INsight/ Three Trust Barriers

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

Manila, 6 May 2020 — Which of the three trust barriers is holding back your leadership?

This month in Grow3Leaders, we explore the theme Engage: Leaders invest in building trust with people.

Building Trust

While it is difficult to fully understand how trust works, we know that trust is indispensable for starting and maintaining good relationships, including in the workplace, and with clients and partners. Giving, earning, and receiving trust are all dynamic processes—there are lots of moving parts, so to say.

Trust is an essential requirement for performance in any organization, public or private. That also goes for high-performing teams, sustained relationships, successful mergers, and any form of partnership or collaboration where risk is taken and value created. 

In the absence of trust, and where there is distrust, leaders will struggle in their influencing work and face deficits of attention, attraction, action, collaboration, impact, and return on investment.

Over the past few decades, the landscape of trust has changed, as we would expect in a world that is increasingly interconnected, complex, and unpredictable. The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked the changing patterns of trust in governments, businesses, and NGOs over the past two decades, and their results tell a remarkable story.

Our interest here is to investigate how leaders—people who influence a process of change, either individually or collectively—can invest to build trust with people as part of their influencing work.

In this post, we introduce three trust barriers that leaders face in their work: the Language Barrier, the Power Barrier, and the Care Barrier. Let’s explore them together?

#1 The Language Barrier

This is the barrier that Nelson Mandela faced when he became the first democratically-elected president of South Africa at the end of the Apartheid era. He inherited a country marked by faultlines and factions who disagreed with each other on almost everything, operating as they did from widely different worldviews.

Each faction in South Africa saw the problems they faced through the lens of their own worldview, be they traditional tribal, conservative farmers, entrepreneurial business people, activist political reforms, or others.

Faced with deep distrust all around, Mandela’s challenge was to make South Africans see their problems and opportunities in a new light. He started by tackling the Language Barrier, familiarizing himself with the languages (worldviews) of each of the warring factions so that he could effectively influence change by speaking their language.

In later posts, we will explore in more detail how Mandela did this, and how we are today building on his experience in our Work In All Colors training. Tackling the Language Barrier helps leaders to understand their problems with new eyes and ears, and in several languages.

For leaders, the influencing process starts with helping people to see what matters to them as well as to the community at large, in a way they can relate to, in their language. Harvard researchers Kotter and Cohen reported shared how this works in their acclaimed book The Heart of Change.

The Language Barrier will block leaders from making progress for as long as they are held back by their own worldview and are unable to translate a problem into the languages of the people they want to influence.

Only then can trust be built.

#2 The Power Barrier

Leaders face the second barrier, the Power Barrier, when there is a deficit of power to build trust. What kind of power are we talking about? It can be positional power, derived from a position of authority, and non-positional or personal power.

The latter kind of power is increasingly important because most leadership challenges nowadays involve influencing across hierarchies, compared to previous decades and centuries where positional power was used to exercise authority within a hierarchy.

Power is needed to empower those you want to influence. Personal power is what leaders bring to the table to build trust, in terms of their credibility, competencies, expertise and experiences, and their networks.

This includes a leader’s capability to plan and implement an influencing strategy that is appropriate for the situation at hand. Integrity and consistency are often mentioned as essential ingredients in building trust. So are the six principles of influence in Robert Cialdini’s landmark book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

A deficit in a leader’s personal power to use these values, abilities, and principles means that there is a barrier to building trust, a Power Barrier.

There is simply insufficient power to empower others and earn the trust needed for change to happen. 

#3 The Care Barrier

From the earliest history, the Care Barrier has challenged leaders who were capable and competent, yet unable to show empathy and care for their followers. They have always found it harder to earn their trust and be effective leaders.

In the first two decades of our new millennium, the public’s expectation of leaders has changed dramatically as our world became more complex, connected, and unpredictable. Leaders are now expected in many places around the world to show up in a way that is authentic and shows some vulnerability. Servant leadership is a concept that has grown in popularity.

In order to give their trust (and vote), people want to be seen, heard, acknowledged, and appreciated. They want to feel (in their heart) that leaders understand them and really care about them, and they have high expectations of their leaders to walk their talk when it comes to values of honesty, empathy, and compassion.

Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, has recently been described as a leader who excels in leading with Care. Leaders who have difficulty expressing these values are still facing the Care Barrier and will find it much harder to build trust with those they want to influence for change.

Think of this Care Barrier as questions asked of leaders, silently or out loud: do you really care about us? Why should I care about you and what you say?

Building trust has become harder with the Care Barrier becoming more prominent.

Grow3Leaders Challenge

Which of these barriers is holding back your leadership? And what are you going to do about that?

In Grow3Leaders, we will unpack that question as we pursue the practice of building trust as a necessary step to influencing others for positive changes in the workplace.

We are a private community of leaders from countries around the world, and from different generations, who are committed to learning and practicing effective leadership behaviors ‘out loud’ and together to create positive change in our workplaces.

Joining us is free of charge—not free of commitment. Send us a request if you feel that you are up to our Grow3Leaders challenge and are ready to join together with three of your colleagues in the workplace. Please ask them first, and let us know the names.

We look forward to learning together with you and your team.