"The world has changed. Our style of leadership has not." This is the gist of Stephen Covey’s message in his new book, Trust and Inspire. In our post-pandemic new world of work, hybrid working requires leaders to create high trust cultures, and yet the research cited by Covey shows that command and control, even in an enlightened form, remains the prevailing leadership style of 92% of organizations.
Strikingly, Covey refers to this challenge as "like trying to play tennis with a golf club." If, as he suggests, the game of leadership has changed, how do we swap our old golf clubs for shiny, new tennis rackets? In particular, how do we transition from the intellectual understanding of the challenge to the daily practice of different leadership behaviors?
In stepping up to this challenge, we need to recognize that there are two sides to the trust coin: how to be trustworthy and how to be trusting.
Trustworthiness × Trusting = Trust
My own research to develop the Nine Habits of Trust at Aston Business School focused on the first step of coaching leaders to become more trustworthy. Covey focuses on the second step of helping leaders become more trusting.
The key to inspiring trustworthiness in your followers is to work in parallel on the three pillars of trustworthiness: ability, integrity and benevolence. The Nine Habits model breaks the challenge down further into three behavioral habits under each pillar.
For example, our team is currently working with an elite sports leadership team that has used the Nine Habits model to diagnose their next steps in building a high-trust culture. As a result of an organization-wide survey, they have identified three habits—coaching, being open and being brave—as critical in role-modeling trustworthy behaviors. Each executive team member has committed to specific, daily routines to demonstrate these habits. One leader is being more open by sharing personal mistakes and learnings. Another is practicing coaching by empowering their team and resisting micromanagement. A third leader is stepping up to be braver by challenging the status quo regarding diversity and inclusion. It is a powerful combination of small steps taken frequently and consistently.
In Covey’s work, he suggests leaders who have become more trustworthy are still struggling to be sufficiently trusting. In this area, he has some valuable tips to share. Paraphrasing his advice, he invites leaders to become the Chief Coach, Chief Forgiver and Chief Inspirer in their organizations. Through coaching, forgiving and inspiring, these leaders will unlock the many benefits of high-trust cultures. The Chief Coach knows how to bring out the potential in others through listening, asking powerful questions and empowering. The Chief Forgiver does not let the minority who cannot be trusted dictate the culture for the majority who can be trusted. The Chief Inspirer goes beyond motivation to focus on igniting the inner spark of purpose, autonomy and belonging that is increasingly important to 21st-century knowledge workers.
In my experience coaching over 130 CEOs across 22 different countries, I understand how difficult it can be to let go of command-and-control habits and shift to the trustworthiness and trusting of the new world of work. Those who do it the best recognize that changing habits is hard, but not impossible.
I liken it to writing with my natural hand. I am left-handed. I cannot write with my right hand. However, if I woke up tomorrow and found my left hand paralyzed, would I learn to write with my right hand? It wouldn’t look pretty at first, but eventually, I would write as well with my right hand as I ever wrote with my left. All that has changed is my motivation.
It’s the same with trust-and-inspire leadership. The new world of work is slowly paralyzing old command-and-control behaviors. Highly motivated leaders will do the hard work to learn the new habits of the trust-and-inspire era. This is the shift Covey refers to when he talks of playing tennis with golf clubs. The game of leadership has changed. The prize is compelling, as, according to the research, staff are six times more likely to achieve higher performance in a high-trust culture. Are your leaders ready and equipped for the new world of work? Or are they struggling to be as trustworthy and as trusting as this new world demands?