485 week 2

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Learning Activity #2

Compare the best practices of leading trust in a face-to-face environment with those of leading in a virtual world. How do they differ?

Is the fact that you are a virtual student going to help you in leading a virtual business? Discuss in detail bringing in course material.

Theme #2: The “Big Two” Trust and Communication Are the Cornerstones of Sound Leadership.

Read or View:

Trust in the Leader

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." --Warren Buffett

Oct 24, 2012, by David Horsager

You Can't Be A Great Leader Without Trust -- Here's How You Build It

Among all the attributes of the greatest leaders of our time, one stands above the rest: They are all highly trusted. You can have a compelling vision, rock-solid strategy, excellent communication skills, innovative insight, and a skilled team, but if people don’t trust you, you will never get the results you want. Leaders who inspire trust garner better output, morale, retention, innovation, loyalty, and revenue, while mistrust fosters skepticism, frustration, low productivity, lost sales, and turnover. Trust affects a leader’s impact and the company’s bottom line more than any other single thing.

One of the biggest mistakes a leader can make is to assume that others trust him simply by virtue of his title. Trust is not a benefit that comes packaged with the nameplate on your door. It must be earned, and it takes time. As a leader, you are trusted only to the degree that people believe in your ability, consistency, integrity, and commitment to deliver. The good news is that you can earn trust over time, by building and maintaining eight key strengths:

· Clarity: People trust the clear and mistrust or distrust the ambiguous. Be clear about your mission, purpose, expectations, and daily activities. When a leader is clear about expectations, she will likely get what she wants. When we are clear about priorities on a daily basis, we become productive and effective.

· Compassion: People put faith in those who care beyond themselves. Think beyond yourself, and never underestimate the power of sincerely caring about another person. People are often skeptical about whether someone really has their best interests in mind. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is not just an old saying. It is a bottom-line truth. Follow it, and you will build trust.

· Character: People notice those who do what is right ahead of what is easy. Leaders who have built this pillar consistently do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, whether they feel like doing it or not. It is the work of life to do what is right rather than what is easy.

· Contribution: Few things build trust quicker than actual results. At the end of the day, people need to see outcomes. You can have compassion and character, but without the results you promised, people won’t trust you. Be a contributor who delivers real results.

· Competency: People have confidence in those who stay fresh, relevant, and capable. The humble and teachable person keeps learning new ways of doing things and stays current on ideas and trends. According to one study, the key competency of a successful new MBA is not a specific skill but rather the ability to learn amid chaos. Arrogance and a “been there done that” attitude prevent you from growing, and they compromise others’ confidence in you. There is always more to learn, so make a habit of reading, learning, and listening to fresh information.

· Connection: People want to follow, buy from, and be around friends—and having friends is all about building connections.Trust is all about relationships, and relationships are best built by establishing genuine connection. Ask questions, listen, and above all, show gratitude—it’s the primary trait of truly talented connectors. Grateful people are not entitled, they do not complain, and they do not gossip. Develop the trait of gratitude, and you will be a magnet.

· Commitment: People believe in those who stand through adversity. People trusted General Patton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Jesus, and George Washington because they saw commitment and sacrifice for the greater good. Commitment builds trust.

· Consistency: In every area of life, it’s the little things—done consistently—that make the big difference. If I am overweight, it is because I have eaten too many calories over time, not because I ate too much yesterday. It is the same in business. The little things done consistently make for a higher level of trust and better results. The great leaders consistently do the small but most important things first. They make that call and write that thank you note. Do the little things, consistently.

· Trust can’t be built overnight. It requires time, effort, diligence, and character. Inspiring trust is not slick or easy to fake. Trust is like a forest. It takes a long time to grow and can burn down with a just touch of carelessness. But if you focus on these eight components with every action, you will foster trusted relationships—whether with employees, customers, suppliers, or fellow leaders—that will drive results and the bottom line.

Aug 19, 2010, By Erin Meyer

The Four Keys To Success With Virtual Teams

Today's financial woes have forced many companies to pick members of project teams from across various global locations and have them communicate virtually--by phone, e-mail and videoconference--thereby saving both time and money.

There are more global virtual teams today than ever before. And their numbers are increasing rapidly. INSEAD, the international business school where I teach, has been bombarded with requests to set up a program showing executives the skills they'll need to meet this new management challenge. The latest research shows that those skills are not simply different from those needed for running co-located teams; they are often the exact opposite. Here are four principal ways they're very different.

1. You must lead differently.

While co-located teams often benefit most from a leader who acts as a facilitator, virtual teams need a manager who provides clearly defined direction and removes all ambiguity from the process. Research by my fellow INSEAD professor José Santos demonstrates that highly centralized coordination usually works best in globally distributed teams. When a team works together in the same office, you can have loose job descriptions, possibly even with two people sharing elements of the same role. In virtual teams that just doesn't work. Team leaders have to formalize roles and responsibilities--starting with their own.

2. You must arrive at decisions differently.

Teams don't work the same everywhere. In the U.S., managers are trained to solicit input from a team, choose a direction quickly and make adjustments as the project moves forward. It works, but then so do other methods. In Sweden teams learn to make decisions through lengthy consensus building, which can span many meetings but eventually leads to strong buy-in and rapid implementation. In France the Descartes-inspired education system teaches that debate and confrontation are necessary elements of any decision-making process. And in Japan decisions tend to be made in informal one-on-one discussions before a formal group meeting.

In my own research, I've found that one of the most difficult tasks for leaders of global teams is to recognize that their styles of decision making may be deeply rooted in the cultures that they come from. Global teams therefore need very explicit descriptions of how decisions will be made, and the best global team leader is one who is willing to try out different kinds of decision-making processes at different points in a project.

3. You must build trust differently.

Trust takes on a whole new meaning in virtual teams. When you meet your workmates by the water cooler or photocopier every day, you know instinctively who you can and cannot trust. In a geographically distributed team, trust is measured almost exclusively in terms of reliability.

Cristina Escallon, another faculty member in our new Managing Global Virtual Teams program, teaches that leaders of virtual teams need to concentrate on creating a highly defined process where team members deliver specific results in a repeated sequence. Reliability, aka trust, is thus firmly established after two or three cycles. Because of that, face-to face meetings can be limited to once a year or so.

4. You must communicate differently.

The utmost key to global virtual team leading is, without doubt, communication. But when we communicate virtually, we often become less influential. INSEAD Professor Ian Woodward has demonstrated through practical exercises that moving your body while speaking enhances your voice quality. Managers of global virtual teams who sit rigidly at their desks, glued to Skype or videoconference screens, tend to lose their interpersonal or persuasive edge. Walking around or simply moving your arms is just one of many simple but effective communication tricks that managers can use to improve the sound of their message.

The upshot of all this is that managers with geographically scattered teams need a much broader skill set than those with traditional, co-located teams. More than that, they need the ability to switch between skill sets, based on the diversity of their team members and the distance between them. Welcome to a new virtual world of business.

September 15, 2010

Leading and Managing Virtual Teams

How to Lead and Manage Virtual Teams

A manager is brought into his boss’s office and told he is going to be assigned to a new project. This is not a surprise; his success leading previous teams has translated into responsibility for increasingly important and complex projects. He likes a new challenge. He asks who, of the staff in the Boston office, will be assigned to his team. His boss explains that for this new project he will lead a team whose members are based in Boston, Buenos Aires, Bangalore, Beijing, and Brussels and, due to limited budget, his team will only come together face-to-face once during the projected year-long project.The manager pauses to reflect on this. He has never been in charge of managing a remote team before but the expectation is that he will be a success based on his past experience. As someone who closely monitors the work of his team and relies heavily on frequent face-to-face communication, he is not without his concerns.

Sound familiar?

