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Transcript
If you really want to destroy your ability to lead, if you just really don’t want to be effective as a leader, there’s one thing you can do to really make that happen: and that’s to make it where your people can’t trust you.
When people can’t trust you, they aren’t going to follow you. Because think about it with yourself. If you have a leader, if you have someone who you find unreliable, are you going to follow them? Do you just want to chase after them, go to the ends of the world with that person? Probably not.
So in this video, we’re going to talk about 10 ways that you can destroy your trust with your people so that hopefully you can do the opposite.
1. You lie
Number one is lying. That’s kind of a simple one. If you lie and people catch you in your lie, and usually over time people do catch you when you’re lying, then people lose trust in you because they can’t know or they won’t know if what you’re telling them is the truth, is what you’re saying to them real.
Can they really rely on you?
If you lie, then that destroys that trust and it hurts your ability to lead.
2. You don’t follow through on your commitments
The second is that you don’t follow through on your commitments.
I know for me, there’s been times when people I’ve trusted to do something and I’ve asked them to do something, or they told me they were going to do something, but they didn’t follow through, or they took a lot longer than they said they were going to take.
And that made me have a harder time trusting them in the future. If I knew it could take weeks instead of days when they said it’s going to take this amount of time, I didn’t want to trust them with something else. Or I wasn’t sure if they were going to complete what they told me.
But the thing is, I’ve been there too where I’ve said I’m going to do something and I was unreliable. And then people couldn’t trust me. And that obviously makes me feel terrible that I’ve been that way before. And that’s something I hope to not do again. And I hope that’s your hope too.
3. You cut corners
Third is cutting corners.
Now sometimes cutting corners just seems like an easy thing to do, quickly get something, but when you’re cheating something, when you’re going around doing what you shouldn’t do, what’s not right, it’s going to come to bite you in the end.
Whether it’s just through the trust with other people, they’re relying on you as a leader, or even legal or other moral ethical things that could come from that being unethical.
Don’t cut corners, just do the right thing, even when it’s hard.
And that builds integrity in yourself where people can trust you, your employees, your customers, your suppliers, everybody, because they know you do what’s right, even when it’s hard. So don’t cut corners.
4. You hide information
Fourth is hiding information. Sometimes leaders hide information for different reasons. They might do it because it’s a power thing. They feel like they are in control, and they see the knowledge and information as a source of power for themselves and they keep it. He, he, he, he, he.
So that they can control it and so they feel so smart or so powerful or so whatever that word I can’t think of is, they feel that way so they hide information.
Sometimes it’s a lack of trust in them toward their people. They don’t trust that their people can handle the information. And because they show a lack of trust in people, that lack of trust comes back to them. The thing is when you don’t share information that should be shared or that can be shared, it builds distrust, period.
Especially if there’s some negative things going on in the company or with you, when you don’t share the information, people usually talk but it’s usually negative, and they usually assume the negative. It’s just kind of how we are as humans. We assume the negative.
So when you don’t say something, guess what? They will say something, it just won’t be the right thing, and, again you hurt that trust with your people So you want to be a person who shares as much information as possible because that shows trust to them, and that builds trust back to you.
5. You spin information
Fifth is spending information. Sometimes when negative things are happening, first of all, sometimes that negative stuff is ignored. I remember in one company that there was a lot of issues that we saw and that we dealt with, but every time they had a newsletter or something come out, they would say, “Hey, let’s talk about the great things happening in that organization” versus saying, “Hey, here are the problems, we acknowledge them, and this is what we’re going to do to fix them,” or “This is what we’re working toward.”
If they had done that, that would have been like, poof, it would have been wonderful, because I would know they actually knew something was wrong, and that they were actually doing something toward it.
Sometimes leaders, when things are negative, they try to make it look good when it’s not, “Hey, we’re laying off half the employees at the company, but it’s a good thing because…,” don’t spin it, be real. Tell the truth, and people respect that.
When you spin it, it makes you look fake and it can hurt your trust with people.
6. You hide your mistakes or blame others
Six, hiding your mistakes or blaming others for your mistakes is a great way to destroy trust. Because here’s the thing, first of all, when you make a mistake, generally people see that mistake. They know you’ve made that mistake. They see it.
And when you lie or try to pretend it didn’t happen, and be like, “Yeah, nothing happened. I’m all good,” people know it’s fake, and they don’t trust you anymore because you’re lying about it.
When you are honest and open about your mistakes, that builds trust, and it also teaches people that it’s okay to make mistakes and that we’re just about learning from them.
But even worse, when you blame people for the mistakes you make or just for your team, because as a leader, you’re responsible of everything. So when you blame, that first of all makes you look like a weak leader, because you are being a weak leader, but also hurts that trust because again, you’re blaming and not taking responsibility, and people won’t trust you as much because of that, which again, hurts your effectiveness as a leader.
