In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 13, I am concluding our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being transparent.
Here is the link to the podcast.
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In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 13, I am concluding our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being transparent.
When I was younger, I remember a deodorant commercial with the tagline, “Never let them see you sweat!” The point of the commercial was that if you used their product as your deodorant and antiperspirant, it would prevent or cover perspiration in highly active or high-stress environments. The underlying message was that you would be able to hide the effects of activity or stress, looking like it was simple and easy for you. It was all about presenting an image that would make people think you had it all together.
Think also about two contrasting expressions. The first one, “What you see is what you get,” conveys the idea that what is visible on the outside is a reflection of and reveals what is on the inside. But that’s not necessarily true of everyone and everything, because often people or circumstances are not what they appear to be, either in a good way or in a bad way. That’s why there is the conflicting expression, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” which conveys the idea that what is on the outside is not necessarily a reflection of what’s on the inside. The deodorant commercial and these contradictory expressions all point to the question of transparency.
What is the question? It is this: is transparency a sign of weakness or a sign of strength for a leader? Brené Brown talked about this in her breakthrough book over a decade ago, Daring Greatly,” in which she talked about the value and importance of vulnerability. What she showed with research was that transparency is, actually, a measure of courage, and that cultivating vulnerability will make us better leaders. That doesn’t stop many of us from putting on a mask anyway.
Stemming from insecurity, in my school-age years and early in my leadership, I struggled with trying to make people think that made no mistakes, that I always had all the answers and always knew what I was doing. For me, that struggle began as early as 6th grade (or at least, that’s when I started to become aware of it), because that’s when I remember cheating on a 6th grade math homework assignment by changing an answer as the teacher was going over the answers in class, all because I didn’t want other students to think I didn’t know the right answer. As it turned out, the answer the teacher gave was incorrect, and my original answer had been the right one, and that experience seared itself into my memory. However, It still took me a while to learn and understand that people needed to see that I was just as flawed, if not more so, than anyone else.
You see, to be transparent is to be real. The alternative is to be fake (even deceitfully so). When you do that, people think you are hiding something, and you will lose trust. Yes, I think there are circumstances and information that need to be carefully guarded. My dad once said, “There is no shame in your struggle, but it’s still wise to be careful you who share it with.” But at the same time, if you always hide your vulnerability, you set yourself up as an unrealistic and unreachable example, because everyone else knows that they are not perfect, so if you try to make them think you are, they turn off and turn away.
Therefore, you need to be courageous enough to open yourself up, be vulnerable, and be real. When you do that, you may very well also be opening yourself up to criticism and judgment, but your impact will be greater! Share your struggle, tell the truth, and be genuine. When you do that, people will know that they can relate to you and trust you, and they will be much more willing to follow.
In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, wand discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 12, I am continuing our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being safe.
Here is the link to the podcast.
In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 12, I am continuing our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being safe.
Have you ever seen someone’s spirit get crushed? I have. I can remember sitting in a fast food restaurant when I was in my early 20’s, when a young boy at a nearby table spilled his soft drink. His mother immediately reacted by loudly and harshly belittling him with her words, and by publicly humiliating him. He was visibly crushed. If he learned anything from that experience, it most likely was that accidents are unforgivable and should never happen. He learned that, in his world, it was not safe to make a mistake.
When people believe that it is not safe to make a mistake or to fail, they will stop putting themselves at risk. They will stop trusting people, taking chances, putting in effort, and growing. Instead of taking a risk, or learning something new, or stepping up to the plate, they will revert to a place of self-preservation. They do this to protect themselves from the consequences that could come with failure, by removing the risk of failure altogether.
We need to remember, however, that failure plays an important role in the development of leadership. In fact, it plays an important role in the development of all people. For that reason, leaders need to have the right perspective regarding failure, so that they can intentionally harness its power for good, and a right perspective on failure includes three important ideas.
- Failure is certain. We are imperfect people, living in an imperfect world. We each have particular strengths, but we also each have particular weaknesses. We learn by experience. This combination of ideas guarantees us that we will make mistakes, and that at some point, we will fail. You can see illustrations of this everywhere you look – babies learning to walk, teenagers learning to drive, students taking tests, professional football quarterbacks throwing interceptions, and countless other examples. The reality is that people make mistakes, and this will always be true. And while failures and mistakes sometimes have the potential to be fatal, generally failure is defeating only when you let it keep you down. As General George Custer once said, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count, it’s how many times you get back up.”
- Failure is valuable. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Clearly, he viewed every mistake, every setback, as a learning opportunity. That’s what makes failure valuable. It provides an opportunity to learn, to change, and to grow. By implication, if you don’t learn from your failures, you won’t change and grow; rather, you will continue to make the same mistakes. This differentiation is one of the attributes that characterizes leaders – they are able to learn from their mistakes and improve. However, the underlying context that makes this work is an environment that allows someone the opportunity to learn from mistakes. It only makes sense, then, that if it is not safe to make mistakes and learn from them, people will avoid behaviors that bring the possibility of failure, and therefore will miss the opportunity for growth that comes from those same failures.
