equation:
“TRUST = (TIME + CONSISTENCY).”
I drew more inspiration from the idea that trust quickly adds up to $$ for leaders and their teams. I'll also shout out to Ryan Reisert, a former math major who introduced me to "The Math of Sales." John Humphrey's ConnectPoints(TM) system and Jeff C. West's FusionPoints(TM) system also inspired me with their fun approaches to tracking the math of these types of concepts. Finally, a recent podcast interview with Jeff Schafer underscored the importance of building trust for any strong team.
The goal here is to lay out a simple approach - and it's about more than core values.
While trust is a central value of mine, I find many of the writings on trust and the various trust exercises to be impractical when it comes to getting things done daily. The idea of trust as "math" forces things to stay simple and focused on daily work.