I’m not a big fan of acronyms, but I created the acronym REAL – responsibility, expectations, accountability, learning - to try to describe what I think right relationships at work should look like. I recognize that very few of our relationships at work will develop into the goal of interdependent partnerships, but that can never be an excuse for us to not continually strive to prepare ourselves and others to be increasingly more interdependent with and less dependent upon each other.

Assuming full responsibility for your performance and citizenship behaviors at work is the foundation of interdependence. You can never be truly interdependent if your behaviors force others to assume responsibility for you. Here are a few suggestions for how we can master our current responsibilities, improve the jobs that we do, do more than what’s expected by helping others, and care about our purpose:

1. Understand your organization’s purpose, why it exists to do what it does. Don’t expect to find this written in an official document – you might have to think hard about this yourself

2. Understand why you were selected for your position over others

3. Understand how your work contributes to the organization’s final products and services, and why your work matters

4. Understand when and how your performance is measured and how it is evaluated. Make a list of the daily behaviors you need to exhibit to exceed your metrics

5. Invest in your own personal development

6. As you master your current responsibilities, look for ways to improve the work you do. Find the courage to communicate your suggestions in the form of solutions rather than complaints

7. As you master and now improve your current responsibilities, look for ways you can help others with their responsibilities

8. Be trustworthy as well as trusting of others

9. Engage with your work and colleagues instead of waiting to be engaged

10. If you are not satisfied with your work, identify the root cause and try to fix it. Commitment is a powerful driver of performance and citizenship behavior, and you will never fully commit if you are not satisfied with your work.

I’m not suggesting this list is compressive, but it’s a good start. Have I left out anything important? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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In contractual relationships, our primary concern is holding others accountable for high standards of performance. Effective contractual relationships require what we deal with others in good faith and that we assume full responsibility for performing our part of the arrangement. That is absolutely essential, but the normative trust and commitment of contractual relationships will never be enough to establish a high performance work environment.

Research has shown that only affective trust and commitment between leaders and followers produces the psychological safety requisite for people to apply the full potential of their heads, hands, and hearts to work. Building on a solid foundation of fair contractual relationships for everyone, high performance leadership moves to establish covenantal relationships with as many employees as possible.

Covenant promises require a different kind of trust, commitment, and leadership intimacy than do contracts.  Contracts are the currency of bosses and subordinates; covenants the currency of partners. Interdependent partners in covenant relationship commit to enabling each other to keep promises established to achieve the vision, values, goals, and daily behaviors consonant with their shared purpose.

Unless and until you are willing to hold yourself accountable for performing your own job with distinction, walking the talk your employees value, and genuinely caring for those you’ve been given the privilege to lead, you will never master covenant leadership. You are not entitled to partnership; you earn partnership by first providing it to others.

“How can I help?” may be the single most important question you can learn to ask as a leader.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Last night the #leadfromwithin community impressed the heck out of Lolly Daskal and I as we presented them with 10 questions on trust. Lolly produced a transcript of the chat that was 144 pages long! There is no way I can cover all 144 pages, or give credit to every incredible person that participated, but I want to share with you some of the highlights to the first two questions.

Question 1: What does it mean to trust others?

@heart_path to trust others means to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to believe they are sharing their authentic selves with you

@sweetieberry to trust others means to believe their discipline and belief in honesty are shared

@lollydaskal trust is the fundamental building block for any relationship; it is the glue that holds any relationship together

@stanbridge1 trust is the opposite of certainty; trusting another is all the things you can’t be certain of but have faith in anyway

@mariepayton I trust in those that are looking out for my interests as well as theirs

@stevelaswell trust means you allow others to be responsible

@katenasser trust delivers you from a solo life of security to an enriched life of risk

@edwardcolozzi trust is the greatest gift, along with love, one shares with another person

@worksmarta trust must be earned

@leadershipfreak trust is confidence in others based on past performance and present character

@toloveitall trust others? Means being able to show vulnerability

@ebonitruss trusting others means you put yourself out there even when you are unsure of the consequences

@versalytics trust is believing that someone will act with your best intentions

Question 2: What does it mean to trust yourself?

