I went to Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit high school in Brooklyn. The experience gives me the confidence to say that trust is the secular equivalent of faith. Both are precious. Both can be lost. Only one is easily found again, barring a miracle.

Faith can be restored with a flash of lightning or at the break of day. Bird song or the birth of a child will do it. Faith may take you—or retake you—by surprise, since it is a Divine franchise. But when trust goes, the door slams shut. Getting it open again is infernally difficult, especially in business.

This exit-only, one-way aspect of trust protects it and us from abuse. By design, trust is such a precious and powerful substance that it implodes the moment there is solid contact with duplicity.

So let’s do trust. A few techniques, a little schmoozing, and we’re in business. Right? Wrong.

I wish I could say that it were that easy. Actually, I don’t wish that at all. I’m glad it’s damned hard to “do” trust. Want to know why it’s hard? You already do know, unless you’ve been skipping around in this book. Hopscotch right back to the end of chapter 2 and read my comments on sincerity.

Sincerity is not optional. That’s why it’s hard. Leaders build trust with one sincere action at a time. Oh, yeah—action. Isn’t that an interesting and troublesome word? Some people actually think that leaders talk, everybody else acts.

No. Too bad there isn’t a button right in the middle of this page that you could push to hear the alarm on the “insincerity meter”—otherwise known as a bullshit detector—go off in reaction to words that are intended to trick, jive, and pacify; words whose only contribution to the material substance of the world is to add another layer of ear wax and make us all a little more deaf each time we hear them uttered.

As a sales guy, manager, speaker, and business consultant with a reputation for full disclosure and the ability to look a person in the eye and tell the unpleasant truth, I am often asked to deliver bad news. But the last time I did it may turn out to be the last time I do it. I was invited to speak to a group of managers facing a round of painful layoffs that they would have to oversee, only they didn’t know it yet. I asked the client if she was going to tell them before I spoke. She demurred. “I’ll tell them then,” I said. It was okay with her.

I’m a teacher at heart. I wanted her to learn that full disclosure is the only way to go. I also couldn’t stand the idea of spending a couple of hours pumping up a group of people that would have a blowout the next day or the next week when the whole truth and nothing but the truth was delivered. What happened was what always happens: shock, disappointment, and anger. Then, as the objectives were made clear and the humane procedures to be used laid out, the group’s leadership instincts and mechanisms kicked in.

I was involved in an ugly, gut-wrenching downsizing at Xerox, which I will go into later as an example of how good companies do bad things. But the reason I was willing to deliver the news to this group was that I wanted to share an insight that I had during the worst of the Xerox episode. I told them they had the consolation of knowing that if what they were doing didn’t work, their names and the names of their bosses belonged at the top of the list for next layoff. Every head in the room nodded—and they weren’t New York nods.

Together we had tapped into the hard core of sincerity and emotional commitment. Maybe the boss couldn’t deliver the bad news to them, but they were going to be able to do it for their teams and keep trust intact to rally the survivors and rebuild the organization.

The epilogue to this story, which explains why it could be the last time I deliver somebody else’s bad news, came a few weeks later when I told the story to Bill Locander of the University of South Florida’s Leadership Center. We were speaking consultant to consultant, and I was pleased with my ability to step up to the plate for the client. Without a moment’s hesitation, Bill told me I had made a mistake. His reasoning was impeccable: You cannot establish trust as a leader if you are not willing to communicate both good and bad news yourself. I got the senior executive off the hook, but I didn’t do her any favors. I should have coached her through the process instead of doing the dirty work for her. She had to deliver the message to keep her bond of trust from busting wide open.

Bill Locander was right. Along with the button to activate the bullshit detector, I would like to figure out a way to deliver a dose of Doctor P’s truth serum to you. Maybe one of those peel off things like they put in fashion magazines for perfume samples. Peel it off, lick the page, and tell it like it is. Not like the character in the Jim Carrey movie Liar, Liar, who couldn’t stop saying whatever dumb and inappropriate thought popped into his head, but building trust by telling people exactly what’s going on around them and what they need to do to succeed.

