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Join trust expert Randy Conley for a complimentary webinar and online chat beginning today at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (12:00 noon Eastern).
In a special presentation on Building Trust: 3 Keys to Becoming a More Trustworthy Leader, Conley will be exploring how leaders can improve the levels of trust in their organization by identifying potential gaps that trip up even the best of leaders.
Participants will learn:
- How to get it right on the inside first
- The 4 leadership behaviors that build or destroy trust
- The 3 keys to creating trusting relationships
The webinar is free and seats are still available if you would like to join over 500 people expected to participate.
Immediately after the webinar, Randy will be answering follow-up questions here at LeaderChat for about 30 minutes. To participate in the follow-up discussion, use these simple instructions.
Instructions for Participating in the Online Chat
- Click on the LEAVE A COMMENT link above
- Type in your question
- Push SUBMIT COMMENT
It’s as easy as that! Randy will answer as many questions as possible in the order they are received. Be sure to press F5 to refresh your screen occasionally to see the latest responses.
We hope you can join us later today for this special complimentary event courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies. Click here for more information on participating.
Very nice webinar…well done guys.
Thanks David!
Hi Everyone–Randy and I are here now. If you have a question for Randy just type it in and we will answer as many as we can in the next 25 minutes.
Looking forward to answering any additional questions from the webinar. Fire away!
I am in a position where I have to lead unit leaders through influence. I have a leader who has year after year met or exceeded company goals. However, his employees are afraid of him and his direct reports don’t trust him. How do you use SLII and the building trust model to convince this leader that trust is important?
Hi Dayna, that’s an excellent question. He may be enjoying success now but will it be sustainable? I would start by asking the leader if he is open to some feedback and whether having trusting relationships is important to him. Assuming he does, you could share these concepts with him and explore how he could incorporate them into his leadership behavior.
Randy, were you a 4-H member as a child? “Head, Heart, etc. connection! Lots of great leadership training for me there at a very early stage of development. Just curious…
Hi Suan! No, I didn’t belong to 4-H but I have some good friends who do! Similar concepts indeed…
The agree to disagree won’t work when you leader/authority is asking something that you cannot agree to on ethical or moral grounds. Then what?
Hello Phil. Moral/ethical dilemmas….argghh…tough situations. Not to oversimplify it, but those are choice points you have to make, right? There isn’t ever a right time to do the wrong thing, so hopefully a person could find the right people in the organization to raise their concerns with and find the right path to follow.
A common event occurs where I hear about trust from the employees who report to me. The context is that our team is ‘virtual’ and I don’t know exactly where they are at any given time. When I need to find them for business purposes and I cannot locate them, I ask them ‘where’ they are, a common reply is that I don’t ‘trust’ them.
Sometimes they are sick, at funerals, taking ‘flex’ time and our employment practices if for them to let me know if they aren’t working within our ‘core business hours’.
Would you have any thoughts about ‘trust’ in the context of this type of situation?
I can relate to your concern Dawn. Nearly 1/2 of my team is located virtually. I think it starts with the team agreeing on norms for how they will operate. It’s important for their to be transparency and honesty in the relationship with virtual workers. I use Instant Messenger statuses, a team calendar, etc. as a way to keep communication open with virtual members.
Thank you Randy. I can confirm we have those things in place too. Overall those tools work really well. But for a few employees, I sense the ‘trust’ connection may be broken. It’s particularly challenging when I have to discuss a situation with our customers where the employee’s actions appear to be less than our expections. ie. listening, documenting, raising the concern. I believe I’ve looked at myself and the four qualities you mentioned. Just seem to be missing something in my communication to foster employee’s growth in their role.
Sounds like you’re doing the right things Dawn. Do you have a level of trust with those individuals where you can openly discuss these differences of perception?
Hi, I do think I have a level of trust but need to self reflect to see if I’m way off base. I have just booked some time with one of the employees to explore some common ground. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts – really helpful to bounce ideas around. Dawn
What tips do you have for managers building trust with virtual employees who have a range of different responsibilities?
Hi there. See my response to Dawn above. There needs to be clear expectations and agreements with virtual workers so that trust is fostered rather than suspicion being created.
Thank you, more specifically my question was related to employees confidence in the competence of the leader that is not performing the same responsibility and is doing so virtually. My team does some physical processing in one location that can not be done in other locations. Any tips on presenting competencies virtually across multi-functional teams?
Thanks for the clarification. It’s not uncommon for managers to not have the same experience or history with a given job function than the people they are managing. I’m a fan of openly discussing these differences of perception, assuming the trust level is high enough to do so. Another alternative may be approaching each team member individually to learn more about why they believe you aren’t as competent in this area as you should be.
Excellent content! Thank you!
Thanks Brenda!
Hi Randy–here’s a question from the webinar: “If you ask 20 people what trust means to them–you’ll get twenty different answers. Given that, how do you open up a conversation about trust with someone?”
Great question Dave. This gets to the key point we made – Trust is based on perception. I think it’s important to share the ABCD Trust Model with people so that everyone has a common framework/language for what trust means. There is an excellent white paper on http://www.kenblanchard.com on Building Trust that explains the ABCD trust model.
Would it be possible to get a direct link posted to the whitepaper Randy references above?
Hi David,
Yes, here is the direct link to the Building Trust white paper http://www.kenblanchard.com/img/pub/Blanchard-Building-Trust.pdf
Hi David. Here’s a direct link to where you can download the white paper. If you haven’t accessed our white papers before you’ll need to go through a registration process (it’s free). http://www.kenblanchard.com/Business_Leadership/Effective_Leadership_White_Papers/Building_Trust/
Do you have a question about trust for Randy–we still have a few minutes left–type it in using the reply feature and we’ll answer it while we are here.
It looks like we’ve answered all of today’s follow-up questions. For additional resources, be sure to check out http://www.kenblanchard.com Also, be sure to read more of Randy’s thinking at his blog, http://www.leadingwithtrust.com Thanks to everyone for joining us today!
Thanks to everyone who attended today’s webinar. We had a wonderful discussion and some very interesting questions. If you’re interested in learning more about trust and leadership, you can visit my blog at http://www.leadingwithtrust.com, follow me on Twitter @RandyConley, or send in an email to webinars@kenblanchard.com.
Lead with Trust!