Into the Dark

How important is building trust to your success as a leader and what about to building an organization's success as well?

I think trust is important because at the end of the day, a leader is leader not because they have a title. I mean, yes, you're a CEO, but you become a leader when your people actually follow you. Especially when they follow you during dark times, because they can't see the other side so, they are trusting you to lead them through in the right way. So, if they don't trust you, they may follow you when it's all nice and bright and easy and because they can see all around everything. But as soon as things get hard or get tight or things get, I call it dark. You can't always see what that next step is. And if you haven't created a level of trust and all of that it becomes very difficult to actually retain great teams.

Can you name three critical things the leader can do to build trust?

Yeah. Trust at the end of the day is when people believe that what you say you mean and that what you do will be consistent with what you say. I mean that's basically what trust is, right? So, when you ask, what can you do? Number one, you make and keep commitments. You try to be transparent because the other thing that can mess up trust, even if you make and keep commitments. But if when you communicate, you communicate and opaque ways, so that people really don't have full visibility or full understanding, then they're going to think you're hiding things, whether you are or not, and that's going to erode the trust. So, you also have to be transparent. So, it's making, keeping commitments, it's having a level of transparency, and candidness in terms of what you do. And it's walking the talk.