@laurindab trusting self means I will find a way to succeed even if I initially fail

@burgessct it means you must be consistent in word and deed

@juanortiztweets trusting yourself is to put all your fears in a box, go out, and do what needs to be done

@jkwleadership trusting yourself is to allow yourself to fail because you know you can get up again

@earthliz trusting yourself allows you to be in the moment without having to second guess your priorities

@womanonajourney knowing that you will do the right things at the right time

@taramarkus trusting yourself is to understand your weaknesses and use your strengths to overcome so that all of you works in harmony

@katenasser trusting yourself means stepping out even when others say stay in line

@simon_gb to have faith in your abilities to succeed

@lollydaskal it means walking in obedience to my inner voice even when others think otherwise. Owning my choices!

@strategicmonk trusting myself means knowing myself better than I know my expectations and criticisms of myself

@jimweible trusting yourself is knowing that your inner voice is in tune with your outer self

@careerspan it is the core belief that your “gut” instinct is not extinct

@growinggold to trust myself means that I know that I know

@jpgtx trusting myself means that I show others the same person I see in the mirror each morning

@lizsvos I trust myself when I listen to my heart

@eldiddulph trusting myself means courage to risk ideas, beliefs, love, not being accepted but plowing forward anyway

@john_paul trusting myself means knowing that I am not totally in control

@mjasmus you must be able to forgive yourself in order to trust yourself

@lollydaskal trusting yourself is being honest with yourself about your feelings and conflicts and obstacles

And that’s just the first two questions! I think you can see the richness of the conversation that takes place in the #leadfromwithin community. These conversations take place every Tuesday night at 8 pm Eastern time – you should join us sometime!

Last night I participated in a twitter chat with the incredible Lolly Daskal and the #leadfromwithin community. The topic was trust, and over the course of an hour Lolly and I provided the group 10 questions on trust and the group engaged in some excellent conversation around those questions. Lolly produced a transcript of the conversation the group engaged in, which you can find by clicking here.

In this video, I share the 10 questions we asked and the responses I provided to those questions. The hour went very quickly and when we got to the end I was wishing we had 10 more minutes!

Behind the scenes, Lolly and I were connected on Skype, where she coached and encouraged me through the process. Lolly is a class act, a consummate professional. Here is what she told me, in her own words, about her goal for the session:

The goal is make everyone know they matter. The answers are not as important in as much as I want everyone to feel we are together in conversation. Everyone is important. Everyone who comes matters.

Lolly cares for her community – she is the real deal. This is why we love Lolly Daskal and trust her to provide an amazing twitter chat every Tuesday at 8 pm Eastern time. Lolly, thank you for trusting me and inviting me to spend an hour with you and your #leadfromwithin community.

If you’ve never participated in Lolly’s #leadfromwithin chat, you should check it out sometime – soon!

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The title of this post is a line from one of my favorite books on leadership, “Leadership is an Art,” by Max DePree. DePree goes on to say:

We also enable the future by forgiving the mistakes we all make while growing up. We free each other to perform in the future through the medium of trust. (p. 114-115).

I must confess that I have a hard time forgiving people I don’t trust. But I find it impossible to trust someone I refuse to forgive. Unforgiveness disables the future by shackling us to the past. Forgiveness is a discipline of liberty, learning, and purposeful growth.

Trust does not require that we forget the performance failures or wrongs done to us by others. Trust simply requires that we factor an individual’s predictable behavior into our future expectations of that person. All of us have the capacity to be predictably untrustworthy at something.

For example, if someone you work with has a history of being deceitful, it would be foolish to pretend this person will never be deceitful again. It’s the resentment of, rather than the knowledge of, the individual’s mala fide behavior that is the real threat to your future development.

Today’s forgiveness enables the trust required for you and your team to create its future. Forgiveness is an inherently prudent professional virtue.

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In their 2010 book entitled “The Truth about Leadership,” James Kouzes and Barry Posner assert that credibility is the foundation of leadership. Credibility “means that you must be so clear about your beliefs that you put them into practice every day.” (p. 28)

That is a high but very appropriate standard. Later in the book they state that trust rules credibility. They sum up the value of trust nicely:

Getting people to work together begins with building mutual trust. Before asking for trust from others, you must demonstrate your own trust in them. That means taking the risk of disclosing what you stand for, value, want, hope for, and are willing and unwilling to do. You also have to be predictable and consistent in your actions; forthright, candid, and clear in your communications; and serious about your promises…There is nothing more destructive to trust than deceit, and nothing more constructive than candor. (p. 89).

