The successor CEO, at one of the ten organizations I’ve been privileged to lead through strategic transitions, was wrestling with how to approach some accountability issues I left her as works in progress. She asked me to summarize my own approach. I am passing along to you, my valued friends and colleagues, an expanded version of those reflections in the hope that your reactions will help me to refine my thinking.
I aspire, first, to build commitment to the mission and to the team. I see myself as the facilitator and, when necessary, the enforcer of that commitment but not the focus of it.
Experience tells me that people who feel they are being monitored tend to read distrust into that monitoring and their behavior and attitudes tend to descend to the level implied by the distrust. People who are trusted tend to rise to the trust. My job is to set the environment of trust and then to identify and address those who don't live up to it.
So, I tell people that I'm concerned about two things: Whether they meet high expectations and whether they are committed and effective members of the team. So, for instance, I don't ask that they get my permission to come and go, but I expect that others know and that they are accessible when needed.
I urge them to make their own decisions about how to empower their own teams (within the limits of general trust and accountability) and reminding them that they are accountable for the results those people produce.
Very frequently I've seen people rise to this trust by working harder than before and doing work of a quality of which they thought themselves incapable.
One mistake from which I have attempted to learn, is allowing too many people to continue to report to me. There are two adverse consequences of that: One is that those responsible for things that are on my personal radar (meeting organization-wide goals, for instance) are held highly accountable while those that are not may well escape my notice. The other, more general one, is that “soft” or cultural change efforts tend to become diffused. People responsible for changing a culture (moving it from blaming and undermining to trust and mutual support, for instance) often simply don’t know how to act upon those better values. They need to see, frequently and at close range, the different kind of behavior. They need regular coaching and consistent counsel. Having too many direct reports, rather than leveraging my efforts through a few change agents, leaves the effort too diffuse to have a real impact.
There is one more crucial attribute of trust, it seems to me. It tends to prosper in the same environment as humility. The leader who is focused on his or her own accomplishments often needs for all successes to be his or hers and all failures to belong to someone else. The practice of nearly all political aides, treating every decision as if it were the boss’s, reflects and reinforces this unfortunate impulse. (“The President has decided that we should take out the trash).” And, the psychological corollary of this is that failure will not be the boss’s. It will either be denied away or attributed to others. So, people take too few risks and too little initiative. After all, they’ll experience enough failure just being passive and the off-setting credit is not to be theirs.
The leader who needs little credit and can accept blame, on the other hand, has the opportunity to create an environment in which others can share credit and accept responsibility. The trust of the leader can spread throughout the culture.
A friend and mentor of mine provided me, some years ago, with a wonderful standard of trust. He had just announced his retirement after engineering the turnaround of a multi-billion dollar corporation. I was sitting in his office one day when he drifted into ruminations about leadership. After offering a general thought or two he said, “Pat, do you know how I’ll know when I’ve really arrived as a manager?” I replied with the obligatory, “no, sir.” “When,” he said, “someone who reports to me and whose work I respect comes into my office, closes the door, sits down and says, ‘Jim, I’ve really messed something up and I need your help sorting it out.’”
There was in that, I thought, a powerful lesson about trust. There was also a lesson about humility. And, for the first time I recognized the strong connection between the two.
© Pat Nichols, May 2006. All rights reserved.