A Breeding Ground for Sincerity

Full disclosure isn’t complicated. It is the utmost simplicity. Spin, evasion, and half-truths destroy trust.

This formula shouldn’t be read as turning back the clock and the calendar to the era when the maximum leader dictated the script to his troops and they saluted. What, why, and how are parameters, not hard and fast edicts.

Selling the policy is not the point here. Information is the point. Trust is the point. Even though people may not agree with what they are hearing and seeing, full disclosure is a demonstration of your sincerity and your trust in their sincere commitment to fulfilling their responsibilities professionally. A lot of pronouns went into that sentence. Every one of them is essential.

A leader pays for trust with sincerity. The trust he or she receives back is underwritten by sincerity from both sides. Sincerity breeds sincerity. If you don’t believe that, we just hit the wall. Leave this book on the train, plane, or bus. Maybe someone else can make good use of it.

Trust me on this—it works.

Whole Foods Market, Inc., the country’s largest chain of natural food supermarkets, knows enough to trust its employees. The firm makes its financial performance information available throughout the organization. It even provides salary data by name. You want to know what one of your team members makes, look it up. The boss? Look it up. Whole Foods knows that if you treat someone with trust and respect, you get trust and respect in return. Denying access to information implies that someone can’t be trusted. The policy seems to be working. In 1998, Whole Foods Market had a 24 percent increase in sales over the previous year to $1.39 billion with net profits surging 55 percent to $46.5 million. Also in 1998, Fortune magazine named the company to its top 100 Best Places to Work list.•¹

Don’t buy it? Try it. Do full disclosure for six months and carefully measure the results. Zero in on team productivity and performance. Look at employee satisfaction stats. Oh, you don’t measure those. I think you will after we go over the need to collect those numbers in chapter 12. In the meantime, you won’t even have to wait six months.

I predict you’ll see a 10 to 20 percent upsurge in support. If that extra margin doesn’t seem impressive, think in terms of what another 10 or 20 percent would do to your bottom line. Wall Street goes ape when companies increase their productivity by 10 to 20 percent. And it’s hard to beat the cost. Write out a check for what, why, and how.

A Help that Hurts

Do I really have to say what I’m about to say? Yeah, I’m afraid so.

Don’t lie.

Little white ones don’t count, or so we tell ourselves. But they do count as credibility killers and the same goes for fibs and half-truths. I’ve heard that it’s a gospel among managers at Coca-Cola that two quick ways to get fired are, 1), not to achieve your numbers and, 2), to lie. But the fastest and most direct route to the door is to lie about your numbers. Good for Coke. That’s exactly as it should be. Lying is so destructive that it cannot be tolerated.

Ironically, most of the time, when a leader lies, he or she is trying to be kind. It’s rare to find someone brazen enough to say, “I’m going to fake these suckers out!” But it is common to sugarcoat bad news or to soft-peddle messages that will lead to conflict and bad feelings. Another motive for lying is to buy time to work out a solution to a problem. It was Adlai Stevenson who said, “A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble.”²

I know all about that kind of help. When I was a kid I used to hide report cards and papers that had lousy grades on them. I didn’t lie to my parents, but I was trying to avoid conflict and maybe solve the problem by getting a better test score or a few As instead of Cs. My younger sister Carm didn’t have the same problem. She was a star student and loved it when I did my “Report card, what report card?” number. She’d go on a search-and-destroy mission all over the house until she found my book bag with the hidden evidence and hand it over in triumph to Mom or Dad.

You know what happened then. I had a bigger problem on my hands than if I had just ’fessed up to the bad grades in the beginning. Something happened in the intervening years—maybe I grew up—but now I’m obsessive about solving a problem the moment I become aware, of its existence. It’s an obsession I hope to convince you to share because, like a dead tree that falls into a rushing stream, an unresolved problem acts as a barrier that snags other problems, which soon clog the flow of business.

Lying gets in the way of a fast solution because it hides the evidence—just like my attempts to keep Carm’s hands off the book bag. Lying makes a problem worse because you can’t get at the problem; it festers and spreads the longer it goes without attention.

