Why Should Anyone Be Led By You was a popular book by Goffee and Jones in 2006, and it still is. The book generated lots of buzz, articles, and several leadership programs with that question as the opener. Leaders everywhere started scrambling to figure out what they had to do to get people to line up behind them – a search many of us have been on for most of our leadership careers in the hope that we’d eventually discover just the right mix of leadership skills that would give us that winning formula.
It’s been a daunting task, mostly because of the massive amounts of information on leading that exists today. In fact, there have been well over 1000 studies conducted on leadership just in the last 50 years alone. Yet, not even one has given a definitive picture of which characteristics define great leadership. In preparing for this post I looked up ‘leadership traits’ on the web and it took a quarter of a second for Google to come up with 2.4 million hits. On page 1 alone there were titles such as, 5 Traits of Great Leaders, Top 10 Leadership Qualities, 15 Traits of Great Leaders (surprise, yes there are more than 5), The Hidden Qualities of Great Leaders (no number, just a bunch of paragraphs philosophizing about leadership). It’s little wonder that as managers we’re not always sure where to put our energies to increase the likelihood that we’ll have willing and engaged followers.
Leadership and Trust
But there IS something. And it turns out to be pretty simple. It’s trust. Sure, we have to have a vision, a plan, and the know-how to make the vision a reality. But without engendering trust for us as leaders in those who are in the pit doing the work, we get compliance and nothing more.
Alan VanderMolen, the President and CEO of Global Practices at Edelman, the world’s largest independently owned public relations firm, summed it up best in an interview in January discussing Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer, their 12th annual global survey of trust in business and government. VanderMolen commented that there are two kinds of drivers of trust in business and both are required for leaders to have the”license to lead”: operational drivers and social drivers. The operational drivers are “basic entry” into the trust field. That is, doing what it takes to deliver solid financial returns, having competent senior leadership in place, appearing regularly on the most admired companies list. The study shows that globally, the business sector scores well on these operational drivers of trust.
But it’s on several social drivers where Edelman’s trust data show that business is missing consistently. Among those social drivers are: engages with stakeholders (this includes employees), treats employees well, is transparent and open with information, and communicates frequently and honestly. So the people aspects of management, when done well, are what further delineate trust and presumably, cause others to want to follow.
Finally, in an HBR article by Bill George, Peter Sims, et al, Discovering Your Authentic Leadership, the authors state that over the past several years – and this article was written five years ago – “people have developed a deep distrust of leaders.” Given that the Edelman Trust Barometer of 2012 still shows that this distrust is a factor, it’s time to do something radically different. Build trust and be conscious of doing it.
Credibility, Commitment, Consistency
With information gleaned from both the Edelman and HBR article data, and Bill George and Peter Sims’ discussion of authentic leadership, there appear to be three areas that are natural trust builders, and that in turn energize and motivate people to follow. They are credibility, commitment, and consistency.
Leadership-on-the-Go®
Just today I started leading a year-long management webinar series, Leadership-on-the-Go®. Simple ways we can enhance credibility (authenticity in leading), show commitment (to the vision and to those who work for us), and demonstrate consistency (in what we say and what we do) were the first session’s topics.
If you’d like to access the WebEx, full article, and the action guide with suggestions for what you can do starting now to increase the trust factor in the way that you lead, you can join us in the Series. We meet monthly, via WebEx for 45 minutes. If you miss a session, the library of recordings, articles, and action guides is always available. Our next topic on March 21, from 9:05-9:50 Pacific is, Get What You Expect (and more) from Your Team.

His suggestion? Make a short list of people we’re grateful to/for and get a plan together for how to let them know.
Anne Kreamer, in her brief yet content-rich HBR blog discusses workplace gender differences from a neuroscience/emotional intelligence perspective. Refreshing and far more advanced than the old John Gray Mars-Venus divide which I found rather simplistic and narrow.
Yes, be your own leader was the clear message in yesterday’s on-line Bloomberg Businessweek tech article: