Sue Dyer - The Trusted Leader: Use the Partnering Approach to Become the Trusted Leader People Want to Follow

CHAPTER 2:

How Fear Makes It Impossible to Lead

He who does not trust enough will NOT be trusted.

Lao Tzu

Fear Shows Up as Poor Communication

Over a ten-year period, I conducted a personal anecdotal study. I asked over one thousand team leaders, From your experience, what makes one project succeed, and another fail? Over 95% of the respondents said that good communication was the reason for their success, and poor communication was the reason for their failure. After working with these teams, and learning more, I gained some real insights from this study: fear routinely shows up as poor communication, and trust appears as good communication. I realized that communication was just a symptom of the level of trust they had on their project team, and communication is what people see, because trust and fear play out in our behaviors.

When you think about your business, remember: the number one way that fear shows up is as poor communication. And things tend to play out from there. When people dont speak openly, the rest of the team is left in the dark to try and figure things out. People are often too shy to ask questions, especially if they are confused or fearful. This is stressful, because inevitably they are afraid that they will guess wrongand of course they will, because they are making assumptions in a vacuum. Fear makes it impossible to lead. You simply cant lead if people arent willing to talk and share their perspective or concerns. In this atmosphere, our monkey mind makes up stories about why others arent sharing. This in turn creates more fear, and the vicious cycle continues to snowball.

The Leadership Continuum

One dreary Saturday morning 15 years ago, I sat at my desk at home, looking out at the rain falling. I was preparing partnering sessions for three different teams. All the teams were overwhelmed by conflict and commotion. The people were smart, seasoned, and capable, but they just could not get out of their own way. While I sat there looking at the rain, I asked myself, If I had a magic wand that I could use to change everything for these teams, what would I change? The answer came immediately: I would change how we lead our teams and businesses.

The teams leaders seemed to add fuel to the fire, and even expected their people to put up a fight to gain as much as they could against the other side. Some wanted to win. Some wanted to protect. Some wanted to make them pay. Some wanted to compete and prove they were better. This prevailing adversarial mindset was rampant and undermined even the best and brightest teams.

I had worked with over a thousand different teams by this point, and I saw this pattern every day. I also saw it in the expectations of the leaders, and the way leaders were trained and mentored. They were told their role was to drive the team to achieve the goals or key performance indicators. To make the sales and profit numbers. To make sure that their team was on time and on budget, and that the quality was high. Not to mess up!

I thought to myself that morning: If we could change the paradigm from being adversarial and fear based, to one of TRUST, oh my, that would change everything. The Trusted Leader Continuum was born that day.

Figure 1 : Leadership Continuum

Most people, when they think of a leader, think of someone who has authentic power. They are the person in charge. They are the decision maker. And therefore, they are the leader. But my definition of a Trusted Leader is a little bit different. In order to be a leader, you must have followers, and following is 100% voluntary. People only follow you when they trust you.