Episode 298 Transcript:

 In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to build trust fast as a new leader.

We’re gonna talk about the playbook that they never gave you. Welcome to this episode. This is number 298.

This is how they said it goes. Trust takes time. Trust, keep proving yourself and eventually they’ll trust you. I’m gonna say wrong. While it does sound good and reasonable enough, what’s actually true for new leaders is this trust is not a reward you earn after months of good behavior.

Trust is a signal that you broadcast in the first 72 hours, and while you are busy listening and learning the culture and not stepping on toes, here is what happens. Behind your back. The team is deciding if you’re weak or strong. The old card is calculating how to box you in how to make sense of you.

Your boss is trying to ensure that they made the right hiring decision and all along the clock is tick. Research from the center of Creative leadership shows that 87% of a leader’s perceived effectiveness is locked in within the first 90 days, and most of that perception.

Is formed in the first two weeks. So the real game when it comes to trust in the workplace isn’t just earning trust over time. The real game is trust velocity. How fast can you establish credibility, predictability, and authority before that window closes? So today in this episode, I’m going to share with you the two asymmetries that explain why new leaders can get eaten alive if trust isn’t there. We’re gonna talk about a frame control rule that you can apply to conversations.

And then we’re gonna talk about the four level trust response ladder to go from the new guy to the captain.

A lot of what I’m sharing here is backed by behavioral science and what actually works behind closed doors at high performing companies. So if you ever walked into a new role and you felt like you were on trial, and that applies to most of us, then this episode is for you.

My name is Ramona Shaw and this is The Manager Track podcast.

 most new leaders don’t fail because they’re incompetent. They fail because they’re playing a different game than everyone else in the room. So you might be thinking you are in an information exchange, which is why you’re listening and you’re learning. They on the other hand, are in a power negotiation.

You are asking yourself, how can I understand this team? They’re asking, how much can we get away with, how much will they go to bad for me?

There are two asymmetries that you must understand if you want to build trust fast. The first one is the history asymmetry. They have years of context in most cases, right? You have a title and a first day. And they may use that history to push back. It sounds like, Hey, we tried that in 2019 and it didn’t work because of the vendor situation and the reorg and the economy and do.dot, the list goes on.

Now what are they actually doing? They’re using that as a way to prevent change. So when you walk in and you say, Hey, I’m still learning. What do you all think we should do? You may think you’re being humble and collaborative ’cause you believe you’re in that information exchange, but they’re in a power negotiation.

So what DMA hear is, Hey, please tell me what to do. Let me give you another example. Let, you might say, Hey, I’d love to understand the history of this project before I make any changes. Sounds so reasonable, but here’s what I might hear. I’m not going to change anything unless you tell me to.

That’s what your comment is translated in their head. Now here is a different framing that you could try.

Here’s what I see in the data relevant to this project, and here is where we are going. Now, can you tell me what obstacles I should know about? that way? You just flipped the role from being a student to being a captain in one sentence, right? Even if this is your first week on the job and you don’t know much yet,

I assume that you know directionally where the team is going or where the org is going or where your boss wants you to take that team. Now you walk into that meeting, you’ve done some research on that project.

You looked into the data, you looked at some analysis, you looked at the project goals, descriptions. And so with that, you can now use that frame to say, I’ve done my homework.

Here’s what I know. Here’s where we’re going, and in our conversation, let’s focus on how we built the bridge. Now of course, there is a time and place to simply learn and listen. Without being directive, but new leaders often spend too much time doing that. And the shift into the directive or what we call the captain role happens too late.

So the history as symmetry was the first one. Now let’s look at the second one. Certainty Asymetry, Harvard Research on dominance and status shows this. People who display high certainty and low emotional reactivity are perceived as higher status even when they’re factually wrong.

The person who sounds the most sure gets treated as the most competent, not the person who is the most right now. While there’s something sad to that, and I wish it wasn’t, so it is the truth. We wanna use that to our benefit in the sense that

we obviously don’t wanna lie, and we obviously don’t want to pretend we know something when we don’t.

