How to Build Leadership Trust Quickly

Which breaks faster, trust in someone's competence or trust in their character? Well, the answer might surprise you, but once you understand it, you're gonna know exactly where you need to focus your attention as a leader. Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Education Leaders The Chat topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you.

As an organizational coach, I've helped thousands of leaders worldwide lead with greater confidence, make better decisions and create winning teams. And on this show, we explore some of the strategies that are gonna help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership. This episode is supported by the International Center for Coaching in Education and the International Equivalent Association. Stay tuned to learn more.

So let me ask you something. When you think about trust, what is it that comes to mind? Maybe you're thinking about integrity. Maybe you're thinking about honesty.

Maybe it's following through on promises, that kind of thing. But there's something really interesting here. So Stephen Covey, he's the guy who wrote the seven habits of highly effective people. He's on my bookshelf right behind me.

He said that trust isn't just one thing. It's actually two separate dimensions working together. Firstly, we've got trust in character. The moral stuff, do you keep your word, your integrity, that kind of thing.

Do you have good intentions? Can people rely on you? And second, you've got trust in competence. That's capability stuff, right?

Do you know what you're doing? Can you deliver results? And do you actually have the experience to solve the challenges in front of you? Both matter.

You need both, but they both work slightly differently. So here's my question to you. Trust in character, trust in competence. Which one do you think is quicker to build?

Character or competence? So if you said competence, you are right. Competence is actually pretty quick to establish. You know, maybe when you first started listening into Education Leaders podcast, and if you're a new listener, welcome, it's great to have you here.

But when you click to listen, you probably assumed a level of competence with me, right? I've got a podcast, he must be fairly competent. It's a credibility marker. Or maybe you go to a conference, you see someone speak, now you can assume quickly a level of competence.

Maybe someone's in a leadership position, their position denotes competence, or maybe they've got qualifications that you know about. So these are all competence trust markers. And in a school position, you can establish this quite quick, maybe you run a meeting really effectively, or maybe there's like a timetable issue at the beginning of the year, and you manage to solve it, you demonstrate your competency quite quick. The problem is with character, it takes a long time.

You can't do shortcuts, you build it one interaction at a time, one kept promise at a time. People need to know you to trust you. We talk about that a lot, right? It takes a while to develop.

But what if we flip that question? Which one do you think is the quickest to break? Character or competence? That's right, character can break like that.

It can be one moment, one lie you told, one time you promised something and it didn't happen. One time that you threw someone under the bus to protect yourself. You can have been building your character for years and it can be shattered in minutes. Competence is a lot more forgiving, right?

You mess up one week, some people can forgive you, bad day, bad day at work, a bit distracted, whatever, whatever, whatever. I wanna share with you very vulnerably something that happened to me. I hope this resonates with you. So I used to be in a leadership position in a school and I worked across two buildings in a school.

I had like a main base and then I had another base where I just went to once a week. And when I went over to that other place for my one day a week in this other building, I obviously didn't have an office there so I shared with another leader there. And that leader kindly allowed me just to share the office space, I wasn't in there too much but just when I needed to sit down, do a bit of admin or take a few meetings, I'd sit in that room. Now at the time when I was in this room, I was obviously observing a lot of the behaviors of this leader who invited me in there as well.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, certain behaviors that I saw in that room for me didn't really match my expectations of what professionalism should be. I heard this person talking sometimes in quite unprofessional ways about staff, the general level of conversation, it made me feel a bit uncomfortable at times. So I just had this unsureness. I didn't really need to act on it, it wasn't really that important to me at the time but certainly it left a bit of a mark on this person's character, in my view at least.

Now when we fast forward a bit, something happened in the school where a quite high level senior leadership position came up for advertisement. And this person who I'd been sharing an office with went for the position. And my line manager at the time, knowing that I worked over there came and asked me, so Shane, tell me like this person's applied, what's your sense of their character? And in that moment I told my line manager, I told him, okay, these are the concerns that I've had and this is what I've experienced.

So this is what made me feel uncomfortable at the time and that might be useful information to you. So I shared with this line manager quite open and he said, thanks Shane, that's really useful just building a context. Anyway, he went and gave the interview to this person and in the interview, he said to this person, so Shane tells me, you know what happened here. I'm sure you just cringe just like I did.

He then described what I'd said to him about my feelings, about the way they operated. And then afterwards came to me and said, Shane, just to give you a heads up, this is what happened and this is what I shared. And I was, you know, I was pretty shocked to be honest and I was kind of like, thanks mate, that's great. Like now I've got a leadership challenge to do.

Now I of course went into a whirlwind inside and of course the first thing I did was thought I need to sit down with this person and talk to them. And I did and I arranged a chat with them and apologized very, very quickly. I'd had to do a lot of reflection. I was a young leader at the time and I thought, actually Shane, what you've done here, you broke some confidence and that's a problem anyway.

I apologized and we never really truly repaired that sadly, that professional relationship. What was interesting in that moment, the reason I tell you that story is because in that moment where my line manager shared with that person their trust in me was broken. Their trust in my character was broken. Even though we'd built up a good relationship over many years inside and outside of school, the trusting character was broken and it never fully repaired.

