Show Concern for Others   Showing concern for others is one of the clearest and most unambiguous signals of your trustworthiness. When others know you will put their interests ahead of your own, they won't hesitate to trust you.⁴ However, this is something people need to see in your actions—actions such as listening, paying attention to their ideas and concerns, helping them solve their problems, and being open to their influence. When you show your openness to their ideas and your interest in their concerns, people will be more open to yours. For example, Abey Mukkanachery, product operations specialist with a health and measurement company, told us about how one of his colleagues was tasked with writing specifications for a new project. “That team member felt overwhelmed with all the work that was required for this project,” Abey said, “and I felt that as a teammate I should reach out and help. I approached my colleague and offered my assistance. In turn, other teammates also felt encouraged to reach out and help. We all ended up making contributions to implementing the new process for project requirements.” Demonstrating empathy goes a long way in illustrating that you are concerned with more than your own interests.

Listening and attending to the needs of others are central to demonstrating empathy. You need to see the world through others' eyes and make sure that you consider alternative viewpoints. You demonstrate empathy when you volunteer to collaborate with people who are having difficulties completing an assignment, when you arrive early to greet everyone and inquire about how they are doing, and when you take the time to coach people who are taking on new jobs and responsibilities. Showing interest in others, being sensitive to their problems, and conveying compassion increases peoples' capacities to do their jobs. Your colleagues have to feel that they can talk freely with you about their challenges. To be open to sharing their ideas, their frustrations, and their dreams, they have to believe that you'll be caring and constructive in your responses. They have to feel, like Abey's colleague did, that you care about their best interests. A common refrain about what people said they would share with other people based on their own Personal-Best Leadership Experience was: “You have to understand how others feel and determine what you can do to help others to be successful. You should want to be remembered for how you served others and not as the one being served.”

When people believe that you have their interests at heart—that you care about them—they're more likely to be open to your influence. It is also true that the more people feel you listen to them, and understand their feelings and perspectives, the more favorable they will feel about their relationship with you. Consider the empirical relationship found between the extent to which peers indicated that one of their colleagues actively listens to diverse points of view and also how they felt about their workplace. LPI data showed a strong relationship between colleagues' ratings of how frequently the individual listened and how strongly they believed that the individual brought out the best of people's talents and abilities, as shown in Figure 5. A similarly dramatic relationship was found between actively listening and the extent to which peers felt valued by this person, and also how much they experienced a strong sense of team spirit.

Active listening involves more than simply paying attention. The best listeners, according to a study involving nearly 3,500 participants in a coaching skills development program, did much more than remain silent while the other person talked.⁵ They demonstrated that they were listening by asking questions that “promoted discovery and insight.” At its best, active listening is like having a conversation. It requires more than just hearing the other person's words. It means being engaged in a way that makes the conversation a positive experience, causing the person to whom you are listening to feel supported and valued. Showing appreciation for others' unique viewpoints demonstrates respect for them and their ideas. Being sensitive to what others are going through creates bonds that make it easier to accept one another's guidance and advice. Great listeners also tend to offer suggestions and have been described as “trampolines” in that you feel you can bounce ideas off of them.⁶ Having the best interests of those around you builds trusting relationships and is facilitated by positive interdependence.

Facilitate Positive Interdependence and Reciprocity   One of the most significant ingredients to cooperation and collaboration is a sense of interdependence, a condition by which people know that they cannot succeed unless everyone else succeeds, or at least that they cannot succeed unless they coordinate their efforts. If there's no sense that “we're all in this together,” that the success of one depends on the success of the other, then it's virtually impossible to create the conditions for positive teamwork. The motivation for working diligently on your own job, keeping in mind the overall common objective, is reinforced when it is the end-result that gets rewarded and not merely individual efforts.

This was precisely the situation Mayank Bhatnagar described in his Personal-Best Leadership Experience. Over the holidays, from Christmas through New Year's, he and two people from different functions “were essentially forced to work as a team on this project” at a small optical sensor startup company. However, he said that as they worked with one another, they got to know each other better and “communications became seamless as we grew together and learned what all we needed from each other to see the project through.” To make extraordinary things happen, people have to rely on each other. No matter your role or position on the team, you have to take an active role in creating both a positive context and structure for cooperation and collaboration. As Mayank reported, “It was easy to get cooperation from team members because we shared ownership, each of us wanted to see the project succeed, and complete the task as quickly as possible.”