This manager is one of many who have been thrown into the world of global workforce management – and sometimes without any formal training on how to manage a virtual team. As organizations expand internationally, the number of virtual, global teams continues to multiply. Managers are given the responsibility to lead teams and processes that span time zones with team members whose work styles are shaped by various country, corporate and functional cultures. How can leaders of such teams build trust, communicate effectively and drive performance when they cannot just walk down the hall and stop by the cubicles or their team members or call impromptu team meetings when the team faces a challenge?

We have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of virtual team leaders across industries and geographies. Through this interaction, we have observed that the leaders of these virtual teams face similar challenges. Now, more than ever, the leaders of virtual, global teams are in the spotlight, and feeling the pressure to show results at rates consistent with, if not exceeding, those of co-located teams of the past. Leaders of virtual teams often must adjust their leadership styles to build trust and relationships among team members and, at the same time, be able to truly take advantage of working across time zones to meet their business goals more efficiently. In this article, we will explore some of the trends and challenges of managing a remote team and suggest some specific strategies for increasing team leaders’ effectiveness in facing these challenges.

Business Trends in Globalization

As organizations become increasingly global, they recognize the need to leverage their international presence to better meet the needs of customers, create economies of scale, increase efficiency, and optimize the talent of new and existing employees regardless of where in the world they are based. Team leaders must be equipped with new skill sets and a mindset for effectively managing a global workforce while keeping their geographically dispersed team members connected, informed, and motivated. Many organizations are managed by geography in the early stages of international expansion for the ease of operation and familiarity with the local market. Being organized by geography was also much more practical in the past when many of the current communication technologies either did not exist or were too expensive to be utilized widely.Today, however, as companies expand, the limitations of being organized by geography become clear. Among the challenges are a lack of synergy across geographies; lack of ability to leverage the talent of employees in various sites; and duplication of efforts — especially in the areas of “shared services” such as finance, human resources and information technology. As a result, many companies have begun reorganizing away from geographically-led efforts. The vast majority of team leaders with whom we have worked with in recent years have been tasked with managing remote employees after such reorganization.

Virtual teams enable organizations to combine the talents of their expanded organization to meet the increasingly competitive pressures of the marketplace. Nevertheless, research indicates that these diverse virtual teams, while having the potential to be far more effective in their outcomes than co-located and more homogeneous teams, more often experience a high degree of ineffectiveness. This creates pressure on the managers who lead these teams.

Challenges: Leadership Style

We each have a style of leadership that is most comfortable. Often our leadership style is a reflection of our cultural conditioning, past experiences and qualities that we admire in the people that lead us. What is surprising to many team leaders is that their management style that has been successful when leading co-located teams does not necessarily translate to effectively managing remote employees, training virtual workers, or working with remote team members effectively.

In our experience, success in managing remote teams is linked to two main factors:

1. the dynamic of virtual communication; and

2. the impact of cultural differences between the team leader and the team members.

If the manager is someone who is used to closely monitoring the work of his team members and imparting new skills by working side by side with them, he often struggles significantly when he works in a virtual management situation, feeling as if he is not in touch and cannot hold team members accountable for their work. Team leaders may also find that their management style, based on certain cultural assumptions, may not align with the various team members’ expectations of leadership. In our work with team leaders, we have explored the differences between team members and team leaders along five dimensions of difference:

· independent (individualistic) and interdependent (group oriented)

· egalitarian and status orientation

· risk and restraint orientation

· direct and indirect communication styles

· task or relationship orientation

Differences along these dimensions can be a reflection of country, functional, regional, corporate, and other cultures. This might be best illustrated with a graphic of a “team profile” provided below. Individual, country, and team GlobeSmart Profiles are generated by Aperian Global’s GlobeSmart® online learning tool upon completion of the questionnaire.

In this illustration, the “team leader” is represented as “My Profile”, and one can see some significant differences between the work style of the team leader and the other team members. He is more interdependent than his team members, more indirect, more task-oriented, and more long-term oriented. This could influence, among other things, how he communicates both face-to-face and virtually, and what he sees as immediate priorities for the team. When a team leader can better understand his own work style and how it is similar to and different from team members and how that impacts team performance, he can then build concrete strategies for bridging the gap and managing remotely. These strategies foster the skill of “style switching” which has proven critical in leading virtual, global teams. As the leader increases his skill in bridging the differences and modifying his leadership style, he builds the ability to leverage the diversity in the team as an asset.

Challenges: Relationship Building and Trust

As global teams are formed, issues emerge such as how to divide work between sites and how to handle organizational resistance. Often, individuals believe their jobs are threatened; they experience a loss of control over the overall success of their work, and they fear the possibility of being relocated internationally. These initial feelings of alienation make building strong relationships and building trust within teams even more difficult. When teams are co-located, they are able to build relationships informally through their daily activities. With global, virtual teams the lack of this “relationship building time” is especially challenging for team members whose work style is more relationship than task oriented. In their recent article on “Creating and Sustaining Trust in Virtual Teams”, Greenberg, Greenberg and Antonucci outline two specific kinds of trust:

1. Cognitive trust: based on rational assessment of activities, function of a person’s integrity and ability

2. Affective trust: based on social bonds developed in a reciprocal relationship – emotional ties.

Both of these kinds of trust are a challenge to establish in the virtual context. Cognitive trust is often built over time as team members build a “track record” of success in following through on tasks. If the knowledge of these accomplishments is not shared with virtual team members equally, these teams may build cognitive trust at a slower rate than co-located teams. In some cases, cognitive trust may actually be hurt through “misinformation” or “misinterpretation “of facts. There may be a disparity in working contexts across multiple locations such that team members are unaware of the impact of situational, technical, resourcing and other challenges that their fellow team members face when trying to complete their tasks (Greenberg, 2007). There are specific strategies that team leaders can implement to increase the level of trust and the strength of relationships in their teams. Farrell, in an article about the integration of different functions in teams, discusses the concept of “anomie”–or a state of confusion of roles, mission etc– in the early stages of team development (Farrell, 2001). One of the best strategies for team leaders in building cognitive trust is to create a clear vision, and roles related to that vision, that bind a team together. The team leader can also contribute to cognitive trust by giving team members “data” on why the team members were chosen to be a part of the team, information about the qualifications.These steps toward establishing cognitive trust are especially critical when “affective trust” has not yet been built within a team. Because affective trust depends on informal interaction between team members, it, too, is a challenge of virtual team management.

Challenges: Leveraging Time Zones for Business Efficiency

When members of virtual, global teams are asked about the challenges they face, one of the most common areas cited is time zones. Gone are the days of cleaning out their e-mail inbox at night and finding it in the same state in the morning. A constant flow of communication at all hours of the day and night is the norm.Team members face the challenges of creating work life balance while scheduling conference calls at midnight to accommodate team members in different locations. Yet, these time zone differences can be a team’s greatest asset if they can be used to enable a project or goal to progress consistently as it is passed from team members in one time zone to another. One of the greatest challenges leaders face in enabling this to occur is streamlining the “handoffs” from one team member to another. Also critical to the success of this ”follow the sun” management is leveraging to full capacity the brief overlaps in the working hours of the team members.

Best practices for leaders to better manage this challenge include:

1. Well-documented processes that enable team members to understand the “context” of what has happened in the process prior to their involvement, and to anticipate what will happen in the process when they pass it on to another team member;

2. Well-defined decision-making sequence so it is clear who should be involved in what types of decisions (since some members of the team will be working while other team members are not on the job);

3. Clarification of who needs to be consulted about what and informed of decisions that affect the overall work of the team.

Holmstrom, Fitzgerald, Agergalk and Cochuir, in their article, “Agile Practices Reduce Distance in Global Software,” stressed that the methods that were most successful in dispersed teams were those that emphasized speed and simplicity. Successful methods were characterized by short, iterative cycles of development driven by product features, periods of reflection and introspection, collaborative decision making and incorporation of rapid feedback. While their findings were based on observations in the software development industry, they seem to apply to the various industries in which our client companies operate, e.g. manufacturing, technology, biotech and pharmaceuticals, and financial services. The more well-documented and streamlined the processes; the more effective the team will be at taking advantage of working around the clock.

