How to build trust and credibility as a new leader (Part 1)
It was like watching a high-speed freight train crash in slow motion.
A talented person with brilliant ideas—and yet I could see they were fast derailing as a new leader. I tried to warn them, although in hindsight, I should have done more. How did I know they were failing? Because I’d failed the same way earlier in my career. More than once.
According to a study by CEB (now Gartner), 60% of new managers fail in their first two years on the job. Other studies published by Gallup and the British Journal of Management put the prevalence of failed leadership at similar or even higher levels. And all these numbers are pre-pandemic, before the new, hybrid or fully remote era that’s made relationship-building and people management all the more challenging for all but the most seasoned and intentional leaders.
In reality, 100% of managers fail at one point or another in their leadership careers, and the only difference between the best and the rest is how much and how quickly they learn from it. But certain types of failure are predictable, and you can prevent them by learning from other people’s mistakes rather than your own.
I hope this post will help you learn from some of mine.
Some 10 years ago, I too was a freight train on track for a high-speed crash. I’d just been appointed to manage two different teams. Armed with a strong vision and solid plans, and with all the buy-in and resources I needed from the executive team, I was all ready and fired up to reach ambitious goals, innovate and optimize processes, and create fast-track career opportunities for team members.
Things got off to a great start with one of the teams—but the other team was having none of it. I was the same person, with the same vision, ideas, and approach, exhibiting the same leadership behaviors. But one thing was different: one of the teams trusted me, the other didn’t.
A version of this story happens to almost every new leader. Some people will trust you, and some won’t. When that happens, new leaders can derail at lightning speed.
A sure way to derail is to see lack of trust as “us vs. them.” After all, you’re a trustworthy person. You have people on the team and beyond who trust you to prove it. So something must obviously be wrong with them.
Meanwhile, those who don’t trust you see things in exactly the same way. They’re also trustworthy people, trusted by a number of colleagues, business partners, and friends. So something must obviously be wrong with you.
This way, a flywheel of mistrust quickly starts spinning. Their mistrust fuels yours, which fuels theirs, which adds fire to yours, and so on. Unless you can break the cycle in some way, things will quickly escalate and often lead to someone getting fired.
Sometimes it’ll be the manager firing one or more team members. Sometimes it’ll be the manager getting fired. (This happens more often than you might think.) Either way, it’ll be painful. And either way, it’s a missed opportunity. Because the cycle can be broken.
Here’s how.
Step 1: Listen intentionally
Many leaders feel self-conscious about their communication skills. They want to become better speakers. They want to become more persuasive. They want to think quicker on their feet. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve those competencies. But if you want to improve your communication skills as a leader, the most impactful thing you can do—by a long way—is to become a better listener. That is because for most people to hear you, they first need to feel heard by you.
Develop active listening habits
To become a better listener, you need to give up the habit of listening to respond, and develop new habits of listening to understand, empathize, and surface what’s unsaid.
Here are five techniques in particular that can help level up your listening skills:
#1: Mirroring means repeating the last 3-4 words of what your counterpart has just said as a question. For example, if we were having a conversation just now, you could say:
“Repeating the last 3-4 words?”
#2: Summarizing your counterpart’s main points during the conversation. For example, you could say something like this now:
“So you're saying I can build more trust as a new leader by showing people that I care about them deeply, and one way to do that is to develop my active listening skills.”
#3: Labeling means identifying and naming the emotions you think your counterpart is experiencing. For example, you could tell me now:
“You seem very passionate about the importance of listening in leadership.”
#4: Open-ended follow-up questions are what/how questions (as opposed to yes/no questions) designed to elicit more information. For example, at this point you could ask me:
“What else do you think will help me build trust as a new leader?”
#5: Silence is perhaps the most powerful tool in the active listener’s arsenal. Especially when your counterpart is struggling to articulate their thoughts or sharing something that’s hard for them to talk about, hold the space for them to verbalize their thoughts and emotions by stretching out your silences longer—sometimes uncomfortably long. Just like this:
“…”
“…”
“…”
Or if that feels uncomfortable at first, try this:
“…”
“…”
“Tell me more.”
Institutionalize listening
You can also build trust by institutionalizing listening. One way to do that is to do a “listening tour” in your first month as a new leader:
Identify your internal and external stakeholders.
Approach them for a 1-hour interview about their objectives, needs, and pain points, both related to your team and in general.
Take notes and consolidate your findings.
By doing so, you’re showing that you care while building competence about your organization and environment. These interviews will also allow you to frame your plans in terms of your stakeholders’ needs and objectives, helping you to get buy-in from them later.
When doing this, take a top-down, inside-out approach to avoid inadvertently crossing any boundaries that you may not be aware of when you’re new to an organization. In other words:
Start with your boss, interview them first, and get their input (and permission and referrals if needed) on what other leaders, business partners, and customers you should talk to.
Speak with your team members, and as you interview them, ask them which other teams they interface with the most—so you can add the leaders of those teams to the list of people to interview.
Approach other managers in your department for an interview.
Approach the relevant managers in other departments for an interview—start with the head of department and get their input (and permission and referrals if needed) on who else in that department you should talk to.