Over 80 percent of colleagues and co-workers in the LPI data reported that they experienced a strong sense of team spirit when their colleagues very frequently developed “cooperative relationships among the people they work with.” This is because collaboration results from people understanding that they have to rely and depend upon one another for their mutual success. A collective purpose binds people into cooperative efforts. Shared values and visions serve this function for the long term, and group goals provide this same common focus for the shorter term. Only through shared goals and recognized interdependence in one another's success can people diligently strive to create integrative solutions. Asking for help and sharing information comes naturally when people realize that they can depend on others to collaborate. When people see themselves in a mutually beneficial relationship, they have little trouble finding and setting a common goal. Make sure that the people you are working with understand the goal they are working toward, feel a shared stake in the outcome, have an appreciation for the talents and resources people bring to the endeavor, and have the latitude necessary to be both imaginative and strategic.

Also essential to developing cooperative relationships is a norm of reciprocity. The power of reciprocity is dramatically demonstrated in a well-known series of studies involving the Prisoner's Dilemma.⁷ Two parties (individuals or groups) are confronted with a series of situations in which they must decide whether or not to cooperate. They don't know in advance how the other party will behave. There are two basic strategies—cooperate (don't say anything) or compete (blame the other party)—and four possible outcomes based on the choices players make—win-lose, lose-win, lose-lose, and win-win.

The maximum individual payoff comes when one player selects a noncooperative strategy and the other player chooses to cooperate in good faith. In this “I win, but you lose” approach, one party gains at the other's expense. Although this might seem to be the most successful strategy—at least for the noncooperative player—it rarely proves to be successful in the long run, mainly because the other player won't continue to cooperate in the face of the first player's noncooperative strategy. This typically leads to both parties deciding not to cooperate and attempting to maximize their respective individual payoffs, resulting in the end that both lose. However, when both parties choose to cooperate, both win, though in the short run the personal payoff for a cooperative move (win-win) is less than what it might be for a competitive one (win-lose).

Over the years researchers have found, amazingly enough, that when faced with such predicaments, the most successful strategy, in the long run, is quite simple: cooperate on the first move and then do whatever the other player did on the previous move. This strategy succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them.⁸ It demonstrates both a willingness to be cooperative and an unwillingness to be taken advantage of. As a long-term strategy, reciprocity minimizes the risk of escalation: if people know that you'll respond in kind, why would they start trouble? Your colleagues learn that the best way to deal with you is to cooperate and become recipients of your cooperation.

Simply put, people who reciprocate are more likely to be successful than those who try to maximize individual advantage. Drawing on surveys and performance records, researchers found that those engineers who maintained equal and reciprocal exchanges with their colleagues were not only the most productive members of their organization but also considered the most trustworthy.⁹ This meant that more people listened to them and were willing to help them.

Reciprocity leads to predictability and stability in relationships; in other words, trust. It's less stressful to work with others when you understand how they will behave in response, which keeps both relationships and negotiations from breaking down.¹⁰ Treat others as you would like for them to treat you, and it is likely they will repay you many times over. In addition, once you help others to succeed, acknowledge their accomplishments, and let them shine; they will never forget it. Whether the rewards of cooperation are tangible or intangible, when people understand that they will be better off by cooperating, they're inclined to recognize the legitimacy of others' interests in an effort to promote their own welfare.

Be More Giving   If one party always gives and the other always takes, the one who gives will feel taken advantage of, and the one who takes will feel superior. In that climate, collaboration is virtually impossible. Researchers have consistently found that organizations filled with “givers”—people who help others—are consistently more effective than those loaded with “takers.” Knowing about the amount of help people are willing to give one another is a highly accurate predictor of a team's effectiveness.¹¹ In a series of studies, teams were rewarded for being the highest-performing team as a whole, prompting members to work together as givers. In contrast, a taker-culture was prompted in teams in which the rewards went to the highest-performing individual within each team. While the competitive teams finished their tasks faster than the cooperative teams, they were less accurate, often simply because members withheld critical information from each other.¹²

To boost the accuracy of the competitive teams, the researchers next had them complete a second task under the giving structure. That is, this time around they rewarded the entire team for high performance. Unfortunately, neither accuracy nor speed went up, and the reason was because people struggled to transition from competition to cooperation—that is, from being takers to being givers. It appears that once people had experienced their colleagues as competitors, they were no longer able to believe they could trust them. Completing even a single task under a structure that rewarded taking was enough to create win–lose mindsets, and these persisted even after the structure was removed.