Summary

We have seen a trend in companies moving away from being organized by geography and reorganizing based on either by product or in the case of shared services, by function. In addition, as companies globalize, there is the realization that with today’s virtual communication technology, the best talent for a particular project does not have to be bound by geography.There is a solid business case for increasing the number of virtual, global teams. The challenge of leading these teams effectively is still a concern for many. On the other hand, it has been documented that when led effectively, virtual global teams can far exceed domestic teams in terms of efficiency, innovation, outcomes, and the likelihood of meeting the needs of customers.So, back to our manager who has just been given responsibility for a team in Boston, Buenos Aires, Bangalore, Beijing, and Brussels… Will he be successful? Much of his success will lie in his ability to overcome the challenges of virtual leadership. Many teams have reached high levels of performance through the capacity of their leaders to modify their leadership style, to build strong relationships and trust despite geographic obstacles, and to leverage time zones as an asset.

How the best leaders build trust. By Stephen M. R. Covey

Almost everywhere we turn, trust is on the decline. Trust in our culture at large, in our institutions, and in our companies is significantly lower than a generation ago. Research shows that only 49% of employees trust senior management, and only 28% believe CEOs are a credible source of information. Consider the loss of trust and confidence in the financial markets today. Indeed, "trust makes the world go 'round," and right now we're experiencing a crisis of trust. This crisis compels us to ask three questions. First, is there a measurable cost to low trust? Second, is there a tangible benefit to high trust? Third, how can the best leaders build trust in and within their organizations to reap the benefits of high trust?

Most people don't know how to think about the organizational and societal consequences of low trust because they don't know how to quantify or measure the costs of such a so-called "soft" factor as trust. For many, trust is intangible, ethereal, unquantifiable. If it remains that way, then people don't know how to get their arms around it or how to improve it. But the fact is, the costs of low trust are very real, they are quantifiable, and they are staggering.

In 2004, one estimate put the cost of complying with federal rules and regulations alone in the United States -- put in place essentially due to lack of trust -- at $1.1 trillion, which is more than 10% of the gross domestic product. A recent study conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimated that the average American company lost 6% of its annual revenue to some sort of fraudulent activity. Research shows similar effects for the other disguised low-trust taxes as well.

Think about it this way: When trust is low, in a company or in a relationship, it places a hidden "tax" on every transaction: every communication, every interaction, every strategy, every decision is taxed, bringing speed down and sending costs up. My experience is that significant distrust doubles the cost of doing business and triples the time it takes to get things done.

By contrast, individuals and organizations that have earned and operate with high trust experience the opposite of a tax -- a "dividend" that is like a performance multiplier, enabling them to succeed in their communications, interactions, and decisions, and to move with incredible speed. A recent Watson Wyatt study showed that high trust companies outperform low trust companies by nearly 300%!

I contend that the ability to establish, grow, extend, and (where needed) restore trust among stakeholders is the critical competency of leadership needed today. It is needed more than any other competency. Engendering trust is, in fact, a competency that can be learned, applied, and understood. It is something that you can get good at, something you can measure and improve, something for which you can "move the needle." You cannot be an effective leader without trust. As Warren Bennis put it, "Leadership without mutual trust is a contradiction in terms."

How do the best leaders build trust?

The first job of any leader is to inspire trust. Trust is confidence born of two dimensions: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, motive, and intent with people. Competence includes your capabilities, skills, results, and track record. Both dimensions are vital.

With the increasing focus on ethics in our society, the character side of trust is fast becoming the price of entry in the new global economy. However, the differentiating and often ignored side of trust -- competence -- is equally essential. You might think a person is sincere, even honest, but you won't trust that person fully if he or she doesn't get results. And the opposite is true. A person might have great skills and talents and a good track record, but if he or she is not honest, you're not going to trust that person either.

The best leaders begin by framing trust in economic terms for their companies. When an organization recognizes that it has low trust, huge economic consequences can be expected. Everything will take longer and everything will cost more because of the steps organizations will need to take to compensate for their lack of trust. These costs can be quantified and, when they are, suddenly leaders recognize how low trust is not merely a social issue, but that it is an economic matter. The dividends of high trust can be similarly quantified, enabling leaders to make a compelling business case for trust.

The best leaders then focus on making the creation of trust an explicit objective. It must become like any other goal that is focused on, measured, and improved. It must be communicated that trust matters to management and leadership. It must be expressed that it is the right thing to do and it is the economic thing to do. One of the best ways to do this is to make an initial baseline measurement of organizational trust and then to track improvements over time.

The true transformation starts with building credibility at the personal level. The foundation of trust is your own credibility, and it can be a real differentiator for any leader. A person's reputation is a direct reflection of their credibility, and it precedes them in any interactions or negotiations they might have. When a leader's credibility and reputation are high, it enables them to establish trust fast -- speed goes up, cost goes down.

There are 4 Cores of Credibility, and it's about all 4 Cores working in tandemâ€”Integrity, Intent, Capabilities, and Results. Part of building trust is understanding -- clarifying -- what the organization wants and what you can offer them. Be the one that does that best. Then add to your credibility the kind of behavior that builds trust. (see the 13 high trust behaviors below). Next, take it beyond just you as the leader and extend it to your entire organization. The combination of that type of credibility and behavior and organizational alignment results in a culture of high trust.

Consider the example of Warren Buffett -- CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (and generally considered one of the most trusted leaders in the world) -- who completed a major acquisition of McLane Distribution (a $23 billion company) from Wal-Mart. As public companies, both Berkshire Hathaway and Wal-Mart are subject to all kinds of market and regulatory scrutiny. Typically, a merger of this size would take several months to complete and cost several million dollars to pay for accountants, auditors, and attorneys to verify and validate all kinds of information. But in this instance, because both parties operated with high trust, the deal was made with one two-hour meeting and a handshake. In less than a month, it was completed. High trust, high speed, low cost.

13 Behaviors of High-Trust Leaders Worldwide

I approach this strategy primarily as a practitioner, both in my own experience and in my extensive work with other organizations. Throughout this learning process, have identified 13 common behaviors of trusted leaders around the world that build -- and allow you to maintain -- trust. When you adopt these ways of behaving, it's like making deposits into a "trust account" of another party.

1. Talk Straight

2. Demonstrate Respect

3. Create Transparency

4. Right Wrongs

5. Show Loyalty

6. Deliver Results

7. Get Better

8. Confront Reality

9. Clarify Expectation

10. Practice Accountability

11. Listen First

12. Keep Commitments

13. Extend Trust

Remember that the 13 Behaviors always need to be balanced by each other (e.g., Talk Straight needs to be balanced by Demonstrate Respect) and that any behavior pushed to the extreme can become a weakness.

Depending on your roles and responsibilities, you may have more or less influence on others. However, you can always have extraordinary influence on your starting points: Self-Trust (the confidence you have in yourself -- in your ability to set and achieve goals, to keep commitments, to walk your talk, and also with your ability to inspire trust in others) and Relationship Trust (how to establish and increase the trust accounts we have with others).

Trust in the Culture

Creating a High Trust Organization

As CEO of Whole Foods Market, I believe that great organizations have great purposes. The highest ideals humans aspire to should be the same ideals that our organizations have as their highest purposes.

By Dr. Dean Ornish, Contributor

05/14/2010 05:12am ET | Updated November 17, 2011

American society appears to be undergoing a crisis in trust. Most of the major organizations that we depend upon, including governments of all types, corporations, our health care system, our financial institutions, and our schools all seem to be failing us. Indeed, I do not believe it is an exaggeration to claim that our society is actually undergoing a disintegration process whereby the fundamental premises and values supporting our institutions are all being called into question. While such disintegration is of course very painful to experience, it is also a tremendous opportunity for genuine transformation. My essay will attempt to outline some of the most important values and strategies necessary for the creation of, and the transformation to, high trust organizations.