Approach top business partners and customers.
When you interview stakeholders, talk with them about their goals, their challenges, their perception of your team (or company or product), and how you and your team can help them.
As you progress with your interviews, start building a stakeholder map so you can keep track of how you’ll engage with your stakeholders in the future depending on how much influence and interest they have in your and your team’s work:
Subsequently, touch base with these stakeholders at varying degrees of frequency depending on their level of interest and influence (see the graphic above for some suggestions on this).
Step 2: Make people feel safe
Treat mistakes as learning opportunities and show vulnerability
One problem when trying to build trust as manager is that demonstrating your competence can easily come across as demonstrating another person’s incompetence even if that wasn’t your intention at all.
Are you accountable for your team members’ performance?
Of course.
Does that mean you need to correct every little mistake that they make?
Not at all.
Don’t be the manager who asks the designer to change the color of a website button or makes spurious edits in the content writer’s copy to achieve a marginal improvement that most likely only you can see. Don’t be the manager who holds people accountable to expectations that have never been clearly articulated. And most importantly, don’t be the manager whose first impulse is to assign blame when some things inevitably go wrong.
Sure, if a mistake is likely to have high impact or high visibility, correct it. If there is serious under-performance or toxic behavior, address it promptly. If someone needs to improve a skill, help them. But if someone is generally meeting expectations, or a piece of work is good enough, resist the temptation to compulsively demonstrate your competence by showing how it could have been even better.
Why?
Because if you want to build an effective team, you need to prioritize ownership over optimum.
As now famous research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard University has shown, teams are more effective when leaders create a learning-oriented (as opposed to blame-oriented) culture, a climate in which mistakes can be discussed, corrected, and learnt from openly, without fear of being shamed or punished.
“Project Aristotle,” Google’s own research into what makes teams effective, has reinforced these findings by showing that psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is the most important contributor to team effectiveness.
According to Edmondson, a psychologically safe team is one where:
Mistakes aren’t held against people.
Team members are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
People on the team don’t reject others for being different.
People feel safe to take risks.
People feel safe to ask others for help.
People don’t deliberately act in ways that undermine each other’s efforts.
People’s unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
One way you can encourage people to grow by learning from mistakes, taking risks, and trying new approaches is to make them feel safe by showing vulnerability. Show them your humanity in its full fallible glory by talking openly about your toughest challenges. Tell them about some of the worst mistakes you’ve made. When you feel uncertain or don’t have the answer, admit it. Ask for help when you need it. Admit and apologize if you’ve done something wrong. And take the blame if someone on your team has messed something up.
After all, the buck stops with you.
Make constructive dissent safe and practice nemawashi
Here’s a scenario that’ll be familiar to most of you:
The irony is that as soon as we become managers, we’re liable to forget how we felt—and feel—when our own managers propose something we disagree with or feel concerned about. You might have the best intentions and the most psychologically safe team out there, but disagreeing with someone more powerful is always risky for people.
Even if you’ve built a culture where people do feel safe voicing their dissent, they’ll often—consciously or not—attempt to reduce that risk through mitigated speech, downplaying or sugar-coating their opinions because they may be unsure if they’re right, how their point will be received, or simply trying to be polite.
Why is that a problem?
First, because it puts you at risk of authority bias (the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure) and groupthink (the desire for conformity in a group that can often lead to suppressing dissenting viewpoints). And secondly, because implementation will often break down when your team members give you counterfeit buy-in to play it safe but have little motivation to actually follow through.
So what can you do to make constructive dissent safe for team members?
The following have worked well for me over the years:
Speak last in meetings
Even—and especially—if you have a strong opinion about something and know exactly what needs to be done, resist the temptation to be the first to speak in meetings. If you come out with a strong opinion forcefully, you make it exponentially riskier for your team members to voice different perspectives. Rather, ask your team members what they think first. If you notice that someone is silent, ask them to contribute.Ask for constructive upward feedback
As big a problem as it is when managers don’t give their team enough positive and constructive feedback, an even bigger one is that most managers don’t get much feedback—particularly constructive feedback—themselves. To avoid living in an echo chamber where your ideas, plans, and decisions aren’t sufficiently stress-tested, solicit constructive feedback from your team members frequently by asking them questions such as: “What risks do you see?” “What is one thing I may be missing here?” “What is one thing you’d like me to do differently, but you’re afraid I might get upset if you told me about it?”Align on a shared way to voice concerns
Aim to make voicing dissent a duty, rather than a privilege. Make it clear that you expect team members to voice their opinions, especially when they disagree with you or someone else. And align on a shared way to voice concerns with your team. One such way that has been adopted at a number of companies is nonviolent communication, a four-step approach that you can read more about here.Practice nemawashi
Nemawashi is a Japanese word. Its literal meaning is “turning the roots,” but it’s often translated as “laying the groundwork.” In the corporate world, it means approaching and consulting with stakeholders individually before a decision is made to gauge their reaction and gather their input. While I’ve adopted this practice as a manager in Japan, it’s served me well and become my default approach when leading teams in Germany and Hungary as well. As opposed to the illustration at the beginning of this chapter, nemawashi looks something like this:
In other words, before finalizing and announcing a plan or a decision, you approach the important stakeholders one by one with a draft proposal to solicit their feedback.