These claims are supported by high quality empirical research published in leading peer-reviewed journals. When I teach organizational behavior to my MBA students at the University of Nevada, Reno, I drive home the point that few things are more important to their success as leaders than the ability to develop, maintain, and leverage trust with their employees, peers, bosses, suppliers, and customers. Trust is huge.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2001 at 8 pm EDT (5 pm Reno time!), I will be the guest host on Lolly Daskal’s #leadfromwithin Leadership Chat on Twitter. Our topic will be trust. I’ve given Lolly 10 questions to present to the chat participants that deal with various aspects of trust, and I will try to focus on trust in the workplace. We will discuss what trust is, why it matters, how it develops, how it is destroyed, how it is repaired when broken, how we can help our leaders be more trustworthy, and how we can better trust ourselves.

If you’d like to participate but are not sure how, here is a nice YouTube video by Torrey McGraw that describes three ways to participate in a twitter chat.

I hope you will join Lolly Daskal, me, and the rest of the #leadfromwithin community tomorrow night to talk about trust! Lolly does an amazing job with this – I bet you will be as impressed with her as I am.

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Dan Frank, the pastor of my church in Reno, challenged us to think this week about how we deal with doubt, then to share our thoughts online. As I thought about doubt, I realized that I don’t give much thought to doubt. I’m sure I have a folder in my cognitive file cabinet labeled “things I doubt,” but there is not much in it and I don’t visit it very often.

I much prefer to classify things I encounter as either 1) things I believe, 2) things I don’t believe, or 3) things I don’t understand.

Even though I love the truth, I don’t necessarily like everything I believe to be true, and not everything I believe matters to me. You might tell me something that I believe, and it matters to you, but it does not really matter to me. There are some things I believe that really matter to me, but I don’t fully understand them. It might be different for you, but I don’t have to fully understand everything in order to believe it. If the source is credible and trustworthy, I can accept what is given to me as true even if I don’t fully comprehend the issue. Things I believe but don’t fully understand certainly merit further consideration, but that consideration is not necessarily urgent.

There are some things I don’t believe where the issue for me is final, and other things I don’t currently believe that I am open to changing my beliefs about in the future. For example, I don’t believe that O.J. is innocent – case closed for me. I also don’t believe that drastic cuts to education funding in Nevada will either reform the system or help our ailing economy in the long run, but I’m hoping I’m wrong.

Every now and then I encounter something from a source that I don’t know well enough to trust that I simply don’t understand enough about to either believe or disbelieve. I suppose this is as close as I get to doubt. If the issue even merits my consideration, I try to quickly move it to one of the categories in either my “belief,” or “disbelief” folders.

If I trust you, one of the reasons is that you have a history of telling me things that I can believe, even though I might not like it; therefore, if you tell me something new I will be motivated to believe it. If you tell me something that turns out not to be completely true, it probably won’t mean that I will distrust you, but it certainly will mean that the trust between us will change. Some things that I previously would have believed and they would have mattered to me might now be things that I either believe but they no longer matter, or I believe but want to investigate further before deciding if they matter.

Trust is very important to me; consequently, I don’t give much thought to doubt.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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The City is a software platform designed specifically for churches. It functions as an intranet but it is clearly a Facebook clone. When you join The City at the church you attend, you are required to set up a profile (e.g. picture, about, groups, friends). My church started using The City this year, so per their request I joined.

I hate The City.

I think The City would be fine as an internal communication and coordination platform for church staff and senior leaders. These folks need to have coordinated conversations in order to accomplish church business, and those conversations do not need to be public. If you have a large church staff and leadership team, an intranet could be a very useful management tool.

But I think it is a disaster for the congregation because it masquerades as a social media platform. I think people that use The City need to keep in mind that the norms of behavior are patterned off the king of social media platforms, Facebook. Facebook was created by a guy in a Harvard dorm room that wanted to help his friends connect with women. As these Facebook norms (e.g. friends, groups) have migrated to other software platforms, people easily accept them as “the way things should be” and quickly forget how they originated.