Higher Purpose

Virtually all of our societal organizations seem to have either forgotten or have never really known why they exist and what their higher purposes are. Instead, they have often elevated narrow individual and institutional self-interest into the only purposes that they recognize as valid. Our governments all too frequently serve the politicians and the public service unions rather than their citizens. Our schools too often serve their educational bureaucracy and teachers' unions instead of their students and their parents. Our health care system too often seeks to maximize the profits of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies rather than the health and wellness of patients. Many of our corporations primarily exist to maximize the compensation of their executives, and secondarily shareholder value, rather than value creation for customers, employees, and other major stakeholders.

The single most important requirement for the creation of higher levels of trust for any organization is to discover or rediscover the higher purpose of the organization. Why does the organization exist? What is it trying to accomplish? What core values will inspire the organization and create greater trust from all of its stakeholders?

While there are potentially as many different purposes as there are organizations, I believe that great organizations have great purposes. The highest ideals that humans aspire to should be the same ideals that our organizations also have as their highest purposes. These include such timeless ideals as:

The Good: Service to others--improving health, education, communication, and the quality of life. Southwest Airlines, Nordstroms, The Container Store, Amazon.com, and Joie de Vivre Hospitality are examples of this great purpose.

The True: Discovery & furthering human knowledge. Google, Intel, Genentech, and Wikipedia all express this higher aspiration.

The Beautiful: Excellence & the creation of beauty. Apple and Berkshire Hathaway share this ideal in their own unique ways.

The Heroic: Courage to do what is right to change & improve the world. Grameen Bank and the Gates Foundation express this higher purpose in their actions.

Organizations that place these higher purposes at the very core of their business model tend to inspire trust from all of their major stakeholders: customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the larger communities that they exist in. Higher purpose and shared core values tend to unify the organization behind their fulfillment and usually act to pull the overall organization upwards to a higher degree ethical commitment. Higher levels of trust are a natural result of this unity of purpose, shared core values, and greater ethical commitment.

Conscious Leadership -- Walking the Walk

Next to the power of higher purpose, nothing is more important for creating high levels of organizational trust than the quality and commitment of the leadership at all levels of the organization. It doesn't matter if an organization has a higher purpose if the leadership doesn't understand it and seek to serve it. The various stakeholders of an organization, especially employees and customers, look to the leadership to "walk-the-talk"--to serve the purpose and mission of the organization and to lead by example. It is especially important that the CEO and other senior leadership embody the higher purpose of the organization.

As the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, I'm the most visible person in the company. One of the most important parts of my job is touring our stores and talking to our team members, customers, and suppliers. I know that in virtually everything that I say and do, our team members are always studying me, trying to determine whether they can trust me and the mission of the company. I'm always on stage. So walking the talk is very important. I try to communicate the mission and values of Whole Foods at every opportunity and I try to live those core values myself with complete fidelity. Fidelity to the mission and values builds trust, while any deviance undermines it. High trust organizations and hypocritical leadership are mutually exclusive.

Teams Everywhere

Human beings evolved in relatively small tribal bands. Many scientific studies have indicated that our ability to maintain close trusting relationships with family, friends, and co-workers is constrained to probably not more than about 150 people. We can, of course, know many more people than this, but it is hard to know them well enough to develop close bonds of trust based on actual experiences. At Whole Foods we recognize the importance of smaller tribal groupings to maximize familiarity and trust. We organize our stores and company into a variety of interlocking teams. Most teams have between 6 and 100 team members and the larger teams are subdivided further into a variety of sub-teams. The leaders of each team are also members of the Store Leadership Team and the Store Team Leaders are members of the Regional Leadership Team. This interlocking team structure continues all the way upwards to the Executive Team at the highest level of the company.

It has been our experience at Whole Foods that trust is optimized in this type of smaller team organizational structure. This is because each person is a vital and important member of their teams. The success of the team is dependent upon the invaluable contributions of everyone on the team. Trust is optimized when it flows between all levels within the organization. Many leaders make the mistake of believing that the key to increasing organizational trust is to somehow get the work force to trust the leadership more. While this is obviously very important, it is equally important that the leadership trust the workforce. To receive trust, it is usually necessary that we give trust. Organizing into small interlocking teams helps ensure that trust will flow in all directions within the organization -- upwards, downwards, within the team, and across teams.

Empowerment = Trust

While small teams are essential to optimizing the flow of organizational trust, equally important is the philosophy of empowerment. The effectiveness of teams is tremendously enhanced when they are fully empowered to do their work and to fulfill the organization's mission and values. Empowerment must be much, much more than a mere slogan, however. It should be within the very DNA of the organization. Empowerment unleashes creativity and innovation and rapidly accelerates the evolution of the organization. Empowered organizations have tremendous competitive advantage because they have tapped into levels of energy and commitment which their competitors usually have difficulty matching.

Nothing holds back empowerment more than the leadership philosophy of command and control. Command and control (C&C) is actually the opposite of empowerment and it greatly lessens trust. C&C usually involves detailed rules and bureaucratic structures to enforce the rules. Such detailed rules almost always inhibit innovation and creativity. People get ahead in the organization not through being innovative, but by following the rules and playing it safe. C&C may produce compliance from the workforce, but it seldom unleashes much energy or passion for the purpose of the organization. Empowerment = Trust. C&C = Lack of Trust.

The Importance Of Transparency and Authentic Communication

A very important measurement and condition of trust is transparency. If we want to optimize trust then we must seek to optimize transparency. When we decide to keep something hidden the motivation is almost always a lack of trust. We are afraid that the information that we wish to hide would cause more harm than good if it were widely known. While of course, some discretion is usually necessary to protect important organizational information from migrating to one's competitors or to outsiders who wish to harm the organization, such discretion can easily be overdone. Transparency is a very important supporting value for empowerment. Indeed, it is difficult for an organization to be empowered if it lacks transparency.

Whole Foods Market strives to optimize transparency to all of our stakeholders. Authentic communication with honesty and integrity are essential attributes of both transparency and trust. This is the exact opposite of what many organizations do, which is to try to "spin" their messaging to tell people what they believe people want to hear so that people will think well of them. This lack of honest, authentic communication and transparency usually boomerangs, however, and undermines trust and creates cynicism. One of the main reasons why Americans don't trust many political leaders, including the various Presidents that have led us, is that we discover that they routinely lie to us. They don't tell us the truth and we come to understand that they don't trust us and feel that they need to manipulate us. We tell the truth to people that we trust.

The high-trust organization takes the risk of revealing too much information. We must be willing to take the risk that some valuable information may fall into the wrong hands because our commitment to empowerment and trust necessitates taking that risk. Creating transparency and authentic communication is an ongoing challenge that every organization faces. We must continually strive to remove the barriers that prevent it, knowing that we can't maintain high levels of organizational trust without it.

Fairness in All Things

Nothing unravels trust more quickly in an organization than either the reality or the perception of unfairness. Another important virtue of creating a culture of transparency is that it helps ensure that unfairness is clearly seen and can therefore be corrected quickly. It is essential that the ethic of fairness apply to all key organizational processes such as hiring, promotion, compensation, discipline, and termination. Favoritism and nepotism undermine organizational trust. They cannot be tolerated. People are often prone to envy and any perceived unfairness exacerbates this tendency greatly, giving it the energy of justification.

Creating a Culture of Love and Care

Ultimately we cannot create high trust organizations without creating cultures based on love and care. The people we usually trust the most are the people that we also believe genuinely love and care for us. All too often, love and care are not qualities that we associate with organizations. We tend to look for love and friendship with our families and friends, but not from our work. Why is this? Many people believe that love and care in the organizational setting interfere with efficiency and get in the way of making the "tough but necessary" decisions that the organization requires for success. This type of thinking reflects our own lack of integration of love and care in our own lives. We have created an artificial barrier that is holding back our own personal growth and the full potential of our organizations. Fear is the opposite of love. When fear predominates in the organization, love and care cannot flourish. The opposite is also true--love and care banish fear. How can we create more love and care in our organizations? To answer this would require another essay and perhaps even an entire book. After discovering the higher organizational purpose, nothing is more important than encouraging and nurturing love and care. Here are a few suggestions that will hopefully stimulate further thinking on this incredibly important goal of creating more love and care in our organizations:

• The leadership must embody genuine love and care. This cannot be faked. If the leadership doesn't express love and care in their actions then love and care will not flourish in the organization. As Gandhi said: "We must be the change that we wish to see in the world."