If you’re concerned that this approach slows down decision-making, it does indeed.
However, I’ve found that it often leads to better decisions, more trust on the team and across teams, and much faster and smoother implementation down the line.
Of course, there aren’t enough hours in the day to make every decision this way. If a decision is low-risk, reversible, clearly within your purview to make, and has low impact on the current or future day-to-day of your stakeholders, you can make a quick decision without consulting too many people in advance, and review it periodically to course correct if needed.
But if a decision is high-risk or difficult to reverse without incurring significant costs, it has a tangible impact on some of your stakeholders’ day-to-day, or it’s ambiguous who has the authority to decide, I’ve found nemawashi to be the best approach.
Step 3: Make people feel valued
It’s a cliché but true: nothing breeds success like success.
If people feel they’re doing well, that feeling alone will greatly enhance their expectancy and self-efficacy, and hence their motivation and ability to do well.
As a leader, you have a crucial part to play in setting the mood on your team. Instead of a vicious flywheel of mistrust, you can set in motion a virtuous flywheel of trust and confidence on your team by focusing on, amplifying, and reinforcing what’s going well.
Of course, that doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to problems or abdicating responsibility by shying away from addressing issues promptly and constructively. But you’re doing no one—including yourself—a favor if you get too preoccupied with what isn’t going well while failing to notice—and amplify—all the positive aspects.
In some ways, the glass is always half full and half empty. But it’s the part that’s full that will give you and your team the energy to deal with the empty part. So focus 80% of your energy, communication, and feedback on the half that’s full, and only 20% on the empty half.
Focus 80% of your strategy on what you already do well, and only 20% on building new capabilities.
Focus 80% of your thoughts on what you can control, and only 20% on things that are out of your hands.
Focus 80% of your time on engineering quick wins, and only 20% on worrying about long-term outcomes.
Focus 80% of your energy on top and core performers, and only 20% on those who under-perform.
Focus 80% of your efforts on aligning people’s roles and work environment with their strengths and values, and only 20% on helping them address their weaknesses.
Focus 80% of your feedback on praising your team members for what they’re doing well, and only 20% on what they can improve.
For me personally, this was perhaps the most hard-earned lesson in my 15+ year leadership career. It took me a decade until I’d fully absorbed that “coach” rather than “policeman” was my role as a manager. Like the police, I only used to pull people over if they did something wrong, and took all the things they did right for granted. By contrast, a good coach will spend more time bringing awareness to your strengths and help you leverage them to offset your weaknesses. They’ll hold the bar high while helping you clear it.
The following approaches have worked well for me as I’ve increasingly learnt to build trust and increase people’s confidence, motivation, and performance by making them feel valued:
Aligning people’s roles, work environment, goals, and incentives with their individual values and strengths.
Giving frequent and impactful positive feedback.
Celebrating wins, birthdays, and work anniversaries.
You can do this by:
Understanding what’s important to each person on your team, and setting up their goals and incentives in a way that leads them to those valued outcomes.
Understanding people’s strengths and preferences, and setting up their roles and work environment in a way that allows them to perform at their best.
Giving at least five times more positive feedback than constructive criticism, i.e., praising every team member for something they did well every week.
Recognizing efforts and progress, not just successes, and make sure your praise is specific and connected to the outcomes, values, and strengths you’d like to foster.
The third approach—celebrating wins, birthdays, and anniversaries—is perhaps a bit more “tactical,” and you might think that it speaks for itself. And yet I haven’t come across too many managers who do it in a way that’s truly meaningful.
The problem with “Happy birthday!” and “Congrats on your work anniversary!” is the same as the problem with “Thank you!”— in the worst case, they’re forgotten, and in the best case, they’ve become a commodity.
To avoid these negative outcomes, you need to invest some energy into personalizing your approach.
What’s one thing that’s unique about your team member?
What’s one thing that makes them special?
What’s a key strength that they have?
What’s a distinctive way in which they contribute?
What’s a memorable or helpful thing they’ve done?
What’s one superpower they have that they themselves might not be aware of?
What’s one thing that others truly appreciate about them?
What’s a remarkable thing that most people don’t know about them?
In recent years, asking HR for the dates of my team members’ birthdays and work anniversaries has become one of the first things that I do when taking over as the leader of a team. I put these dates on my private calendar, and compile a mental “uniqueness audit” of each of my team members’ distinctive strengths and contributions through our daily interactions so I can praise them in a meaningful, personalized way on their special days.
In some cases, tears of joy have been shed over these comments.
Perhaps more of mine than my team members’… And not just because I get more and more sentimental with age. But because there’s no greater privilege in being a leader than to cherish and affirm the truth that each and every person on this planet is meaningful and extraordinary.
This article has been edited down from its original length. To read the full version, visit The MotivatingManager Monthly on Substack.
Tune in next week for Part 2!
Download The State of Motivation Report 2024. It’s free!
