Everything Starts with Trust

Frances X. Frei

Anne Morriss

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
  <h5>The Starting Point</h5>
  <p>The traditional leadership narrative is all about you: your talents, charisma, and moments of courage and instinct. But real leadership is about your people and creating the conditions for them to fully realize their own capacity and power. To do this, you have to develop stores of trust.</p>
  <h5>The Challenge</h5>
  <p>How do leaders build trust? By focusing on its core drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they think they’re interacting with the real you, when they have faith in your judgment and competence, and when they believe you care about them.</p>
  <h5>The Way Forward</h5>
  <p>When leaders have trouble with trust, it’s usually because they’re weak on one of those three drivers. To develop or restore trust, identify which driver you’re “wobbly” on, and then work on strengthening it.</p>
 </div>
</article-ideainbrief><p>On a spring afternoon in 2017, Travis Kalanick, then the CEO of Uber, walked into a conference room at the company’s Bay Area headquarters. One of us, Frances, was waiting for him. Meghan Joyce, the company’s general manager for the United States and Canada, had reached out to us, hoping that we could guide the company as it sought to heal from a series of deep, self-inflicted wounds. We had a track record of helping organizations, many of them founder-led, tackle messy leadership and culture challenges.</p>

qynO+qRmk/t0UiXeK12XcpfVfIoZFULUswUf4Uy9O8d3a2RMVzNu3Pvuw6mz6wCbfg6Y58/MvQ8sY1C3doxXc8TXLinUEgfrBRCH4z3vJ8A=

<p>Trust is the basis for almost everything we do. It&#8217;s the foundation on which our laws and contracts are built. It&#8217;s the reason we&#8217;re willing to exchange our hard-earned paychecks for goods and services, to pledge our lives to another person in marriage, and to cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. It&#8217;s also the input that makes it possible for leaders to create the conditions for employees to fully realize their own capacity and power.</p>
<p>So how do you build up stores of this essential leadership capital? By focusing, the authors argue, on the three core drivers of trust: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers.</p>
<p>This article explains how leaders can identify their weaknesses and strengths on these three dimensions and offers advice on how all three can be developed in the service of a truly empowering leadership style.</p>

Begin with Trust

Trust is the basis for almost everything we do. It’s the foundation on which our laws and contracts are built. It’s the reason we’re willing to exchange our hard-earned paychecks for goods and services, to pledge our lives to another person in marriage, and to cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. It’s also the input that makes it possible for leaders to create the conditions for employees to fully realize their own capacity and power. So how do you build up stores of this essential leadership capital? By focusing, the authors argue, on the three core drivers of trust: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers. This article explains how leaders can identify their weaknesses and strengths on these three dimensions and offers advice on how all three can be developed in the service of a truly empowering leadership style.

Begin with Trust

Summary.

Partner Center