• We must "give permission" for love and care to be expressed in the organization. Many organizations are afraid of love and care and force them to remain hidden. Love and care will flow naturally when we give them permission and encourage them.

• We should consider the virtues of love and care in all of our leadership promotion decisions. We shouldn't just promote the most competent, but also the most loving and caring. Our organizations need both and we should promote leaders who embody both.

• Cultivate forgiveness rather than judgment and condemnation. Too many organizations believe that judgment of others and criticizing failures are essential for creating excellence. While striving for excellence is important for all organizations, this can be done at a higher level of consciousness without condemnation. Forgiveness doesn't mean condoning mistakes and failures. It simply means that we help the other person to learn from their mistakes through non-judgmental feedback and encouragement.

• End all your organizational meetings with "appreciations". This is something that Whole Foods Market has been doing for about 25 years now with wonderful results for spreading love and care. Give everyone participating in the meeting the opportunity to voluntarily appreciate and thank other members in the group for services they have contributed or qualities that are admired. This one simple cultural practice of appreciating our fellow team members moves us out of judgment and fear into the consciousness of love.

Conclusion

We have the opportunity to create more conscious and higher trust organizations in the 21st century. To do so will require three major changes. First the organization must become conscious of what its higher purposes are. Without consciousness of higher purposes organizations will not reach their fullest potential because the creative energy within the organization will not be fully expressed. Secondly, we'll need our leaders to evolve to higher levels of consciousness and trust themselves. We will not be able to create high trust organizations without more conscious and high trust leaders. Less conscious leaders will tend to hold their organizations back.

Thirdly, we will need to evolve the cultures of our organization in ways that create processes, strategies, and structures that encourage higher levels of trust. These will necessarily include the important ideals of teams, empowerment, transparency, authentic communication, fairness, love and care.

How to Create Trust and Keep Motivation High at Your Company

Building a culture of trust and motivation within a business is a two-way street built largely on communication.

Joy Chen

GUEST WRITER

Chairman and CEO of H2O+ Beauty

March 7, 2017

Building a culture of trust and motivation within a business is a two-way street built largely on communication. Both employees and management should commit to open dialogue across the board. This may sound simple in theory, but can be difficult to implement. For example, while it may seem easy to celebrate successes together, it’s not always clear how the full team should work to address problems. Inclusive and honest discussion should be the goal, even if there is disagreement. That’s because the process of working through those disagreements is crucial for a healthy workplace culture and high morale.

No matter the structure of your company or the idiosyncrasies of your industry, here are the core principles that should underlie all types of communication to create an atmosphere of trust and keep motivation high.

Employees: speak with authority

A business needs the full participation of every employee to be successful, so remember that your voice matters. This is especially true when your views differ with one of your colleagues. Don’t be afraid to disagree. Your particular role in the company gives you a unique perspective, which can shed light on issues from a new angle and help to solve potential problems faster.

I experienced this myself early on in my career. The company I was working for at the time had just announced a new strategy. I knew that it needed serious improvement, and could actually be detrimental to our business if implemented as initially envisioned. Though I was nervous about expressing my concerns to colleagues who outranked me, my recommendations ultimately improved our overall plan. This experience gave me the confidence to continue sharing my opinions, and now, having led businesses for several years, I understand the importance of fostering open communication from the top down.

Management: encourage differing points of view

As a leader, you have even more power to create an environment where your colleagues know that their voices will be heard. A major part of this involves accepting differing points of view, which has a two-fold benefit for your business: It gives everyone the confidence that their thoughts are valued, which builds a sense of loyalty. It also encourages critical thinking about the state of the business from all levels. Once this open culture has been established and appropriately encouraged, problems can be addressed, or even prevented, earlier, as you will have set the stage for more vigilance about the wellbeing of the company.

Management: formal recognition also goes a long way

Balance is key for most aspects of a business, and that holds true for creating a trusting culture. Just as employees should be able to honestly communicate with management in order to solve problems, they should also expect widespread recognition for their successes. I put that theory into action at H2O+ Beauty by creating the Water Walker award. This program recognizes individuals or groups from any part of the company that exemplify H2O+ Beauty’s values, based on nominations from all team members. Traditions like this can be a tool to keep motivation high by showing everyone how their achievements are appreciated across the entire business.

Employees: participate in important traditions

Since the Water Walker award was originally the brainchild of the leadership team, it is especially important for employees to give it credibility by participating. Ideally, traditions like these underscore the value of an individual or group to both their peers and superiors, but they require eager, honest contributions from the bulk of the workforce to fulfill their potential.

Ultimately, each member of a business has the power to build a culture of trust and boost motivation among their colleagues. Leaders may set the tone of the culture with strong opinions and positive traditions, but the longevity of an open, mutually supportive culture cannot be assured without the buy-in of employees. If individuals at every level of a business can express themselves confidently and show equal respect for important customs, the culture will thrive over the long term.

Communication by the Leader

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere.

— Lee Iacocca

Feb 6, 2015, 11:28pm

Why Communication Is Today's Most Important Skill

Greg Satell

When I was in high school, a man came to speak about Winston Churchill. Mostly, it was the usual mix of historical events and anecdotes, which in Churchill’s case was a potent mixture of the poignant, the irreverent and the hilarious. But what I remember best was how the talk ended.

The speaker concluded by saying that if we were to remember one thing about Churchill it should be that what made him so effective was his power to communicate. I didn't understand that at the time. Growing up I had always heard about the importance of hard work, honesty and other things, but never communication.

Yet now, thirty years later, I’ve begun to understand what he meant. As Walter Isaacson argues in his book The Innovators, even in technology—maybe especially in technology—the ability to collaborate effectively is decisive. In order to innovate, it’s not enough to just come up with big ideas, you also need to work hard to communicate them clearly.

The Father Of The Electronic Age

Today, we take electricity for granted. We switch on lights, watch TV and enjoy connected devices without a second thought. It’s hard to imagine an earlier age in which we had to use smoky, smelly candles in order to see at night and didn’t have the benefit and convenience of basic household appliances.

Michael Faraday, probably more than anyone else, transformed electricity from an interesting curiosity into the workhorse of the modern age. Not only did he uncover many of its basic principles, such as its relationship to magnetism, but also invented crucial technologies, like the dynamo that generates electricity and the motor which turns it into meaningful work.

Yet Faraday was more than just a talented scientist. He was also a very effective communicator. As Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon write in their book, Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, “His scientific genius lay not simply in producing experimental results that had eluded everyone else but in explaining them too.”

This wasn’t a natural talent, he worked hard at it, taking copious notes on his own lectures and those of others. The effort paid off. His regular lectures at the Royal Institution made him, and the Institution itself, a fixture in the scientific world. The special Christmas lectures for children, which he instituted, continue to this day and draw a large television audience.

The Magician Who Shared His Tricks

A more recent genius was Richard Feynman. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, but also made important discoveries in biology and was an early pioneer of parallel and quantum computing. His talent, in fact, was so prodigious that even other elite scientists considered him to be a magician.

Yet like Faraday, Feynman was not content to hide his tricks behind smoke and mirrors. He insisted on teaching an introductory class for undergraduates—exceedingly rare for top calibre academics—that was standing room only. With his Brooklyn accent, wry sense of humor and talent for explaining things in practical, everyday terms, he was a student favorite.