Cooperative behavior requires people to understand that by working together they will be able to accomplish something that no one can accomplish alone. You wouldn't necessarily think of fencing as a team sport, but that's what nationally ranked fencing champion Zachary Chien worked on getting the students he coached to realize in their practice sessions. He said that his most difficult challenge “was creating an environment that fostered collaboration amongst all my students because, at the end of the day, fencing is an individual sport, so athletes often prioritized their own development.”

The fencers tended to be quite competitive and didn't socialize and bond as much as athletes in other team sports. To fix this, Zach created skill games and drills that required “giving.” For example, students would fence each other, and after each touch, whoever scored needed to tell the partner exactly how the point was set up. Zach found that once the fencers began showing more support toward one another he was able to get them to buy into the larger idea that fostering collaboration and sharing growth was in everyone's best interest: “I told them that they couldn't get to the top on their own, and I alone couldn't help get them there. They needed the support from the people they practice with. In order to be the best, you have to beat the best.”

Figuring out how to take as much as possible from others—while contributing as little as possible—does not create greatness. You need to make sure that the long-term benefits of working together and giving are greater than the short-term benefits of working alone or competing with others on your team. You need to get people to realize that by working together they can complete the project faster than by focusing on short-term individual victories resulting from doing their own thing, complaining, blaming, or contending with others for scarce resources.

Maintain Durable Social Connections   The new currency of the Internet Age and the IoE (internet of everything) is not intellectual capital; it is social capital—the collective value of the people you know and what you will do for each other. When social connections are strong and numerous, there's more trust, reciprocity, information flow, collective action, and elevated well-being. Having strong social relationships is the best predictor of human happiness, trumping wealth, income, and material possessions; and those who fail to achieve this most basic need experience loneliness, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, obesity, and anger.¹³ You need to find ways to get connected to the information, resources, and influence you will need to make a difference. In doing so, figure out substantive ways to connect your colleagues with one another and with those outside the boundary of your group or team who are part of other key networks.

The importance of social connections has been dramatically illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While nearly everyone around the world was ordered to maintain “physical distance,” the yearning for social connection increased. People invented all kinds of ways to continue to interact with their fellow human beings. Virtual coffee breaks and cocktail hours popped up immediately after people had to shelter in place. Residents stood on their balconies and sang to each other. Friends and family organized drive-by birthday and graduation celebrations. The demand for virtual gathering services nearly broke the Internet. There was seemingly no end to the creative ways that people invented to stay connected to each other, even in the worst of the crisis.

The most well-connected individuals are typically those who are involved in activities outside of their immediate job function or discipline, and who avoid being too strongly typecast in one field, function, administrative body, or community. Find ways to meet people from a wide range of units, departments, projects, and professions. While specialization has its benefits, from a leadership perspective you don't want to get stuck in a rut. If your connections are only in your specialty, you will be less influential than if your connections cross a lot of boundaries. When it comes to social connections, there's a payoff in mining deep and wide.

Greater connectedness can also be fostered when you and your colleagues have enough confidence in one another's relationships to ask for help when needed. The impulse to give help when requested is a powerful, automatic, and emotional response formed early in life.¹⁴ However, in many situations people underestimate how willing others would be to provide assistance when requested. There is a social cost to saying “no” when someone asks for help. The person can be seen as uncaring, unreasonable, insensitive, and even cruel. Saying “yes,” by contrast, is a more positive and rewarding experience, and agreeing to help or cooperate strengthens the bond of connectedness between people. By making someone else happy, the person who has agreed to help also feels good about himself or herself and strengthens the bond of connectedness between them. Researchers have demonstrated that people underestimate by nearly 50 percent the likelihood of receiving a positive response when requesting assistance, and this leads to lost opportunities, like prospective friends, colleagues, and clients going uncontacted, and squandering chances to increase connectedness.¹⁵ When you feel a sense of connection with someone else, you are more likely to volunteer your assistance, as is often demonstrated by onlookers who are most predisposed to help emergency victims if they feel they share something with them.