Equally with my line manager, maybe my trust with him was a little bit broken in that moment too. And it just speaks to how quick trust can be broken in this situation. A learning moment that stayed with me quite heavy. This episode is supported by the International Center for Coaching in Education.

And I am actually on their current cohort. I don't recommend anything I don't believe in and I am genuinely excited to be strengthening my coaching practice this year. The ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching is built specifically for senior leaders in international schools. It's fully online, really practical and honestly, learning alongside other school leaders to get the context we work in as being brilliant.

If coaching is something you want to develop properly, not just dabbling, head to theicce.org or click the link in the show notes and listeners to this podcast get an exclusive 5% discount using the code SHANE5, that's SHANE5. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. The ICA have been around for 30 years now, championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools.

And what I really love is that right at their core is the model for improving learning. This is a model focused on the learning experience and they have got tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours. If you're interested, head to internationalcurriculum.com.

So we've got this interesting situation, like competence builds fast, but it breaks slowly, character builds slowly, but it breaks fast. So what do we do with that? I'm gonna share with you a tool today that has been really useful for me going forward, really spurred on by that moment and how I think things through. And this is what I would call a transparency framework.

So here's where most leaders get it wrong. They focus all their energy on establishing competence. They want people to think that they've got the answers. They want to look capable.

They want to look in control. Like you know exactly what you're doing and you know what, it makes sense, you're new, you're trying to prove yourself maybe in this position. You don't wanna look weak, you don't wanna look uncertain, but there's a problem here because when you're pretending to have all the answers, when you hide your uncertainty or when you're projecting a false confidence, you're actually starting to undermine your trust and character because people aren't stupid, right? They can tell when you're bluffing.

So the alternative to this is transparency. Transparency is, in my experience, the fastest way for you to build trusting character while you're still building that competence. And it works because it's based on honesty, not capability. So here's a framework, three parts.

Part one, you're gonna share your thinking process, especially when you're uncertain. So have you ever been asked for something and your immediate response might be as a good leader to say, I'll think about it and I'll get back to you? Well, instead of doing that, try this. Try saying, I hear you, I'm torn between option A and option B.

Option A will be quicker, option B will be more thorough. I'm leaning towards B at the minute because I think quality matters here, but I think I need a bit of time to check our timeline and I need to check it with the senior leadership team first. I'm gonna let you know by Friday. That was very different to how think about it and get back to you.

And what happened there is you've admitted in that situation uncertainty, you shared your reasoning, you've committed to a timeline, you didn't pretend to have the answer, but you did demonstrate your character because you are honest and you were showing follow through. So part one is sharing your thinking process, really important, especially when you're uncertain. Part two is admit what you don't know and then commit to finding out. So this is really simple, but many leaders, especially new leaders struggle with it.

They think admitting that they don't know something makes them look incompetent. I'm telling you, it doesn't. It makes you look honest. So try this instead.

Here's what you might say if you don't know something. I don't know the answer to that. Here's how I'm gonna find out. Here's what I'm gonna get back to you.

Three sentences. I don't know. Here's how I'll find out. And here's when I'll get back to you.

You've just built trust in your character while being completely honest about your competence gap. And part three is explaining your decisions, I would say. When you have to make an unpopular call and let's face it as leaders, we do it. You don't just announce it.

Walk people through your thinking. Walk people through it. Put them into your shoes. So we're speaking to an art teacher.

I know you wanted more budget for your art department and I wanted that too. But we've got three competing priorities and we've only got money for one. I chose literacy intervention because the data that I was looking at showed that that's our biggest gap right now. And I hate that art has to wait, but this is where we are.

And if anything changes budget-wise, art will be next on my list. So here you're explaining, you didn't change the decision. You didn't make everyone happy, but you did show your character through transparency. And look, people might disagree with the choice you made, but at least they can trust in your reasoning.

And that's the framework. Three things, share your thinking, admit what you don't know and explain your decisions. And the thing is there's a reason transparency is so powerful because first it builds trust in character fast because character is about honesty, isn't it? It's about integrity.

When you are transparent, you demonstrate both every single time. Secondly, it protects the other side. It protects your competence because when you admit you don't know something, people don't think you're incompetent. They actually just think you're honest and honesty builds character which matters more in the long run.

And third, I think this is really important. So when I'm really passionate about at the minute, it reduces your cognitive load. Once you systematize transparency and you start to operate in that way, you stop worrying about whether people trust you, you stop second guessing your decisions and you just follow that framework, you share your thinking, you have to meet your gaps, you explain your decision, done. And finally, I think this is really important.

It models behavior you want from your team. If you want the teachers in your school to be honest about what's working, what isn't? Well, starting with you being honest, that's a pretty good place to start. If this resonates with you, I just wanna say this is one of the things I teach on my Education Leaders Intensive.

If you're thinking I need to systematize more leadership fundamentals like this, then check it out, Education Leaders Intensive. I've got my first one starting in January. It's 10 weeks together. We'll work through some of the core leadership skills that nobody teaches, but everyone needs, just like what we've just talked about now.

You can find a link to that in the show notes or go to my website, shaneleaning.com forward slash intensive. Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, production assistant, Skylar Rose-Sturman, and for the original music by Guillermo Silva.

And thank you so, so much for tuning in today. I hope it was helpful. And if we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. If you're interested in the work of...