Perhaps the best example of how Feynman combined brilliance with exceptional communication skills was a talk he gave a few days after Christmas in 1959. Starting from a basic question about what it would take to shrink the Encyclopedia Britannica to fit on the head of a pin, he moved step by step until, in less than an hour, he had invented the field of nanotechnology.

Schopenhauer once said that, “talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” What made Feynman so special was that he wanted us to see it too.

“THESE ADS SUCK”

We often treat communication as if it were a discrete act, a matter of performance or lack thereof. Yet meaning cannot be separated from context. A crucial, but often overlooked, function of leadership is creating a culture in which effective communication can flourish.

Consider the case of Google, which I described in Harvard Business Review. In early 2002, Larry Page walked into the the kitchen and posted a few pages of search results and wrote in big, bold letters, “THESE ADS SUCK.” In many organizations, this act would be considered a harsh taking down of an incompetent product manager.

But not at Google. It was seen as a call to action and within 72 hours a team of search engineers posted a solution. As it turned out, it was they, not the ads team, that had the requisite skills and perspectives to fix the problem. In many ways, it was that episode that made Google the profit machine it is today.

Yet Page’s action was vastly greater than a single act. He and Sergey Brin spent years creating a culture that favored change over the status quo. When he posted the subpar search results, everybody knew why. He wasn’t looking to attack—no one was fired or disciplined—but inspire.

Communication is bidirectional, requiring both a transmitter and a receiver. Both need to effectively engineered.

The Myth Of A Private Language

We tend to treat knowledge and communication as two separate spheres. We act as expertise was a private matter, attained through quiet study of the lexicon in a particular field. Communication, on the other hand, is often relegated to the realm of the social, a tool we use to interact with others of our species.

Yet, as Wittgenstein argued decades ago, that position is logically untenable because it assumes that we are able to communicate to ourselves in a private language. In truth, we can’t really know anything that we can’t communicate. To assert that we can possess knowledge, but are unable to designate what it is, is nonsensical.

And so it is curious that we give communication such short shrift. Schools don’t teach communication. They teach math, (not very well), some science, history and give rote instructions about rigid grammatical rules, but give very little guidance on how to express ideas clearly.

When we enter professional life, we immerse ourselves in the jargon and principles of our chosen field and obediently follow precepts laid out by our respective priesthoods. Yet we rarely put serious effort toward expressing ourselves in a language that can be understood by those outside our tribe. Then we wonder why our efforts and achievements fail to resonate.

It has become fashionable to say that our present epoch is an information age, but that’s not quite right. In truth, we live in a communication age and it’s time we start taking it seriously.

Apr 4, 2012, 04:59pm Mike Myatt Contributor

10 Communication Secrets Of Great Leaders

It is simply impossible to become a great leader without being a great communicator. I hope you noticed the previous sentence didn't refer to being a great talker - big difference. The key to becoming a skillful communicator is rarely found in what has been taught in the world of academia. From our earliest days in the classroom we are trained to focus on enunciation, vocabulary, presence, delivery, grammar, syntax and the like. In other words, we are taught to focus on ourselves. While I don't mean to belittle these things as they're important to learn, it's the more subtle elements of communication rarely taught in the classroom (the elements that focus on others), which leaders desperately need to learn. In today's column I'll share a few of the communication traits, which if used consistently, will help you achieve better communication results.

It is the ability to develop a keen external awareness that separates the truly great communicators from those who muddle through their interactions with others. Examine the world's greatest leaders and you'll find them all to be exceptional communicators. They might talk about their ideas, but they do so in a way which also speaks to your emotions and your aspirations. They realize if their message doesn't take deep root with the audience then it likely won't be understood, much less championed.

I don't believe it comes as any great surprise that most leaders spend the overwhelming majority of their time each day in some type of an interpersonal situation. I also don't believe it comes as a great shock that a large number of organizational problems occur as a result of poor communications. It is precisely this paradox that underscores the need for leaders to focus on becoming great communicators. Effective communication is an essential component of professional success whether it is at the interpersonal, inter-group, intra-group, organizational, or external level. While developing an understanding of great communication skills is easier than one might think, being able to appropriately draw upon said skills when the chips are down is not always as easy as one might hope for.

Skills acquired and/or knowledge gained are only valuable to the extent they can be practically applied when called for. The number one thing great communicators have in common is they possess a heightened sense of situational and contextual awareness. The best communicators are great listeners and astute in their observations. Great communicators are skilled at reading a person/group by sensing the moods, dynamics, attitudes, values and concerns of those being communicated with. Not only do they read their environment well, but they possess the uncanny ability to adapt their messaging to said environment without missing a beat. The message is not about the messenger; it has nothing to do with messenger; it is however 100% about meeting the needs and the expectations of those you're communicating with.

So, how do you know when your skills have matured to the point that you've become an excellent communicator? The answer is you'll have reached the point where your interactions with others consistently use the following ten principles:

1. Speak not with a forked tongue: In most cases, people just won't open up to those they don't trust. When people have a sense a leader is worthy of their trust they will invest time and take risks in ways they never would if their leader had a reputation built upon poor character or lack of integrity. While you can attempt to demand trust, it rarely works. Trust is best created by earning it with right acting, thinking, and decisioning. Keep in mind people will forgive many things where trust exists, but will rarely forgive anything where trust is absent.

2. Get personal: Stop issuing corporate communications and begin having organizational conversations - think dialog not monologue. Here's the thing - the more personal and engaging the conversation is the more effective it will be. There is great truth in the following axiom: "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." Classic business theory tells leaders to stay at arms length. I say stay at arms length if you want to remain in the dark receiving only highly sanitized versions of the truth. If you don't develop meaningful relationships with people you'll never know what's really on their mind until it's too late to do anything about it.

3. Get specific: Specificity is better than Ambiguity 11 times out of 10: Learn to communicate with clarity. Simple and concise is always better than complicated and confusing. Time has never been a more precious commodity than it is today. It is critical leaders learn how to cut to the chase and hit the high points - it's also important to expect the same from others. Without understanding the value of brevity and clarity it is unlikely you'll ever be afforded the opportunity to get to the granular level as people will tune you out long before you ever get there. Your goal is to weed out the superfluous and to make your words count.

4. Focus on the leave-behinds not the take-aways: The best communicators are not only skilled at learning and gathering information while communicating, they are also adept at transferring ideas, aligning expectations, inspiring action, and spreading their vision. The key is to approach each interaction with a servant's heart. When you truly focus on contributing more than receiving you will have accomplished the goal. Even though this may seem counter-intuitive, by intensely focusing on the other party's wants, needs & desires, you'll learn far more than you ever would by focusing on your agenda.

5. Have an open mind: I've often said that the rigidity of a closed mind is the single greatest limiting factor of new opportunities. A leader takes their game to a whole new level the minute they willingly seek out those who hold dissenting opinions and opposing positions with the goal not of convincing them to change their minds, but with the goal of understanding what's on their mind. I'm always amazed at how many people are truly fearful of opposing views, when what they should be is genuinely curious and interested. Open dialogs with those who confront you, challenge you, stretch you, and develop you. Remember that it's not the opinion that matters, but rather the willingness to discuss it with an open mind and learn.

6. Shut-up and listen: Great leaders know when to dial it up, dial it down, and dial it off (mostly down and off). Simply broadcasting your message ad nauseum will not have the same result as engaging in meaningful conversation, but this assumes that you understand that the greatest form of discourse takes place within a conversation, and not a lecture or a monologue. When you reach that point in your life where the light bulb goes off, and you begin to understand that knowledge is not gained by flapping your lips, but by removing your ear wax, you have taken the first step to becoming a skilled communicator.

7. Replace ego with empathy: I have long advised leaders not to let their ego write checks that their talent can't cash. When candor is communicated with empathy & caring and not the prideful arrogance of an over inflated ego good things begin to happen. Empathetic communicators display a level of authenticity and transparency that is not present with those who choose to communicate behind the carefully crafted facade propped-up by a very fragile ego. Understanding the this communication principle is what helps turn anger into respect and doubt into trust.