Feeling connected to the people you are working with enhances feelings of well-being and fosters greater commitment to colleagues. Research documents that high-quality connections contribute to people flourishing, resulting in better health, higher cognitive functioning, broader thinking, and stronger resilience.¹⁶ Individuals with high-quality relationships also have a better sense of whom to trust and not trust. They are more open, and they more fully understand themselves and the viewpoints of others.

You can more effectively develop your leadership abilities by connecting to people who can teach you about the skills you would like to acquire and the things you would like to achieve. Find out about their struggles, hardships, and mistakes as well as their accomplishments. Consider connecting with people who are not particularly well known but who nonetheless exhibit deep competence, unswerving dedication, and a good sense of who they are. Most importantly, select people who make you feel good about yourself. After all, the purpose of these relationships is to encourage and inspire you to be your best version of yourself. Travis Carrigan, a senior engineer, told us that he's been doing exactly this for years, which has led to some great opportunities and collaborative work. “These relationships,” he says, “are phenomenal at helping me become a better leader, listener, and engineer.”

What about virtual connections? Aren't they a good way to foster collaboration and build trust? There is no question that virtual connections are prolific, and in a global economy no organization could function if people had to fly halfway around the world to exchange information, make decisions, or resolve disputes. Proof of this can be found with the exponential growth in virtual communications during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and that demand has led to the development of new apps and platforms to meet the need. With a large percentage of people working from home and almost all educational institutions' classes going online, virtual connections became the most frequent way in which people communicated, learned, and conducted business.

That said, the stroke of a key, the click of a mouse, or the switch of a video doesn't get you the same results that an in-person conversation does. In an era that is becoming more and more dependent on virtual connections, there's a temptation to believe that such connections automatically lead to better relationships and greater trust. Unfortunately, virtual trust is much more difficult to both build and maintain than is trust developed in-person. Even among Gen Z employees, who make up 20 percent of today's workforce, 72 percent indicate they prefer face-to-face communication at work.¹⁷

Virtual trust, like virtual reality, is still one step removed from the real thing. People are social animals; it is their nature to want to interact face-to-face.¹⁸ Bits and bytes and pixilated images make for a very fragile social foundation. As handy as virtual tools such as email, voice mail, apps, and texts are for staying in touch, they are no substitute for positive face-to-face interactions. If you mainly know the members of your group virtually, you probably do not know them well enough to trust them with extremely important matters. This may sound heretical in a world driving itself more and more to depend on electronic connections, but you have to figure out how to combine and balance the benefits of technology with the social imperative of human contact. Data and information may be virtually shared, but ensuring understanding, sensitivity, knowledge, and action online or at a distance are kinks still to be worked out.

In order to cement your social capital, you have to intensify the durable nature of relationships. People who like being in the relationship and expect their interactions to continue into the future—for example, they'll run into one another at some event, continue to serve on this project team for several years, or participate in a subsequent task force—are much more likely to cooperate in the here-and-now. Knowing that you have to deal with someone again, whether tomorrow, next week, or in the foreseeable future, ensures that you will not easily forget how you've treated one another. When interactions are likely to be frequent, the consequences of today's actions on tomorrow's dealings are that much more pronounced. In the end, enduring relationships, more than one-time or short-term ones, provide incentives to find ways to work together cooperatively to ensure mutual success in the future.

Provide Choices   Freedom is the ability to make choices. Trapped is the word that people generally use when they believe that they do not have any latitude about how they can behave. When people feel trapped, they often act as rats caught in a maze; believing they have no alternatives, they typically stop moving and eventually shut down. Amanda Itilong gave voice to these feelings as she described her experience in the process of getting cancer scans. She observed one radiology tech come out to greet patients for a CT scan with a contrast drink already prepared. “This might sound efficient,” Amanda said, “but as a patient it's really frustrating if you don't get a personal choice of the flavor of the drink. It gets worse when a few minutes later a different radiology tech comes out and gives her patient five different flavor choices for contrast. So my tech just picked a random flavor for me and didn't even tell me there were choices?” Amanda's poignant observation that “patients need choices to feel like they have a little control in their healthcare experience, where they're usually without much control,” is just as relevant and applicable in a work, community, or any other setting. People need to feel in control of their own lives, and you should do what you can to ensure that they have choices.

