Lead from Trust and Vision

Those you lead are continually asking themselves two questions:

1. Can I trust my leaders?

2. Where are we going?

By trust, I mean functional trust, not moral trust. Functional trust is the feeling that people will do what they say, have our backs, stick with us when things get tough, share or spotlight credit, and do their best to help us succeed. If they're worried about moral trust — lying, cheating, stealing, etc. — the game's already up.

The second question is a question of vision. Too many leaders confuse having a vision with having a plan and undershare where the team or organization is going because they're waiting to figure out how they're going to get there. Teammates are surprisingly open to there not being a solid plan and often like being part of creating the plan. But not knowing, in general, where you're going makes it hard to do much but move within the parameters of explicit plans and guidance.

It's really hard to overdo it when it comes to cultivating trust and sharing vision. It's surprisingly easy to underdo it.

But leading from trust and vision isn't just about the relationship from leaders to their teammates. It's really:

1. Can leaders trust their teammates?

2. Can teammates trust their leaders?

3. Can teammates trust each other?

And on the vision side, it's:

1. Are leaders sharing their vision with their teammates?

2. Are their teammates aligning their priorities, challenges, opportunities, communication, and efforts to their leaders' vision?

3. Are teammates using their leaders' vision to collaborate, coordinate, align, and partner with each other?

Those are the six trust-and-vision vectors. If any one of them is weak, the others strain to compensate.

As much as we might wish it were the case, cultivating trust and aligning to vision across all six vectors doesn't happen automagically and they require continual reinforcement. This vexes many leaders.

From the leader's point of view, if there's not an explicit indication that their trust has been breached and/or diminished, trust between teammates should be automagically enhanced and built. In a similar vein, their vision feels something like the floor — it's always there in a very tangible way and it's what we walk on and build from.

Unless there's a problem with it, we don't talk about the floor much. Just like, unless there's a financial problem, we don't continually reaffirm that people will get paid — there's just an unspoken trust that makes these conversations “invisible.”

But from their teammates' perspectives, trust and vision are not static givens. It turns out that teammates aren't mono-dimensional beings that only exist in a work context.

In their world, there's a lot of VUCA. They're betrayed in small and major ways by the people they trust. Their friends and families are having their world turned upside down.

And because it's common to be left in the dark about vision and to not get enough explicit and truthful feedback about how they're doing at work, they often don't know where they're going or how they're doing. Leaders swooping and pooping new initiatives and goals that are poorly contextualized can feel like continual whiplash, as can leaders quiet firing or quiet demoting people (intentionally or not) by taking back projects and responsibilities or redirecting them to someone else without adequate communication.

And aside from some of the dysfunction I mentioned, humans need and appreciate trust signals and affirmation that everything is still on track. Professionals crave the feedback that they're doing things well and are on track, just as much as they appreciate knowing the truth that they need to improve in some areas and are out of alignment.

When I share the standing imperative to lead from trust and vision with managers and clients, the honest ones speak up and comment about how much work it takes. When are they going to do their real work?

My response is always the same: this is your real work and, like team habits, you can't really opt out. Given the nature of work and human beings, if you're not intentionally leading from trust and vision, you're probably allowing distrust, scattered work, overreach, and general background anxiety to grow.

If you're a leader, you already know how hard it is to come back from a trust breach or to get people to be all in when there's low trust. You also already know how easy it is for teams to scatter, drift, or tread water when they're not aware of and aligned to your vision.

So, yes, it's work. But less work than not doing it, especially when we acknowledge that so much of the hard part of leadership is the social and emotional labor it takes to lead when things aren't going well.

I'm working on a book that will go much deeper on this topic, but I'm sharing the main idea now because it's so foundational to everything I teach and, honestly, I've been stuck without having the main thrust here.

I'll leave you with this today:

1. Take the top-of-mind team or leadership challenge that you started with before this post. Might the core problem be a matter of insufficient trust or unclear or unknown vision? How would you address it?

2. Consider the top-of-mind growth opportunity that keeps getting punted to someday. Have you articulated how it fits in with your vision? Have you given your team some time they can trust to pursue it?

3. What can you do in less than five minutes today that cultivates trust with your teammates and/or aligns them to your vision?

Whether it's a problem to solve, an opportunity to grow into, or just not being sure what your team needs, start with trust and vision.

You might be surprised to see what it unlocks.