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BUILD REAL BONDS

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

—GEORGE MACDONALD

Principle 2: Without Strong Relationships, You Can’t Lead

In recent years, the US military has been in the midst of fighting wars all over the world; its primary target has been Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the Middle East. In 2013, an American general named Robert Caslen was called on by the United States Military Academy to return to his alma mater and serve as the 59th Superintendent of West Point. Not only was this a dream job for him because of what the Academy had done for him in his career, but the position carried a large amount of responsibility and honor. The institution boasted a number of former cadets as accomplished American leaders in their respective fields, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George Patton, and Edgar Allan Poe.

After he agreed to take the job, Caslen couldn’t help but consider the great opportunity in front of him. It was his job to prepare the army’s cadets to lead during one of the most difficult times in the country’s history. Caslen wasted no time instilling a culture built on rising above mediocrity and adversity in order to protect America at all costs. It didn’t take long for the army cadets to revere him; he showed them he loved and respected them while demanding they remained disciplined by a set of principles. During his time there, Caslen instilled and lived out the West Point values of “duty, honor, country” and provided a near perfect model of the Honor Code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do.”

While doing research for this book, I spent time with General Caslen in order to better understand exactly how the Academy taught its graduating cadets (future army second lieutenants) to build trust with their new teams. Caslen said, “Failing at leadership isn’t an option due to the extreme circumstances our 870 second lieutenants are going to face upon graduation. Within a few months, all will be leading troops in battles. Most of the troops each of them will lead, won’t even care they went to West Point, some will actually resent that fact they were West Pointers. So once they get there, each soldier will evaluate how much they can trust their new second lieutenants by asking two important questions, Are they competent? Do they care?”

He continued, “Competence is most important because if you aren’t competent as a lieutenant of a platoon, you are going to get people killed and they aren’t going to go home to their families. So the soldiers are most concerned with competence. Quickly after competence, they evaluate whether the lieutenant really cares about them on a personal and professional level. Competence and care work together because once they know a lieutenant cares they are going to follow them that much closer and it will make them look even more competent. The moral of the story is, trust matters so much because lives are at stake.”

The people that you lead at work probably don’t have bullets flying at them, but their lives are still at stake. They go to work to provide for their families and desire to do work that matters during the time they have on earth. They have to believe in, and most importantly, trust you as their leader by knowing that you are competent and that you care.

The ability to lead a team starts with good, quality, professional relationships, built on the bond of mutual trust. As a leader, you must consistently share your competence and care in order for people to trust you. The key word here is consistency. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock, came up with my favorite formula for easily understanding trust.

Consistency + Time = Trust

When you break down the simple formula, it makes so much sense. Regardless of how long you have been leading other people, we can all relate to building trust with someone in our lives. Trust is the foundation everything else is built upon, and it’s created by consistency over time. Someone doing what they say they are going to do, day in and day out. Falter once, and trust can be damaged. Imagine if General Caslen preached the importance of competence and care, only to fail to carry out his teachings in everyday actions with his cadets. There is no way his methods and guidance would have made such a big difference if Caslen hadn’t built trust by living out his own principles.

Reject Your Natural Instincts

One of the leaders I work closely with has a mix of men and women on his team. In our initial coaching conversation, it was clear that he had much stronger, trust-based relationships with the men on his team. As we unpacked the reasons, it was evident he gravitated toward the men because they looked like him, acted like him, and behaved like him. The women on the team were in roles where he had little to no firsthand experience. They didn’t talk like him, and they certainly didn’t think like him. Through multiple coaching sessions, he reached a point of self-realization. He had been playing favorites and putting in more work and effort with the men on the team than the women.

If you want better trust-filled relationships, look beyond commonalities.

What I now know is that this man isn’t in a league of his own. All leaders are challenged to overcome different biases in order to have better trust-filled relationships across their teams. However, our natural instinct as human beings is to gravitate toward and trust people who look, act, or behave like us. This manifests itself in both leaders and their people.

Add in Character

Maria Weist learned a powerful way to earn the trust of others early in her career. Promoted at the age of 25, Maria became the youngest IT manager at her company. Hoping to mitigate potential difficulties, her boss, Arch Humphries, provided some valuable insight.

He said, “It’s important to ask yourself this question before you get started in this role: who do you want to be as a leader? It’s an important question to answer because there is no doubt you are less experienced and younger than the people you will be leading, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Show your character early on by telling them the truth when you don’t know something and do everything you can to be a sponge and learn from your team’s expertise and experience.”

Maria carried Humphries’s wise words with her throughout her career by consistently showing her true character. She was always honest and transparent and didn’t shy away from treating people fairly, regardless of the situation.

She shared one instance in particular in which her character was put to the test. During a meeting with a woman on her team, Maria pressed her on a project that was not going well. The woman said outright, “I want to leave this conversation, now.” Acting on the very obvious cue, Maria told her to step out and take the time she needed. Thirty minutes later, the woman returned. “I can’t believe you let me leave. Why did you?” she asked. Maria responded, “I knew it’s what was best for you at that moment. I had to put my own interests aside and focus on you because it was the right thing to do.” The strong connection Maria built with her teammate allowed for the best-case scenario to occur. For the relationship to work, the trust had to be mutual.

The challenge some leaders face is that they don’t give enough weight to the individual relationships and instead think of their relationship with their team as a whole. Developing great trust-filled relationships is a one-on-one event, not a one on many. Totaling a lump sum of the quality of your relationship with an entire team is the easy way out. The best way to do this is by focusing on each person on the team and sharing what I call the Trust Compound Theory.