Being able to have a choice, and the ability to exercise a choice, that is, having a sense of genuine autonomy, makes people feel powerful and increases their willingness to exercise their capabilities more fully. Researchers at the Delgado Lab for Social and Affective Neuroscience at Rutgers University report that the perception of increased choice activates reward-related circuits in the brain, which makes people feel more at ease, enhancing their willingness to experiment and venture outside of their comfort zones.²¹

High-performing organizations result from people's willingness to work beyond their job descriptions, and this happens because they have the latitude and discretion to make choices about both the work they do and how they do it. In the LPI data the individual's peers were asked about the extent to which they felt this person provided them with “a great deal of freedom and choice in deciding how to do their work.” How proud they were to tell others they work for the organization was strongly related to this leadership behavior. About 5 percent strongly agreed that they felt proud when they experienced the individual providing this latitude only once in a while or less. In contrast, 90 percent strongly agreed they were proud when the individual provided freedom and choice fairly often or more.

No one wakes up in the morning and is excited to go to work so that they can be incompetent and disruptive. People want to be seen as responsible and productive, taking initiative, and being self-directed. Constantly told what to do by a leader and how to do it by some rulebook stymie these inclinations. People want to think for themselves, not continually having to ask someone, “What should I do?” Lacking freedom of choice and operating in prescribed and predetermined ways makes people unable, and even unwilling, to respond when a situation arises that is not in the script. When people have to ask the “higher-ups” what to do—even if they think they know what needs to be done and feel they can do it—the entire operation slows down. The only way to create an efficient and effective organization is by finding opportunities for people to use their best judgment in applying their knowledge and skills. Doing so is an explicit exercise in trust.

As necessary as choice is, however, it is insufficient. Without the knowledge, skills, information, and resources to do a job expertly and without feeling competent to effectively execute the choices that it requires, people can easily feel overwhelmed and fearful of making mistakes. This means making every effort to ensure that you and your colleagues are prepared to make choices and are willing to be held accountable.

Build Competence and Confidence   You cannot do what you do not know how to do. Providing increasing levels of responsibility and discretion requires an accompanying increase in training and development experiences, as well as the chance to learn on the job. In order for people to feel highly capable, they must continuously improve and develop their skills and abilities. But even if individuals know how to do something, it doesn't mean that they will do it. They may be reluctant to exercise their judgment because they lack the confidence to perform critical tasks in specific situations, fear making mistakes, or lack relevant information about the job.

Without sufficient self-confidence, people will not have the commitment required for taking on tough challenges. Diplomat and statesman Adlai Stevenson II once said, “It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse,” and his humorous observation is supported by research. The lack of confidence manifests itself in feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and often crippling self-doubt. In building your self-confidence, and doing the same for those around you, you are bolstering the inner strength necessary to forge ahead in uncharted terrain, to face opposition, and to make tough choices.²²

Empirical studies document how self-confidence affects people's performance. Participants were told that decision making was a skill developed through practice. The more they worked at it, the more capable they became. The researchers told another group of participants that decision making reflected one's basic intellectual aptitude. The higher their underlying cognitive capacities, the better their decision-making ability would be. Both groups worked through a series of problems in a simulated organization. Participants who believed that decision making was an acquirable skill continued to set challenging goals for themselves, used effective problem-solving strategies, and fostered organizational productivity. Their counterparts who believed that decision-making ability was inherent—that is, you either have it, or you don't—lost confidence in themselves as they encountered difficulties. They lowered their aspirations for the task, their problem solving deteriorated, and organizational productivity declined.²³

In reflecting back on her Personal-Best Leadership Experience, which involved major internal system changes, Karina Chamorro realized that she was initially short-sighted in thinking that the project team structure limited her ability to strengthen those around her because she was neither the project leader nor the department head. What she did come to appreciate is that she could boost not only her colleagues' competencies but their self-confidence simply by helping to ensure that responsibilities and tasks were distributed around in ways that “aligned tasks to experience and interests whenever possible.” She explained: “Different colleagues led when they were best positioned to manage that situation because they felt particularly passionate about an issue or idea or were going to be impacted by a project team decision.” Like Karina, you can help to identify and leverage teammate capabilities and give them opportunities to exercise leadership.

