Society’s View of Leaders

In 2011, the movie Horrible Bosses was released. Opening at #2 at the box office, it grossed over $209 million dollars. The premise? Three friends decide their bosses are so bad, they plot to murder them. It does so well that in 2014, a sequel is released. In retrospect, this success isn’t surprising. Most everyone has experienced a “horrible boss.”

And, by the way, no one has made (or likely even proposed) a movie called Awesome Boss.

This isn’t the only society-wide propaganda that puts leaders in a bad light. I could give you many examples, most of which boil down to a lack of trust. According to a little over a decade’s worth of Gallup polls, trust in organizational leadership consistently hovers around 20%. Only around 20% of respondents have a high level of trust in their leaders, leaving about 80% with little to no trust. Ouch.

What does this mean for us as individual leaders and as organizational leadership teams? It means we have a steep hill to climb to earn high levels of trust from those we lead. Said another way: We don’t just need to be trustworthy and offer trust. We must also change the perception of leaders in the eyes of our teams/teammates.

How can we do that, organizationally?

• Make trust a high priority. Run decisions, communications, and investments through the trust lens, asking “Will this help us build organizational trust?”
• Make trust a leadership expectation and metric. If we want our leaders to create greater trust, we must expect it, coach to it, provide resources to help grow it, and measure progress.
• Create more effective organizational communication channels and approaches. One of the best ways to build trust is to have clearer, more consistent, and more transparent communication approaches. Time spent working on these approaches will help improve trust.
• Ask for feedback. If you are using employee surveys, make sure you are asking about trust. More importantly, make sure you are finding out what the trust barriers are. If you aren’t doing formal surveys, start asking about and listening for clues about what is or isn’t building trust. It is one thing to know that trust isn’t great; it is more important to find out why.
• Reduce/eliminate polices that (intentionally or not) reduce people’s sense that the organization trusts them. Some policies are created to deal with a specific challenge or situation affecting a small percentage of the team. So where does that leave the rest of them? Are your policies, even if created with good intention, signaling that you don’t trust people?
• Increase the amount of time leaders spend interacting with and building relationships with their team members. If you wanted just one activity that would start to build trust at the individual leader level, it would be for leaders to have more formal and informal conversations with team members. You can create expectations and processes for this with leaders across the organization. And as an individual leader, you can make this change yourself, starting today.

Just the Beginning

The list could be longer than this – and the strategies needed would each require at least one post. My goal today was to start you thinking about these three things:

• For individual leaders and whole leadership teams to build trust, we must change the cultural perception of leaders.
• The topic of trust should be at the top of your priority list for leadership development and culture activities.
• Here are some places to start building trust today.