8. Read between the lines: Take a moment and reflect back on any great leader that comes to mind... you'll find they are very adept at reading between the lines. They have the uncanny ability to understand what is not said, witnessed, or heard. Being a leader should not be viewed as a license to increase the volume of rhetoric. Rather astute leaders know that there is far more to be gained by surrendering the floor than by filibustering. In this age of instant communication, everyone seems to be in such a rush to communicate what's on their mind that they fail to realize everything to be gained from the minds of others. Keep your eyes & ears open and your mouth shut and you'll be amazed at how your level or organizational awareness is raised.

9. When you speak, know what you're talking about: Develop a technical command over your subject matter. If you don't possess subject matter expertise, few people will give you the time of day. Most successful people have little interest in listening to those individuals who cannot add value to a situation or topic, but force themselves into a conversation just to hear themselves speak. The fake it until you make it days have long since passed, and for most people I know fast and slick equals not credible. You've all heard the saying "it's not what you say, but how you say it that matters," and while there is surely an element of truth in that statement, I'm here to tell you that it matters very much what you say. Good communicators address both the "what" and "how" aspects of messaging so they don't fall prey to becoming the smooth talker who leaves people with the impression of form over substance.

10. Speak to groups as individuals: Leaders don't always have the luxury of speaking to individuals in an intimate setting. Great communicators can tailor a message such that they can speak to 10 people in a conference room or 10,000 people in an auditorium and have them feel as if they were speaking directly to each one of them as an individual. Knowing how to work a room and establish credibility, trust, and rapport are keys to successful interactions.

11. Bonus - Be prepared to change the message if needed: Another component of communications strategy that is rarely discussed is how to prevent a message from going bad, and what to do when does. It's called being prepared and developing a contingency plan. Again, you must keep in mind that for successful interactions to occur, your objective must be in alignment with those you are communicating with. If your expertise, empathy, clarity, etc. don't have the desired effect, which by the way is very rare, you need to be able to make an impact by changing things up on the fly. Use great questions, humor, stories, analogies, relevant data, and where needed, bold statements to help connect and engender the confidence and trust that it takes for people to want to engage. While it is sometimes necessary to "Shock and Awe" this tactic should be reserved as a last resort.

Don't assume someone is ready to have a particular conversation with you just because you're ready to have the conversation with them. Spending time paving the way for a productive conversation is far better than coming off as the proverbial bull in a china shop. Furthermore, you cannot assume anyone knows where you're coming from if you don't tell them. I never ceased to be amazed at how many people assume everyone knows what they want to occur without ever finding it necessary to communicate their objective. If you fail to justify your message with knowledge, business logic, reason, empathy etc., you will find that said message will likely fall on deaf ears needing reinforcement or clarification afterward.

Bottom line - The leadership lesson here is whenever you have a message to communicate (either directly, or indirectly through a third party) make sure said message is true & correct, well reasoned, and substantiated by solid business logic that is specific, consistent, clear and accurate. Spending a little extra time on the front-end of the messaging curve will likely save you from considerable aggravation and brain damage on the back-end. Most importantly of all, keep in mind that communication is not about you, your opinions, your positions or your circumstances. It's about helping others by meeting their needs, understanding their concerns, and adding value to their world. Do these things and you'll drastically reduce the number of communications problems you'll experience moving forward.

Thoughts?

Jul 7, 2015, 10:10am Carmine Gallo Senior Contributor

Richard Branson: 'Communication Is The Most Important Skill Any Leader Can Possess'

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson is a student of communication. In a blog post listing his favorite quotes on the subject, Branson calls communication "an art." He’s right. We can use science to study why certain techniques are more effective than others, but ultimately communication is more art than science and, like mastering any art, it takes practice to sharpen the craft.

Quoting business author Brian Tracy, Branson writes, “Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.”

Communication levels the playing field. If you can speak well, you can outshine the competition in so many ways. Every week I receive emails and comments from our readers who have found uncommon success almost immediately upon improving their communication skills. Among them:

· A recent college graduate who landed a dream job on his third interview after he rehearsed the company’s pitch for eight hours. The company’s sales manager asked to record his pitch to show the rest of the sales team how to sell their product.

· A mid-level manager who is rapidly ascending the ranks of his Fortune 500 technology firm because he’s considered one of the company’s best presenters.

· The marketing manager of a large construction company who re-tooled the company’s PowerPoint presentation and landed an $875 million contract.

Each of these people have very different communication styles. There’s no template that can be easily replicated from one person to another. And that’s why communication is more "art" than science. Mastering an art requires skill and skill is only developed through practice, regardless of the field. I play golf and, as any golfer knows, if you don’t practice in between rounds you have no chance of getting better. Golf is a very difficult sport, but it gets easier and more enjoyable when you know how to do it. It’s the same with communication and presentation skills. Very few people enjoy giving a presentation. They’re anxious about it, spend sleepless nights for days or weeks ahead of the event, and, in many cases, experience full-blown stage fright.

HOW LEADERS CAN COMMUNICATE TO BUILD TRUST

by: Ralph Beslin , Chitra Reddin , November / December 2004

A business leader’s greatest battle today is to win the trust of stakeholders. The leaders who win are those who communicate openly and often, have a clear and committed communications policy, initiate formal and informal programs and assess their own performance. Here’s sound advice from authors who have taught CEOs how to do it.

Leaders too often talk about having trust, rather than building trust. Trust is something that must be earned. It is not something that today’s business leaders can take for granted, because both internal workforces and external publics are increasingly cynical.

From Enron to WorldCom to Grasso to Hollinger to Parmalat to Martha Stewart, allegations of colossal corporate greed and fraud have eroded trust (and share values) and set new rules about how corporations (and their leaders) are expected to operate. Employees, investors, customers, governments and regulators are demanding greater corporate accountability and transparency. Such measures as Sarbanes-Oxley and its recently announced Canadian counterpart aim to curb the excesses of corporations and protect the public.

But leaders of well-respected, high-performing organizations have long known the value of building and sustaining trust. We recently talked to CEOs, senior HR executives and communications leaders in some of North America’s best organizations to obtain their views on why and how they communicate to build trust. We then considered the opinions of these senior business leaders in the context of our own lessons learned over a combined 50 years of corporate, academic and consulting experience. This article discusses some of the best practices for building trust.

Leading communications, engaging stakeholders

Building trust in an organization’s leadership requires a personal effort on the part of the leaders themselves. Yet it’s a team effort too. And the corporate function most likely to support leaders’ efforts to build or sustain trust is communications.

Why communications?

“Communications is fundamental to building trust,” says Jodi Macpherson, a communications expert at Mercer Inc. “It contributes to the creation of an environment of trust around leaders that enables them to lead effectively, engage employees and ultimately deliver results.” Communications serves as the positioning agent for message delivery and leadership development for senior managers. Successful business leaders have learned this from first-hand experience.

Leaders are communicators if they believe that one of their key responsibilities is to “communicate, communicate and then communicate some more.” Bill Black, former president and CEO of Maritime Life, says: “One of the three or four central jobs of the CEO is communications. A very substantial part of your accountability as a CEO is to communicate with stakeholders such as employees and customers. People want the CEO to communicate the strategic issues-the ‘big picture’ questions. For things happening at the corporate level, they want to hear it from the top.” No surprise, then, that Maritime Life, now part of Manulife Financial, has been recognized as one of Canada’s top employers for the past five years in a row.

Communications can’t make a person trust someone who is basically untrustworthy. But it can help create a culture in which trust can thrive. CEOs and senior managers who want to build trust with key stakeholders have a plethora of communication tools at their disposal, and capable communication professionals to assist them.

Building trust, creating value

Why should CEOs and senior managers care about building trust? Aren’t there already too many things to worry about nowadays, such as sustaining profitability in a cutthroat, competitive environment? And what about that stagnating share price or those restructuring projects that never seem to produce all the promised benefits?