As revealed in the Personal-Best Leadership Experiences and in empirical research—and probably your own experience underscores—having confidence and believing in your ability to handle the job, no matter how difficult, is essential in promoting and sustaining consistent efforts. Fostering self-efficacy is not a warmed-over version of the power of positive thinking. You must communicate your belief that people can be successful. This sentiment was quite apparent in most people's personal-bests—someone believed in them and gave them the chance to make something extraordinary happen. Knowing that someone expected them to succeed motivated them to extend themselves, and to persevere in the face of hardships and any setbacks.

Foster Personal Responsibility and Accountability   Mykell Bates had played soccer from the age of 14 and was chosen captain of the U.S. Under-17 national team when he was just 15 years old. When he went on to college, his soccer playing continued, and in his sophomore year Mykell was chosen captain of the soccer team. None of the players reported to him in any formal organizational sense, and Mykell realized that since they depended upon each other on the field, why should that be any different off the field? “We all play an important part in our success on the field,” he explained, “so all I was asking for was that same level of accountability and connection to the team off the field. When I'd ask a player ‘Hey, can you text the guys about the team meeting tonight?’ they always stepped up.” Slowly Mykell began passing on responsibilities to more members of the team. Ultimately, it became clear that spreading out some of the tasks was a much more efficient way of doing things, and it helped all those who contributed feel accountable for the successful operation of the team.

What Mykell did with the team is what all leaders do to foster accountability: they consciously create an environment in which team members count on one another to do what needs to be done. This doesn't mean they are autocratic or controlling. As one of his teammates told us, “Mykell was not directive in handing out tasks; he would simply ask for your help, and you would want to help him. He trusted that I could do the job that needed to be done, and I didn't want to break that trust. It was mutual respect, for each other and for the good of the team.”

Asking his soccer teammates to step up and take over some of the operational tasks for the soccer team had another benefit beyond fostering accountability. By spreading responsibilities among the group, each teammate could specialize and perfect one thing rather than having one person take it all on. A seminar participant took to heart Mykell's example, and when he came back to us several months later he told us how he had learned that giving others responsibilities enhanced their skills and self-confidence: “I have a part-time construction job, and Mykell's leadership showed me that one thing I can do is pass on some of the building responsibilities to others. I have always liked doing everything myself, but I am sure the guys I am working with can do just as well as I can, if not better in some cases. I can coach them through it, and that will build their capabilities and confidence, eventually making us a much stronger and more productive work team.”

Just like Mykell, you have to appreciate a fundamental truth about strengthening others: the power to choose can only be sustained if people are willing to be held accountable. The more freedom of choice people have, the more personal responsibility they must accept. This comes with a bonus: The more that people believe that everyone is taking responsibility for his or her part of the project—and has the competence to do it—the more trusting and the more cooperative they will be. People will be more confident in doing their part when they believe others will do theirs.

Accountability is a critical element in every collaborative effort. When people take personal responsibility and hold themselves accountable for their actions, their colleagues will be considerably more inclined to work with them and be more cooperative. Everyone has to do his or her part for a group to function effectively. Personal accountability is enhanced when the situation is structured so that people have to work collaboratively with one another. Knowing that your peers are expecting you to be prepared and to do your job is a powerful force in motivating each person to do well. The feeling of not wanting to let the rest of the group down strengthens each individual's resolve to do his or her best. Additionally, the more people believe that everyone else is competent and taking responsibility for a part of the job, the more trusting and cooperative they will be. It's also true that people will be more committed to doing their part when confident that others will be doing theirs.

Facilitating self-confidence is what Mykell was doing when he started spreading around the tasks and responsibilities that traditionally had belonged to the soccer team captain. “When Mykell asked me to do something, it instilled confidence in my abilities,” teammate Brandon Zimmerman told us. “When he would ask me to take on some of his day-to-day responsibilities, it gave me the confidence and competence to perform those tasks. All Mykell did was give me the authority to use the skills that he believed I already had, but maybe I wasn't acknowledging in myself. The more he did this, the more it worked to the advantage of the group as a whole, because each of us became stronger.”

