Everyday Leadership | Trust

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That's STORM to 51555. Bernie and Cheryl will both be back soon and we hope you're already enjoying this new series. Today, Major Murphy discusses the importance of trust when it comes to leadership. Hi, I'm Megan Hoffer and if you're enjoying Words of Life, I want to invite you to check out another show brought to you by the Salvation Army. Heartbeat is a one-minute show about real life.

Heartbeat touches on topics ranging from finances and prayer to dating and mental health. If you're looking for a short message of hope to challenge you and brighten up your day, head to Heartbeat wherever you get your podcasts or visit salvationarmysoundcast.org. Good morning, Major Murphy. Good morning. Good to see you again. Good to see you again for another edition of Everyday Leadership. Yes, and I think we have a very good topic to talk about today.

What's our topic? Trust. Trust. Yeah, what comes to mind when I say trust? To trust somebody means I feel safe with them. I love that and we're going to talk about that for a moment. Safety, yes, trust builds safety.

Anything else? I sense consistency, sometimes in the good way and the bad way, but sometimes you trust somebody to be unreliable, I guess. It's consistency in that sense. That's one thing I learned about trust that I hadn't thought about before was that, yes, you can trust someone to do the wrong thing and you can feel confident in the way that you interact with them because you know that the outcome is going to be a specific way.

So there is kind of safety in that as well, isn't there? You know that I had a, we won't go down that trail, but you're right. You're very right. Right. So consistency. Yeah. Do you need another word here?

Do you have one more? I, I can, I guess consistency goes with knowing what to expect from them, knowing or believing that they have my best interest at heart. Yeah. That kind of goes along with safety as well, but knowing and trusting that they're going to make the call that's for the better of the people, not just for themselves.

Right. I think when I think about trust, I think about having confidence in someone or something, right? In expecting the outcome to be one way or the other, right? And I think trust, we also sometimes think about belief when we put our trust in someone, we put our belief in them, we put our faith in them. There is a, there is a very good definition of trust.

Let me read it for you. Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or some thing, right? To expect or be assured of an outcome that all relates to trust. And I think in leadership, when we think about trust, we also consider that, that in order to trust someone or when we trust someone, we're putting the care of ourselves in their hands, right? Very much so.

Yeah. If we want to other people to believe that we can care for them or guide them correctly or appropriately, then they need to have trust in us. I'd flip that around and say, for this purpose, we would say that we want to be trustworthy individuals, right? Because we can kind of manipulate trust. People can have trust in us when we don't deserve it.

So really what we want to focus in on maybe is not just trust itself, but also our trustworthiness. Yeah. You know that I work in the creative realm. So a lot of times I'm working with actors and with dancers and I'm pulling in choreographers and directors.

And one of the big things that I'm looking for is how they take care of the artists. Are they going to ask so much of my dancers that their bodies are in jeopardy or are they going to set up an environment where my actors don't feel like they're safe to try new things or be creative and it plays a big part in how we want to put people in front of those that we care about. Do I trust you to take care of them?

Yeah. We can think of trust kind of as an academic exercise, but I believe when we really hone down into it, it does come down to that safety, right? The way that we care for other people or like you said very clearly, how much faith or trust we have in somebody to care for either the people that we put in front of them or the situations as well, it really is a safety care proposition. The verse that I like from scripture is Proverbs 3.5, does that come to mind very quickly for you? Trust in the Lord. Yeah, trust in the Lord with all your heart. What I like about that is it pulls in the understanding of you can have confidence in the Lord, you can trust, you can have confidence because the Lord has been proven, right?

Proven. His actions have been confirmed, therefore, the psalmist writes, you can trust. And I think that's where we want to be in that realm of trustworthiness is that we want to be proven.

We want to be confirmed. We want people to come in front of us and understand that based on past experience with us, they can put their faith or belief in what we're going to say, how we're going to treat them, care for them, decisions that we're going to make. That's very important to leadership.

Well, Major, can you give us some reasons why trust is so important in leadership? Yes. There is, make sure I get it right.

There was a global trust study by the Trust Outlook, it's an organization that does that kind of thing. Who knew? Yes. And this is what they found. This is what they reported. The number one reason people give for wanting to work for an organization is trusted leadership. The number one reason.

Number one. It's above salary, right? Above any raises. It's above benefits. It's above more autonomy. It's above the environment at work, like having a fun work environment, the number one reason people said they wanted to be here or go there was because of the trust, the confidence they had in leadership.

You already touched on the first one. Being trustworthy is so important because safety is so important, right? People want to be in a safe environment. Their psychological safety, which is not the same as trust, right? Not the same kind of safety that trust brings, but they are connected. Trust is about how we view each other, how we relate to each other, and that does have a part to play in our psychological safety. So trust is important in that matter as well. And I really believe that the type of influence we have on situations or people is related to trust. If we want to have a positive influence, then people have to be able to have confidence in us.

They have to be able to trust us. And lastly, we talked about relationships before. Relationships are kind of this glue that holds everything together, right? Ideally, the way that we relate to each other matters a great deal on the amount of influence we're going to have.

We talked about that in detail. What often hinders this connection is a lack of trust. And without trust, then our efforts quickly disintegrate, and you've probably seen it.

It turns into kind of a confrontational or a competition rather than all of us pulling together and moving the same direction. All of those kinds of things hinge on trust. It's extremely important.

And it's hard to separate it. If you've lost trust or lost faith in a leader, it's in one setting. Let's say it's only on one project or one situation. It's hard to separate that from another project or another situation because that feeling of trust or distrust carries through in that whole relationship.

Right. I think what's important for us to remember, and it's a heavy concept, is that our trustworthiness increases or decreases with every encounter. Like you just said, people build trust in us over time with the encounters that we have, the decisions that we make that affect them or that they see affect other people or situations. And sometimes, right, we make a bad decision, right? And trust is eroded a little bit. So what's key is consistency over time, ensuring that we are always considering are we trustworthy. Can people find confidence in us and in this context, in our leadership?

So we're all human. What happens when we're inconsistent, when we break trust, when we've made a bad choice? What can we do to build that trust back up?

Let's make that today's action, okay? So when we do, when we do, because we all have, when we do, let's be transparent about it, right? Let's admit, I apologize, I'm sorry, in this situation, and we need to be specific, right?

In this situation, in this interaction, I did this and that was not helpful or that was wrong or I, you know, whatever it may be. Let's be honest about what happened and recognize that trust has been eroded, that we are not as trustworthy in their eyes as we should be or as we were before. That's the first step. We don't want to stop there though, because I don't want to be the individual who just goes around apologizing for what I've done wrong, right? So the second step is very important. We need to make another commitment and we need to keep it, right?

I'm sorry. Here's what I'm going to do. You can count on me in this instance. And when we do that, we consistently build trust, which is very important. Thank you so much, Major.

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