- It can be safe to fail. Given both the certainty and the value of failure, it becomes important for leaders to cultivate a culture that makes it safe to try and fail, and there are three steps that can be taken that help to ensure this:
- First, provide opportunities for people to try. Experience is such an important part of growth and development, but experience only comes when someone has the opportunity to try – to lead a project, manage a task, facilitate a discussion, plan an event, and so on. What we have to keep in mind is that (like a baby learning to walk) people will stumble in the process of learning something new and stretching themselves.
- Therefore, the second step is to have a response that is instructive, not destructive. Use it as a teachable experience, one from which they can learn. Take time to evaluate the causes and contributing factors, the mistakes that were made, and provide guidance that will ultimate produce greater growth, confidence, and development.
- Finally, the third step is to give people a chance to get back up after they have fallen, to “get back in the saddle” and try again. The goal is that they have learned from their failures and become more competent and skilled, which will be better for everyone. And if they don’t learn, then you have; you now know that they are beyond their limits of performance, at least at this point in their personal development, and therefore you, the leader, can choose to not give them those opportunities again.
President Theodore Roosevelt once declared, “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” Failure is an important part of life. Make it safe for people to fail and then to learn. When you make it safe for them to do so, they will learn to trust you, and will therefore be freed up to try more and do more, which will benefit both of you in the end.
”Your walk talks and your talk talks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks.”
In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential.
to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 11, I am continuing our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being consistent.
Here is the link to the podcast.
In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 11, I am continuing our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being consistent.
“Your walk talks and your talk talks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks.” I heard my father say this many times when I was growing up, in his effort to teach the importance of being genuine. The lesson reinforced to me on numerous occasions was that my words (what I say) and my actions (what I do) need to match. In fact, the reality is that people will judge me more by my actions than by my words.
As I grew into an adult, I eventually realized that I had unconsciously taken on many of my father’s characteristics that I had learned by watching his “walk.” Interestingly, I think the same thing is true in organizations: people within the organization, over time, take on many of the characteristics of the leader. I’m reminded of the classic parenting line, “Do as I say and not as I do,” which we all know is not what really happens; we tend to do what we see. That same conclusion was reached by Albert Bandura in his studies on behavior modification and observational learning, most notably in his classic “Bobo doll” study.
One of the primary applications of this truth is the importance of consistency in leadership. In essence, do what you say you will do. I found strong affirmation of this in a recent study by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, which was undertaken to identify “what separates the competent from the exceptional individual performers” using over 50,000 360-degree evaluations on 4150+ individual contributors over a five-year time period. Stated in an article in the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, they said, “Walk the Talk. It’s easy for some people to casually agree to do something and then let it slip their minds. Most people would say that this is mere forgetfulness. We disagree. We believe it is dishonest behavior. If you commit to doing something, barring some event truly beyond your control, you should follow through. The best individual contributors are careful not to say one thing and do another. They are excellent role models for others. This is the competency for which the collective group of 4,158 individuals we studied received the highest scores. That means, essentially, that following through on commitments is table stakes. But exceptional individual contributors go far beyond the others in their scrupulous practice of always doing what they say they will do.”
Consistency in what you do is one of the most important factors in your credibility as a leader. It gives you trust, makes you believable. John Kotter made the same connection between consistency and credibility when he said, “Another big challenge in leadership efforts is credibility – getting people to believe the message. Many things contribute to credibility: the track record of the person delivering the message, the content of the message itself, the communicator’s reputation for integrity and trustworthiness, and the consistency between words and deeds.” I had the opportunity to live this out in one organization that had an absence of trust between leadership and employees when I arrived. In my first year, I became very intentional about communicating publicly what I would be doing (both minor and major things), and then making sure that people saw that I did those things. I wanted them to know that I would do what I said I would do, so that they could trust me. My efforts were affirmed when, during an evaluation process at the end of the first year, the consensus of the employees indicated that “trust of leadership” was one of the most positive aspects of the year.
I want to go one layer deeper in this principle. The consistency of doing what you say will do is critical to effective leadership, but it will really only work well if it is genuine, and it is only genuine if it is who you are. In other words, it’s not simply about your actions matching your words, but your life matching your values. Jim Collins calls this “consistency of action – consistency with values, consistency with long-term goals, consistency with performance standards, consistency of method, consistency over time.” Consistency begins with what you say, is demonstrated by what you do, but is validated in who you are. It is actually at this deeper level that you will find the strength and courage to resist the pressure to compromise in ways that make you inconsistent, especially when circumstances are difficult.
Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of Behavior Modification. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, A. (2003). On the Psychosocial Impact and Mechanisms of Spiritual Modeling. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 13(3), 167.
Collins, J., & Hansen, M. T. (2011). Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership. (2011). Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
Zenger, J., & Folkman, J. (2014, April 11, 2014). The Behaviors that Define A-Players.
In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 10, I am starting our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being honest.
Here is the link to the podcast.
In this “Be A Better Leader” series of website articles and podcasts, I am talking about a variety of attributes, characteristics, and skills that are essential to effective leadership, and discussing how they are reflected in practice. I have grouped these things into five categories of what a leader ought to be, which is why I am labeling them as the “Be-attitudes of Better Leadership.” These five categories are: “Be Genuine,” “Be Relational,” “Be Trustworthy,” Be Knowledgeable,” and “Be Excellent.” We have already looked at being genuine and being relational, so today in part 10, I am starting our discussion of the third category, “Be Trustworthy,” and more specifically, I am talking about the importance of being honest.
In the classic Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart plays the role of George Bailey, son of the founder of the Bailey Building and Loan Association. George’s life is marked with a number of moments of self-sacrifice and responsibility, but it is the contrast between his character and that of Mr. Potter, local businessman and bank owner who serves as the chief competitor to the Building and Loan, that provides a striking picture of integrity.
At some point in the story, George’s Uncle Billy takes a deposit from the Building and Loan to Mr. Potter’s bank, but in a moment of emotional response to Mr. Potter, he unwittingly misplaces the deposit in the banker’s folded newspaper. This is where the contrast in integrity becomes so apparent. When Mr. Potter realizes that Uncle Billy has “lost” the deposit, he seizes the opportunity to force the Building and Loan into bankruptcy and scandal. His lack of integrity is on display when he covers up the fact that he has the lost money, and tries to deceive George into selling out. George, on the other hand, refuses to compromise, resulting in a night of despair and potentially tragic choices, but culminating in the love and support of his family and friends.
Since the 1980’s, James Kouzes and Barry Posner have conducted extensive, global research on organizational leadership that has revealed the significant importance of integrity in leaders. The results of their research, presented in the book The Leadership Challenge (2002), have identified five practices of exemplary leadership, those behaviors that were consistently present among successful and influential leaders: model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. But they also identified those things that followers most expected from their leaders. Having surveyed over 75,000 people around the world, they have discovered that one characteristic is expected more than any other: honesty. Their results have revealed that in almost every survey they have conducted, “honesty has been selected more often than any other leadership characteristic; overall, it emerges as the single most important ingredient in the leader-constituent relationship.” They go on to say, “When people talk to us about the qualities they admire in leaders, they often use ‘integrity’ and ‘character’ as synonymous with honesty. No matter what the setting, everyone wants to be fully confident in their leaders, and to be fully confident they have to believe that their leaders are people of strong character and solid integrity . . . nearly 90 percent of constituents want their leaders to be honest above all else.” The clear implication is that integrity matters. People will not follow a leader they do not trust, and their level of trust is directly connected to the leader’s integrity.
Why is there such a strong connection between integrity and effective leadership? To begin with, integrity is an attribute of someone’s character that is directly connected to consistency (which we will talk more about in another post in this series). In other words, when your beliefs and actions are not consistent with each other, you are viewed as hypocritical, but when your walk matches your talk (the essence of consistency in character), you are viewed as having integrity. People will then believe what you say because they believe who you are. This leads to credibility, or the confidence that you can be believed because of the integrity that you have demonstrated. Credibility, in turn, is followed by trust, and people will follow someone they trust.
Therefore the lesson is that integrity is crucial for effective leadership. And it must be something that is demonstrated over time in all circumstances. It cannot be a characteristic that you demonstrate in some circumstances, but not in others, picking and choosing when you think it will benefit you to act honestly like a jacket that you put on or take off to fit the mood or the environment. People will very quickly identify that as disingenuous and dishonest. Rather it must be part of who you are all the time. For integrity to be believed, it must be genuine.
When I was young, I once heard integrity defined as the characteristic of choosing to do what is right even when no one is looking. That idea must be true of your actions in all circumstances; whether it is public or not, whether it is easy or not, whether it personally benefits you or not, you need to demonstrate integrity. Do it in the big things, but also do it in the little things, in your daily choices of what you do, or what you say, or what you allow. If people know that you have integrity, they will trust you enough to follow you. So regardless of what type of leader you are, what your circumstances are, or what the environment is in which you lead, integrity must be a genuine and integral part of who you are, how you live your life, and how you lead. To be an effective leader, you must lead with integrity, because when your life reflects integrity, people will be willing and able to trust you.
Kouzes, J. M., and Posner, B. Z. (2002). The Leadership Challenge (3rd Ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.