I should have had Carm help me with my schoolwork instead of sneaking around. Today I dread postponements. Do it now and get it over with so that work can begin on a solution.

For me, lying isn’t at all tempting because delivering bad news or dealing with conflict is the first step to a solution. If you don’t take that first, possibly difficult, step, there can be no solution. Also, telling the truth gets easier the more you do it. People will still be shocked, yet they won’t assume that you’re being mean, callous, or vindictive. Oh, that’s just Frank. He believes in full disclosure and full solutions.

Finally, there is no way to be a sincere liar. Without sincerity there is no trust. As President Clinton demonstrated, lying taints all your good and honest work and irreparably undermines credibility.

Move Fast to Build Trust

“Do it now” is also the best policy for building trust. People withhold their trust—it is our most precious asset, after all—until there’s action that validates what they’ve seen and heard. But trust, in this not-quite-jelled stage between skepticism and belief, is extremely perishable. It’s got a “sell-by” date on it that’s measured in hours.

If you’re a new leader, you can’t wait. Or if you’re reporting to a new leader, beware of the passage of time. It’s not a good sign when the fresh face comes in and says, “I’m not going to make a changes for a while…just take my time to get the lay of the land.” Inertia sets in quickly and hardens like cement. Before too long, the new leader finds he or she has inadvertently invested in the status quo. Ron Nelson, an executive with Danka America, recalls having a new boss once who let 120 days go by before communicating with his teams. That’s scary.

Why would people give their trust if they suspect that it’s going to be business as usual? Waiting 120 days to hear from the boss has B.A.U. stamped on it. Generating or regenerating trust is doubly difficult for a leader who is already in place, if you personify business as usual. It’s that perception that must be changed quickly and decisively to get back in the leadership game.

Wait-and-see leaders usually end up deserving to be see-you-later leaders.

New leaders are often cautioned about making snap decisions to prove they’re bold and decisive. You know—change for the sake of change (second on the “terrible twenty” list of leadership mistakes). That’s good advice. Shoot from the hip and you’re likely to hit an innocent bystander. What I’m talking about is different. First impressions are crucial.

Even when the first impression is a second or third impression. In my first management job, I had been promoted from the inside. People who had been my peers suddenly found themselves reporting to me. Some of them felt it should have been the other way around.

Fortunately, there was time to prepare for the takeover. Not a lot—three days to be exact. I worked around the clock to get ready. Luckily, my predecessor had also won a promotion and was available to help with my research. He and I spent hours going over the files of each of my ten new team members. Of course I was interested in their territories and accounts, but I really focused hard on the individuals. I wanted to find out what made them tick as people. Mind reading? No. I started with what I had: the names of the spouse and children, where they had grown up and gone to school, and those other sketchy bits and pieces of the personal profile that find their way into the files. Bill, the outgoing leader, gave me briefings on strengths and weaknesses and overall performance.

I really crammed. The impression I wanted to make on them at our first meeting was how much I knew about them and cared about them as a team—and even more importantly—as individuals. And that’s what happened. The reserve, the skepticism, the hostility in the air eased considerably.

I held the meeting at the best hotel in the city, ordered up the most expensive breakfast on the menu, followed by something money can’t buy—sincerity. You better believe I talked about sales goals and revenue potential, but first I said I was going all out to build pride and that our team would do everything first class.

Pride? First class? That’s it?

That’s it. It doesn’t get any more basic. People want to feel pride in themselves and in the work that they do. All of us hunger for it. Who says we have to check our self-respect and the respect we deserve from others at the workplace door?

I let the team see how honored I was to be given the assignment. I confessed it was a long-cherished goal. I promised them I would do my best and not let them down. Them, not the company. I said we’d formulate our goals together and pursue them as a team. On top of that I emphasized that I would help develop individual winning game plans for each of them. I laid out my immediate and long-term expectations, and then left the room to give my colleagues a chance to candidly discuss their reactions to me.

