What makes one leader more trustworthy than another?

Trust is a priceless asset for any organisation. The recent Edelman Trust Barometer 2021 underlined how trust across the world has taken a battering over the past year. Interestingly, trust in business has held steady whilst elsewhere it has plunged.
But at the individual level, what makes one business leader more trustworthy than another?

We asked Elizabeth Stewart, Head of Executive Assessment and Development at global executive search specialists, Odgers Berndtson, to explain more about trust and leadership. These are her insights.

Required: a new kind of leader

It has been said that a great strategy means little without the leadership to release its potential. I would heartily agree.
In this disruptive era, a new type of leadership is required. Leadership that will help others thrive whilst delivering the strategy in a world of complexity and uncertainty. What role does trust play in this?

The importance of creating trust as a leader.

A global survey on Leadership Confidence of around 1800 global executives and senior managers (November, 2019) shed light on the importance of trust.
Examining the organisations with the most confidence in their leaders’ ability to deliver through disruptive times revealed a common pattern. Their leaders displayed integrity and they drove a sense of purpose, trust and collaboration.
Strikingly, the gap between leaders creating confidence and anxiety was largest in trust and integrity.

So trust is clearly an important ingredient of future business success. Trust is vital if others are going to follow their leader. That followership needs to be strong from the top down through the organisation, all the way to the frontline if individuals and the organisation are to succeed through challenging times.

Trust needs to be nurtured by the CEO, between the C-Suite, and invested in by their lieutenants. Consequently, trust builds confidence in customers, investors, partners, suppliers and alliances.
It is not an automatic response in any type of relationship because the decision to trust is not taken lightly. Trust can “take years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair”.

What exactly is trust?

Before we can talk about building trust, we have to understand exactly what it is, and how it works.
In short, trust is an expression of mindset, behaviours and values.

David Maister, former Harvard Business School Professor and Management Expert, introduced the world to the Trust Equation. His equation consists of four dimensions: credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation.

This equation defines individual trustworthiness, an intangible concept, and combines some elements that are more difficult to evidence than others:

• Expertise, track record and consistency - easy to evidence.
• Emotions, courage and focus - more challenging to deliver.
• A commitment to discipline and enhancing self for the sake of others and the greater good.

Because it focuses on trustworthiness, Maister’s equation puts the ownership for creating trust with others on the individual first.

Trust doesn’t just happen. Some leaders believe you earn it, whilst intentional leaders create it.

Measuring who can be trusted to follow

This equation can examine the level of trust at multiple levels in an organisation. This helps identify where investment is required to build strong levels of followership.
The leader can explore:

• Am I trustworthy?
• Is he or she (a key stakeholder) trustworthy?
• Are we, as the leadership, trustworthy?

An equation with many moving parts

Working with this equation has been fascinating. Despite the definitions it provides, individuals often have different parameters by which they evaluate the key dimensions of credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation.
Even leaders with similar roles, professional backgrounds and commitments to goals find to their surprise there are gaps, given their individual definitions, which need to be bridged to enhance collaboration.

The pandemic's demands on leadership

To complicate things even further, a leader’s self-perception can be very different from others’ evaluation of their experience of trusting that leader.

Add to that the fact that these definitions may change and the weightings given to the factors may vary according to new or evolving contexts. For instance, the demand from followers for reliability and intimacy from leaders increased through the past year’s crisis. Maybe, however, as the dust settles, the evaluation of their credibility will become more important as followers consider “do I stay or do I go”. This implies that this factor remained important despite not being at the forefront of others’ minds.

Collaboration versus collusion

Trust secures authentic collaboration and a working for the greater good. Collusion can give the impression of trust but is being used as a means to an end. The latter, in some cases, will damage integrity, stifle creativity, and create an illusion that can bring a business down.

In the next part of this article, we will address how to create, build and sustain trust as a leader.