The City has “walls”, which like it or not makes it an exclusive members-only club, and I personally think that is the antithesis of what a church wants to accomplish. Social media has been great for me, and I think it’s a great idea for church members to be active on social media platforms, but all of their persona’s should be public and open to full inspection by anyone at any time. You want to be found so that you can connect, and when you are found people need to know that what you have not posted anything online that you are trying to hide.

How can you expect to earn my trust – the foundation of right relationship – if you give me the impression that online you are concealing something? It’s a mixed message, which sends the wrong signal.

I am a strong introvert by nature, and connecting with people in public groups has never been easy for me. The City for my church has well over 1000 participants, and I only have 7 “friends.” I never visit The City because it reinforces my perception that I don’t really “fit”. The City is no place to make friends, which I find absolutely incongruous with the concept of church life.

I love the transparency that comes with open architectures like Twitter and my blog. In the blogsphere and on Twitter, I can reach out to people I want to meet, and I can offer people a reason to reach out to me. There are places where information is shared, conversations are convened, existing relationships are strengthened, and new friendships are formed.

It’s not a popular opinion, but I think The City is simply unnecessary for the congregation. The current church website works just fine as a billboard to post announcements. The social functions taking place in The City could be accomplished better on existing, more open platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

I hate The City because I think the attitudes and behaviors that its walls encourage compromise its core mission.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Hypocrisy is the gap between what we say we believe and how we are actually behaving. A lot of leaders give lip service to diversity and inclusion, but then behave in ways that stifle dynamic participation.

If you call yourself an inclusive leader, yet your de facto test of whether or not people “fit” the culture is everyone gets along, or at least never questions or disagrees with you, then you have an integrity gap. In too many organizational cultures, “fit” means welcoming with open arms anyone that is willing to become just like one of us. Long faces, averted eye-contact, alienation and vilification are among the wages of those that just can’t seem to fit in.

Is the cohesion you think you see among your employees and peers a mirage? Is it possible that someone, maybe even you, has simply taught all those compliant faces that it’s safer to sit down and shut up than to risk full participation?

The next time you speak on behalf of your group and pronounce that “we” decided upon or agreed to something, ask yourself if anyone in the group would have a reason to say “we” does not include “me.” If you are insulated by a club of longtime friends or “trusted” advisors, it’s highly likely that your esteemed participative leadership is really just a charade.

Despite your eloquent rhetoric, if you are not responding to your folks in ways that encourage them to engage, then you are not really listening, and if you are not listening, then you really don’t care about anyone but yourself. The proof is in the behavioral pudding.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I am occasionally asked to speak in the Reno area about either leadership or social media. If either of my friends Gary or Kathy attends my talk, I always ask them for feedback. They both give great advice and I trust them enough to tell me what I need to hear to improve. But this only works because they know me well enough to understand that I truly care about them and what they think and they trust me enough to give me frank and sometimes tough advice.

I always seek feedback from the person that invited me to speak, but other than that, if Gary, Kathy, or another trusted friend did not attend my talk, I don’t ask anyone else what they thought about my presentation. It’s risky to tell people the truth about their performance; therefore, I won’t ask anyone that does not know me well enough to trust me to take that risk.

I attended a talk recently, and the presenter noticed I was in the audience and contacted me later on Facebook to ask what I thought of his presentation. Even if I had loved the presentation, I would have felt uncomfortable about being asked because I don’t know him well enough to trust him with my candid counsel.

Truthfully, it was one of the worst presentations I’ve attended in a long time. It did not meet my expectations of a good presentation for several reasons, but to be fair, I think about half the folks that attended the talk seemed to enjoy it.  What I told him in my reply was that from where I was sitting, many in the audience seemed to appreciate his talk.

I did not say that I appreciated or enjoyed the presentation because that would have been a lie. I felt bad about not being able to say anything good, but it’s not my fault that he fell fall short of my expectations. He owns his performance, not me.

But I own my opinion of his performance. I didn’t give him my full opinion because it was an error in judgment for him to even ask. Just because we are friends on Facebook does not mean we trust each other enough to either want or need to exchange our honest opinions of each other.

If you are a colleague or a real friend and ask me for honest feedback, I can handle giving it to you. But I’ve found that it’s just not necessary to tell everyone everything I think all the time.

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