The Trust Compound Theory

Each day you get the opportunity to build stronger bonds of mutual trust with your team by sharing your competence, showing you care, and exposing your character. Each member of your team is evaluating how much they trust you based on how well you do these three things (Figure 4.1).

FIGURE 4.1   Trust Is Built on Competence, Care, and Character

Competence

Competence hinges on the depth of your knowledge and how willing you are to impart that to others.

To the naked eye, Jim Estill was a fourth-year engineering student at University in Waterloo. Looking closer you could see his entrepreneurial spirit was ignited. Jim started a small company that bought, sold, and fixed computer parts. What separated him from the masses was his thirst for education around computers. Day in and day out he would study how computers were built, where the industry was going, and how to fix them when they were broken. Before long he became the go-to point of contact for students at the university. If there was a computer needing to be fixed or purchased, Jim was your man.

As Estill’s small start-up business took off, he was forced to hire employees to help him keep up with the demand. He used the same model with his employees as he did for himself. He shared his vast technical competence about the business, the products it bought and sold, and the computer hardware industry as whole with each employee so they could then impart this knowledge on to customers. He didn’t stop there, however. He also was fanatical about sharing his leadership skills with them as well because he know people with only technical competence can only go so far. With this, Jim’s small side hustle grew to epic proportions because he scaled himself. Some 25 years later, the company started by one truly competent college student had grown to $350 million in annual sales and was purchased by SYNNEX.

The key to sharing your own competence is imparting the technical knowledge you have gained to those you lead as well as your leadership skills on an ongoing basis. Your willingness to share these two things is your ticket to building bonds that lead to big things. I will cover much more about the best ways to share competence in Chapter 10.

Care

In order for your team to understand how much you care about them, you must reject the notion that words hold great power. Instead, accept the power of actions.

In 2017, the Los Angeles Rams broke conventional wisdom and hired Sean McVay to be their new head football coach. He instantly became the youngest coach in the NFL at just 30 years old. McVay had a lot to prove, and he faced a challenging environment filled with people who had been in and on the field for much longer than him.

In a sport where age and experience creates a perception of one’s ability, McVay rose to the challenge and showed that age was just a number. In his first two seasons his Los Angeles Rams went an impressive 24-8, won two Conference Championships, and earned an invitation to Super Bowl LIII, and he was named AP’s NFL Coach of the Year. While McVay has the work ethic of many of the greats with the intellect to match, it’s the care he has for his players and coaches that sets him apart. He explained this very well to his quarterbacks during a team meeting, saying, “One of the things that is consistent amongst all great leaders is they’re a great teammate that is invested in the guys around them to raise the level of play. You do that by believing in guys and caring about them. When you care about the players you are working with, that’s when they want to play hard for you.”

In order to show your people you care as Sean McVay does, you have to get to know them on a professional and personal level. This starts with asking them questions about their own journey, experiences, challenges, and what drives them. Instead of just going through the motions, you have to be intent on listening and remembering so you can adjust your actions in the future to show them you listened.

Like all great relationships, the only way to get there is by dedicating time. A mentor of mine always told me, “Kids spell love T-I-M-E.” The same is true in showing people you truly care about them. Your time is valuable, and you can’t get it back. Devoting time to someone else shows that you care, and they are more important than anything else you have going on.

Another powerful way to show you care is to be vulnerable; share truths and ask for help when you need it. During an interview on the How I Built This podcast, Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks Coffee, said, “The most undervalued characteristic of leadership is vulnerability and asking for help.” A man who built a multibillion-dollar company from a small coffee bean shop places the ultimate emphasis on vulnerability. Regardless of his immeasurable success, Schultz has maintained the importance of sharing the truth with people in order to show them he cares about them as human beings.

The whole idea of vulnerability makes some people feel uncomfortable. The best and easiest way for any leader to practice it comes from a lesson I learned from Laszlo Bock, the former SVP of People at Google and current CEO of Humu. It consists of sending a short e-mail to your people that includes the following questions:

1.   Tell me one thing you want me to start doing.

2.   Tell me one thing you want me to stop doing.

This simple act of e-mailing your people with a genuine interest to get better at your job is a powerful act of vulnerability. It shows them you care about their opinion. Not only will it make you a better leader, but it will build stronger bonds with your team.

Character

General Caslen used to tell people at every board meeting, and in interactions all over the campus of West Point, “When you fail at character, you fail at leadership.” Character is defined as the mental and moral qualities distinctive to you as an individual. It’s an engraved set of disciplined habits and a settled disposition to do good. When there is clearly a right or wrong, the choice you make is based on your character. In the workplace, a person’s character is put to the test frequently. These types of decisions are constant. If you stay in a leadership role long enough, you will be faced with many crucible moments where your own character will be tested. If you have been leading other people for very long, they already know the kind of character you possess. Conversely, if you are new to leading a team, those team members are going to be constantly looking out for ways in which you show your character. The simplest examples in which your team will evaluate your character includes things like:

   How do you treat others who have nothing to give you in return?

   How do you act in groups?

   Do you interrupt others when they are talking?

   What do you value most out of life?

There are many leaders who fail in their job. While there are many reasons for failure, a compelling argument can be made it’s because leaders don’t put enough time and effort into building quality trust-filled relationships with the people they are supposed to lead. The best part of building quality relationships is that it knows no age or experience. Trust-filled relationships can be developed by every leader, and if you don’t have them everything else you try and do will be a major uphill battle.