7. You use bureaucratic rules to control people
Number seven, using bureaucratic rules to control people. Now there are a couple good reasons to have policies and things in your organization, such as for safety reasons or for legal reasons, or because it actually makes people more productive. But that’s often not why people make policies. They usually do it for two reasons.
The first being is it’s a passive aggressive way to deal with people, with people problems. Someone does something they shouldn’t do, so instead of dealing with that person, they just make a new blanket rule that affects and hurts everybody’s productivity to, in a sense, control people, to make sure people don’t do it.
I remember in one place I worked, a certain department was caught watching Netflix when they weren’t supposed to. And maybe they did something and talked with them, I’m not sure. But what they did do was just block Netflix for everybody.
But sometimes people may, during their lunch, want to watch Netflix. And if it wasn’t a bandwidth issue, if it wasn’t a problem before, and people are okay with that, then it was wrong to ban it for everybody because of those few people’s actions. You deal with those people versus everybody.
The second reason people create bureaucratic controls that’s a really not good reason is they don’t trust their people and they do it to control them. They want to control what they do, so they make all these policies to make sure they do what they’re supposed to do, and then they go out there and make sure they’re doing, make sure they’re following the checklist.
Those things are not effective. And when you do that, you hurt trust with people and you demotivate people, and you’re not going to be an effective leader. So don’t do that.
8. You serve yourself over your team
Number eight, serving yourself over your team. Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Motive, says there’s really two motives that we can have when it comes to leadership. The first being a selfish one.
You see, many leaders see leadership as about themselves. They may see it as a reward for all their hard work. This is my right. This is my reward. And they think they earned it, so it’s about them. And then they do what’s comfortable, what they like, because now when they’re in that leadership position, sometimes it’s just for the perks, for the money.
They want to be able to boss people around. Maybe they get that special parking spot. And sometimes our society sees that as the way leadership is. You get those special perks. That’s what leadership’s about.
But it’s not about you.
The second motive is service. You’re about serving your team, you’re about serving your mission, you’re about serving your team to accomplish the mission. It’s not about you, it’s about the mission and you doing the hard work to accomplish the mission.
But sometimes, honestly, a lot of leaders get that wrong. And the thing is, when you are about serving you or your career or whatever it may be over the mission and your team, people will see that and they won’t trust you because of that. They will know what your priorities are and what that you’re really about, and that will hurt your effectiveness as a leader, and it’ll hurt their motivation and their drive in what they do as well.
9. Forcing your ideas
Number nine, forcing your ideas over what’s best. Sometimes leaders think that they know what’s best because they’re the leader, and that’s just false, obviously, because you don’t always have the right information.
Especially the further you go up, the more detached you are from what’s happening, and sometimes just decisions you make can be the wrong if you’re not listening to other people’s inputs.
And the truth is, you don’t always have the best idea. Sometimes other people do. And if you’re about making sure your idea happens no matter what, this is my idea, this is what we’re going to do, then you’re not going to do well as a leader because that will hurt your influence with your people.
When you are about your idea versus the best idea, you’re being that selfish motive again. You’re being about you and what you want. People will see that and over time, that will hurt you more and more with your influence with your people, the trust with your people, and you just really getting things done because you’re about you and your idea versus what’s best or the best idea.
10. You take all the credit
Number 10, you take all the credit. Good leaders, when things go wrong, they take responsibility. They take the blame and they work to fix it. They don’t cast blame. They don’t look at somebody else. They look at themselves, see what they can do differently to make sure in the future what needs to happen happens.
When things go well, they don’t look at themselves, they look at others outside them and pass the credit. They pass the credit to their team, they pass the credit to other departments, whatever may be, they pass the credit to others.
Not-so-great leaders actually do the opposite. When things go wrong, not-so-great leaders blame other people. They look at them and look at who they can blame for those things that went wrong. And when things go well, they take all the credit for themselves and talk about how great they are.
A great way to frustrate and annoy and hurt the trust of your employees is to take credit for everything instead of passing it where it’s due. When your team does well, pass the credit.
If you’re honored because your team completed a project and you’re called up on stage or whatever it may be, and the president of the company is like, “Your team did great. Good job leader.” What you should do is then go and pass that credit to others. “It wasn’t me, it was my team. They worked hard. They did this.”
When you do that, that makes you look good. It builds pride in them for what they did, and they are more motivated, they trust you more, and they’re more motivated to work harder for you because you’re passing the credit.
Even to other departments, if they were just involved even a little bit, you say, “Hey, and the marketing department helped us this much and all this stuff,” that builds goodwill when you pass the credit.ot lowering things to meet you. one of service.