Looking back on it, I did four things that morning:

1. I let them see who I was.
2. I told them how we would operate.
3. I asked for their help.
4. And I demonstrated a keen interest in their welfare and success.

On the page, it doesn’t seem very impressive. Yet, ask yourself how often it has happened in your business career or in your personal life, Rarely, I’ll bet. And when it did happen, the effect was influential, if not profound.

Yes, life is complicated. But don’t complicate a first impression. The leadership bond is created out of simple compounds—I like him or I don’t; I trust her or I don’t. My top priority was to impress them with how much I cared about their success. I banged away at that theme because I knew it would help accomplish my objectives, yes, but I also did it because it mattered to me.

When the team came out of the room, its members didn’t love me. I wasn’t looking for love. But they were willing to trust me—a little. As one of them said, “We’re going to have to work awfully hard to keep up with you—but it sounds like it will be fun.”

And it was fun.

“Frank, I’m not that lucky.” I can hear a new leader complaining. I’m about to hit the ground as a total stranger.”

Actually, you may be the lucky one. It’s nice not to have to live down past mistakes or to suddenly have people you grew up with at the company reporting to you. Even so, first impressions are still key. Aware of this, and apprehensive of getting off on the wrong foot, many new leaders try to ease into the water by introducing themselves in bits and pieces.

Not the best idea. You’re giving up control of the message. There are too many blank spots between the components that are filled in by conjecture and assumptions. If I’m new to an organization, I’ll do my preparation work from off-site by having the files sent to me at home and working the phone. I don’t want my colleagues trying to size me up with fragmentary contacts and glimpses. The first day I arrive at the office is show time. The new regime starts.

And don’t be afraid of the show business metaphor. Our most respected corporations spend billions on show business aimed at the external customer. How about a few dollars on the internal customer? They’d like to have some—what’s the word?—fun too. By dramatizing my arrival on the first day, I guarantee that attention will be focused on what I have to say.

On that day, first thing, I call a meeting of the entire staff or team, put my heart on my sleeve, and show them who I am and where we’re headed. I ask for support and, by name, I thank those who have given their best effort to the organization in the past.

You can do that too. Make it straight talk: What you expect and what you’ll inspect; what stops and what starts; what are the rewards of success and what are the consequences of failure. If you haven’t been through one of these bell-ringer kickoffs, you are missing a great thrill.

Make them a part of your leadership repertoire. If you’re not in a leadership position, expect a great first impression. If it doesn’t happen, let it be known that you are disappointed.

Look for:

• emotion
• vision
• goals
• what to expect from the leader
• what he or she expects of you
• straight talk about rewards
• straight talk about problems and solutions
• and recognition for those who have performed

That’s the bare minimum. And—and!—barriers have to start being cut down. It’s time for the chain saw. When I took over as Xerox district manager in Columbus in 1993, I knew I had to set an example. The district had been lazy. There were good people, but they had been allowed to mail it in.

In the preparation process for the first meeting, I talked to several experienced sales reps who brought me legitimate complaints about the ways things were being done. Some, I wasn’t senior enough to fix. So I surprised them by announcing that the Xerox president for field operations would be arriving in one week to hear what they had to say. That got their attention. Of course it did. Sincerity, direct communication, and immediate action are hard to ignore.

Then I went down a list of other barriers I had collected:

1. Orders take too long to process locally.
2. We spend too much time typing our proposals.
3. We fill out redundant paperwork.
4. We need a color copier on the floor for customer presentations.
5. We have only a few PCs to pull up necessary data.
6. The working mothers want later morning meeting times so they can take care of family business.

“Okay, I said, “here’s what’s happening. Admin has agreed that an order with the proper information will be processed in one day—guaranteed.

“We have hired two administrative assistants to be in the sales area to help process proposals and presentations—it’s up to you to keep them busy.”

I held up two sheets of common paperwork. “Fill these out completely and throw the other stuff away.

“When you return to the office tomorrow a color copier will be on the floor—I should see a lot more presentations going out the door.

“We will have six additional PCs up and running tomorrow too, and morning meetings will start a half-hour later.”