When you explicitly give people the freedom to make choices, you are implicitly increasing the degree of personal responsibility they must necessarily accept. The interconnectedness between choice and accountability takes on increasing importance in virtually linked global workplaces. As Mykell's experience demonstrated, fostering accountability meant delegating responsibilities and providing others with the chance to take ownership. By trusting others, he was letting them know that he believed in them and had confidence in their ability and judgment. Given the level of trust he demonstrated in them, they, in turn, felt greater motivation to follow through with their commitments. When you allow others to take on more responsibility, you also benefit by being able to take on new duties and learning opportunities yourself.

Coach and Mentor   While you can communicate your confidence in others, you can't just tell people they can do something if they actually can't—yet. Coaching is essential to enabling people to be their best. A three-year study of the impact of training documented the importance of coaching as it reported how high-improvement learners were four times more likely to have had indicated that they had coaching conversations than individuals who showed little or no improvement.²⁴ In other words, improvement isn't merely about educational experiences; it's the coaching and mentoring associated with those opportunities that matters.

People often underestimate what they can learn from their peers and the people on their teams. Coaching is not a job, but a process that relies especially on an interpersonal relationship. The relationship doesn't need to be official, or even to be formally acknowledged. You can coach as a friend, colleague, or family member. It is necessary to demonstrate an interest in helping someone build competence and confidence—focusing on individual needs and engaging the person in a process of learning. As a coach, you need to understand that strengthening others requires paying deep attention to not only what others are saying and doing, but also to how they are viewed by those around them. You also need to fundamentally believe that anyone you are coaching is essentially smart enough to figure things out when given the opportunity to make choices, provided with support, and provided with meaningful and constructive feedback. Consider how Nils Hansen, a senior buyer with a multinational retailing organization, described what he did to coach his teammates to do something they had never done before: “I encouraged each team member to speak up with new ideas, ask questions, and feel empowered to make decisions. I let them know that I had confidence in their capabilities and gave them the space to trust themselves. I made it a point to remind them that they had what it took to deliver all the goals set forth before us.” Coaching stretches people to grow and develop their capabilities, and it provides them with opportunities to hone and enhance their skills in both routine and challenging assignments.

Think about how you can ask good questions, regardless of your official status as a coach, because the benefits of asking questions are numerous. For one, it gives people the space to think about and to frame issues from their perspectives. Second, asking questions indicates an underlying trust in people's abilities by shifting accountability to them. Third, it has the benefit of creating almost immediate buy-in for the solution (after all, it's their idea). Questions also help to focus people's attention and thinking.

Another avenue for coaches is making connections for the people you are working with to individuals you have relationships with who can be role models they can learn from. These are people who can share invaluable lessons from their experiences. By observing exemplars, people can gain insights into the dynamic nature of the proficiency they themselves aspire to acquire. Positive role models are necessary for growth and development because no one can easily excel based on a negative. You excel best by emulating a positive example. That is, while you may know 100 things not to do, if you don't know even one thing to do, then you can't perform very well at the task. Help others take the next steps of creating a mental picture of performing relevant skills and internalizing why it is vital to develop those competencies. Seek out those people from whom you as well as others can learn.

Even coaches need coaches, so consider assembling a group of coaches for yourself by creating a personal board of directors.²⁵ Typically, such a board includes five to seven people (who probably will never all meet one another but have a relationship with you) who can help with your personal development. Meet with them on a one-on-one basis. Some board members may already be your “fans” (people who support you and will deliver corrective feedback with good intent), and others could be potential “sponsors” (people who can advocate for you when it's time for a new assignment or advancement). The common denominator is that they are people you can learn from. One reason for having many people on your board is that no one can teach you everything you need to know.

Whether or not you are a coach or have a coach, the central issue is that you cannot know how you are doing without asking for feedback and learning about the consequences of your actions on other people. Asking for feedback provides a perspective that only others can see, and armed with this insight you have the opportunity to make improvements. People who seek out disconfirming feedback—information that is contrary to their self-perceptions—perform better than those who only listen to people who see their positive qualities.²⁶ Being aware of your weaknesses and shortcomings is critical to improvement and being the best you can be.