“Leaders are people who are followed,” says Diane Bean, executive vice-president, human resources and communication for Manulife Financial, Canada’s largest insurance company. “People won’t follow a leader they don’t trust. Trust makes it easier to get alignment.”

Trust is a powerful force that builds loyalty, increases credibility and supports effective communications. It gives you the benefit of the doubt in situations where you want to be heard, understood and believed.

As every CEO, employee and analyst knows, trust is severely tested in periods of high uncertainty and change during mergers. Despite best intentions, at these times it is often impossible to communicate as much information as everyone would like. When Maritime Life merged with Manulife Financial, Bill Black was constrained from fully communicating with his employees across the country because of legal and regulatory issues. He attributes the relatively smooth transition at the company to “the reservoir of trust we have built over the years.”

At the heart of building trust is the process of communications. Today, with public confidence in all kinds of organizations at an all-time low, leadership, communications, trust, corporate performance and reputation are inextricably linked. A 2003 Towers Perrin study, “Enhancing Corporate Credibility: Is It Time to Take the SPIN Out of Employee Communications?” (based on input from 1,000 working Americans), concludes: “Company communications about the business – e.g., the company’s strategy, performance and competitive challenges-are viewed as credible by less than half of employees, and appear dishonest to roughly a quarter of the workforce.”

These results should be a wake-up call to senior executives,” says Barbara Kaufman, a principal at Towers Perrin. “Organizations will find it increasingly difficult to motivate, engage and retain their most talented employees if their messages are not believed,” says Kaufman. A workforce that trusts its leaders and really understands what’s happening within the company will be more satisfied, more productive and better able to contribute ideas for improvement, she says.

Leaders of high-performing, well-respected companies are known for their “open-book communications.” They create a culture of trust by sharing information quickly and freely, and building relationships with employees and other stakeholders that enable their organizations to thrive.

Making it happen

“Communication is the critical link to stakeholders,” says David Moorcroft, senior vice-president, corporate communications, at RBC Financial Group. “Not just to provide information, which is just the table stakes. Building trust involves managing communications and creating the right channels that give employees more of a say in things and encouraging discussion around what needs to be done.” He advises senior executives to “do a lot of location visits and a lot of direct e-mail communication. And always provide opportunities for feedback. Communication can’t be left to chance,” Moorcroft says.

How to communicate sincerely, honestly and regularly is a challenge for business leaders and managers alike. After all, there still are companies, divisions and departments to run. But the return on communications is high. In trusted, high-performing companies in Canada and the U.S., the CEO and senior managers are communication champions who lead by example and sustain an open communications culture.

RBC Financial Group, Canada’s largest financial institution, works hard to get it right. Rated Canada’s Most Respected Corporation in 2003, RBC makes sure that its leaders work hard to gain employee trust and evaluate their progress in building trust. Jim Rager, recently retired vice-chairman, personal and commercial banking, walked the talk. He seized every opportunity to communicate directly and deliver the “say-do” messages: what the company wants to do, and what will be done to enable employee behaviour to get it done. Interactive channels are used as frequently as possible to build credibility for the messages and the leader. RBC senior managers are rated and given feedback on their communication skills.

At the heart of RBC’s Leadership Management Program is a communication process called Leadership Dialogues. Established leaders relate their career experiences to developing leaders. These stories are remembered because they’re emotional and powerful. Over the past five years, Rager held quarterly town hall meetings that were attended by 500-800 head office staff. (Additional meetings were held with field staff via satellite-television broadcasts and interactive phone connections.) Says Rager, “It’s an important way of ensuring that everyone understands the context in which we work and how the corporate priorities relate to their own team’s objectives.”

“Make sure the communication is happening, and use both informal and formal methods, says Bill Back. “We had a variety of informal forums, meeting with about a dozen employees-sometimes an entire department-for lunch and coffee breaks. We also found our annual employee survey process very valuable and had a rich and robust post-survey process. This basically set the agenda for our HR initiatives for the coming year.”

For corporate, HR and communications leaders, a regular self-assessment of whether or not you’re acting as a communications champion in your organization helps to illuminate what you’re doing well and where you may benefit from some help. Please see Chart A on the next page for a self assessment.

Measuring progress, getting feedback After making the effort, you also want to know whether what you have done is working. Just as there is no end to improving quality, there is no end to building trust. This makes it necessary to combine ongoing, sporadic, short-term measurement activities with regular, long-term measurement. And don’t discount the importance of your gut-feelings or those of your communications adviser when it comes to gauging trust. RBC’s Moorcroft notes, “The senior PR counsel can’t play politics and must have the highest integrity. His or her advice must be trusted. As a broker of information and strategy, my job is to help our senior managers succeed.”

Most effective is a combination of formal and informal communications measurement. Informal methods provide more specific and more frequent assessments to help make changes or address issues quickly and flexibly. VIP breakfast sessions and round-table meetings with staff are excellent for obtaining a quick read on a variety of issues, including trust and credibility. Jim Rager believes strongly in open communication and in getting feedback from employees in a variety of ways. “They could call me, send me e-mail messages, and we had group discussions,” he says. “My objective was to create a positive environment where people want to talk with you and participate in Q&A.” At Maritime Life, Bill Black and the leadership team went across Canada three to four times a year for employee communications sessions, and they gained both formal and informal feedback. “You can pick up a lot, not just from the words, but the body language. You can tell whether they believe you or not,” Black says.

Regular, formal measurement takes a bit more planning and execution, but it’s worth the effort. Interviews and focus groups involving representative staff members are great for capturing feedback. Conducted by an objective researcher or facilitator, these sessions can include trust-related topics and measurement exercises. Special interpersonal and organizational trust-measurement tools are easy to use; they can be administered using representative sampling techniques to gauge staff perceptions, as well as perception gaps between employees and senior managers.

From a performance-based perspective, 360-degree feedback exercises are excellent for individual and organizational development. Incorporating communication as one of the components provides regular measurement-quarterly, semi-annually or annually-of interpersonal communications and the strategic activities that rely on this important skill. More comprehensive evaluation methods are essential for enterprise-wide, long-term planning and initiatives. The gold standard for evaluating communications is the communication audit. Generally done about every three years, communication audits can take anywhere from two to five months, depending on the size of the organization and variety of communication activities. Typical evaluation and feedback methods include focus groups, print and electronic publication evaluations, interviews with senior managers and selected staff, a review of the functional structure and workflow in the departments responsible for communications, and on-line surveys.

Employee engagement surveys (generally coordinated by the human resources area) will let you know whether, and to what degree, employees perceive senior managers as trustworthy. These surveys should incorporate direct and unequivocal questions related to trust.

A communications audit every three years, combined with ongoing informal research activities and feedback from corporate-wide surveys, will provide a company’s leaders with a full picture of the quality of communications, the effectiveness of information delivery, and the depth of trust for the content of the messages from senior management.

The value of trust

As a personal value, trust is beautiful in its simplicity: It is the unquestioned belief that the other person has your best interests in heart. So why does it take so much effort to get employees and other stakeholders to accept that their corporate leadership does have their best interests in mind and that they should believe what their leaders have to say? The answer: Too often, actions speak louder than words. And the way leaders communicate-or don’t communicate-and how often or seldom leaders communicate sets up barriers that best intentions can’t broach, and occasional sincerity can’t convert into trust.

Our simple definition needs to be extended to take into account that trust must be built, and it must be earned over a span of time by listening, talking, asking questions and “walking the talk.” Employees, investors, suppliers and customers alike eventually reach a decision point in a relationship when they decide where to place their trust and with whom. Leaders are judged on what they do to win trust, and the sincerity and consistency of their effort to retain it.

Fortunately, leaders can and do win the trust of their many stakeholders. They win this trust by communicating openly and often; having a clear and committed communications policy, strategy and processes; initiating formal and informal communications programs; and regularly assessing their own communications effectiveness and that of their team and their organization.