None of the six items was a major issue. But each one was an irritation that got in the way of performance and interfered with employee lifestyle, work-style, and productivity. By tackling them right away, I was demonstrating strating two things: 1), that quick and decisive action was to be the norm, and, 2), I would listen closely to their concerns and treat them seriously. And by the way, I wasn’t making idle promises on the spur of the moment. I had made arrangements for the new PCs, the color copier, and the administrative support before the announcement. I knew the changes would be in place the next day. I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Far from earthshaking, right? But if we can’t count on the leader to take care of the small stuff, why should we believe he or she will be effective when it comes to major problems? Most people are schizophrenic about new leaders: They harbor high hopes and low expectations. Teetering between optimism and pessimism, small things can push them either way. If tomorrow looks like yesterday, it’s hard to believe that anything will change for the better, no matter how sweeping the promise and the vision.

Also, when excuses accumulate, action becomes increasingly difficult. A defeatist or complacent attitude is created that rests on self-serving rationalizations: I can’t do the presentation because I need a color copier. I wish I could make the extra sales call, but I have to type these proposals. I’ll wing it on these numbers because I don’t have a PC to call up the data.

Clear the decks for action. My priority in this first rush of decision-making is to increase productivity. What is the operation doing? What can be put in place to make sure things get done faster and more effectively? Trivial matters create an amazing amount of friction and drag. Get them out of the way and start moving. The analogy of test driving a new car fits perfectly. Most of us are on our best behavior until we’re out of sight of the dealer’s lot and then we gun it. Let’s see what this baby can do!

It’s the same with new leadership responsibilities. Gun it. See what happens, listen for strange sounds, and look for black smoke.

I’ve probably made it sound too easy. It isn’t easy. Who wants easy? Easy is boring. Effective leadership is like an iceberg, two-thirds of it is beneath the surface. Hours and hours of time have to go into preparation to make a high-impact first impression. Burn up the phone lines talking to your predecessors, superiors, mentors, and other colleagues with insight. Call on key customers. I’d even check with the competition to hear them crow about recent victories. You’ve got to immediately sponge up enough information to tell you what has happened.

The big problems will take time to fully solve, but you’ve got to make a start. If nothing else, every organization can use an extra blast of energy, enthusiasm, and efficiency. Take what they’ve been doing and do it faster, better, and with more fun and rewards. It’s not necessary to lay out a carefully crafted agenda for the next five years. The next five hours, or the next five days, will do nicely, thank you.

Bumping up a key activity rate is often the way to go initially. Take care of the fundamentals first—basic blocking and tackling. As I said in chapter 3, customer contact is a fundamental that is almost universal. If the rate per staffer is two a day, double it—for everybody. Even those who don’t normally deal with customers get brought in. And you too. That can shake things loose. You’ll be told there’s not enough time and that other priorities will slip. Stick to your guns, and you will see who performs and who doesn’t.

On that score alone—identifying the performers—you’re now in the possession of priceless information.

The Leader/Manager As Impressionist

Use your red notebook to write down first impressions for a variety of situations.

Jot down a few reasons for your negative or positive reactions, including that you might not be able to identify a reason. In three months, revisit the sources of these first impressions and see how you feel. Whether you’ve changed your mind or not, I want you to realize how strong and vivid those initial responses were. Psychologists believe there’s a primitive emotional mechanism that puts us on guard against possible enemies or signals us that it’s okay to relax.

What if a new leader makes a poor first impression? The odds of his or her success have lengthened. Double check the first impression by asking for candid assessments (this too establishes openness as standard operating procedure). Also, keep a sharp eye on what the team does in response. If you suspect you’ve flopped, take a cold hard look at the message you delivered.

Effective communication is deceptive. It seems so easy and natural. Just crank out a vision and mission statement, send a memo, fire off an e-mail, or speak your mind. But the message—the real message—isn’t like that. Unless it comes enclosed in an envelope of trust, it’s bound to get lost in the mail, lost in the suspicion, cynicism, and paralysis that this fundamental shortcoming inevitably inflicts on people and organizations.