But when you walk in hedging every statement because you want to be a hundred percent accurate and a hundred percent certain, and you say, I think maybe we could possibly consider potentially looking at you are actually broadcasting weakness. Meanwhile, a, let’s say difficulty year leader walks in and says, that won’t work here.

Zero evidence, but complete confidence. They just took over your frame. So the one sentence takeaway in the first 90 days certainty beats accuracy.

Now let’s talk about the frame control rule for new leaders. The rule is this, whoever controls the why, controls the trust, and whoever controls the trust controls the team. So when you walk into a new role, everyone’s kind of running a test in the background. Can I push this person? Will they fold? Are they actually in charge or they’re just holding a title, can they advocate on my behalf? Are they able to push back towards senior leaders who have unreasonable demands? Do they know what they’re doing?

So not only are they succeeding, but I’m succeeding too, and with them being here is gonna help me and my career. Or is this gonna be dead end and then I’m gonna fight myself in dry ice? They’re all asking themselves this and as they’re trying to figure this out, they are testing you and they might be testing with helpful context.

It might be, hey, some honest feedback. Or they might say things such as, Hey, the way we do things here, dot dot, now, if you take that at face value and you defend or explain or justify you will fail that test.

Now I wanna, make this a little bit more practical. So I’m gonna share a fictional story. What do they say loosely, based on true events. Okay. Let’s imagine this. Elena is a new VP of a division where things have gotten a bit messy. They’d gone through three leaders in three years. Revenue was tanking and the morale was basically non-existent. The one guy holding things together was Marcus and he was a top performer.

Now, unofficially, he kind of been running the show and he might not have even tried to get your VP role. Now at the first All hands meeting with the division, , ENA is kicking off the meeting and she’s introducing herself and as she talks about what she’s trying to achieve and where she wants to go with this division, Marcus kinda leans back in his chair. He crossed his arms and he said, Hey. You know, no offense, but we’ve had a lot of people, roll through here with big ideas.

Tell us why should we believe that you’re any different? Now, we don’t know exactly what Marcus’s motive is here, but in a situation like this, the room probably goes quiet. Everyone looks at Elena, and it was that moment that was going to either build a lot of trust. Or either prevent trust from being built or road trust. And Elena was fully aware, this wasn’t her first rodeo. Now, most people might jump in with sort of their resume.

You know, I understand your hesitations, but let me tell you, here’s where I’ve worked, here’s what I’ve done. Here’s how I know I can help you. They’re trying to

proof that they belong and that they were the right person in that seat. But Ena didn’t bite. She looked at Marcus and said, You are right. You shouldn’t trust me yet. I haven’t earned it. What I do know is that we’re losing 2 million a quarter, and my job is to turn that around so we can spend the next hour talking about everything that went wrong with the last three leaders, or we can talk about how we’re going to hit our Q3 targets.

That is gonna be up to you. and in that moment the room went quiet again. Marcus dropped his arms and he said, fair enough, right? She didn’t win him over right then and there, but she did something really important. She made it clear to him and everyone else in the room that she wasn’t going to let anyone else define how she leads.

She reframed that conversation. And in order to build trust quickly, being able to take a conversation and reframe it so that it serves your purpose is a key skill to develop so you’re not just buying into someone else’s frame that they’ve placed on you, where you find yourself now in a defending argument or in a way where you have to justify something, you reframe it to have a conversation that’s actually useful for you and obviously beneficial to the team or the org overall.

Now let’s move on and talk about the trust response ladder. This is a simple model to look at.

Four levels of building credibility when you’re new and someone tests you, you have four ways to respond. Now, most leaders can, I only use sort of the first two, the really great ones they use the last and final one. I’m gonna walk through all four. The first one is the pleaser. This is sort of level one. You try to buy trust by giving everyone what they want.

You might say yes to requests. You let the loudest voice set the agenda in a meeting, you avoid any decision that might upset someone. And what the team learns all along is that. You’ll do whatever they want you to do.

Now, yes, in terms of trust, you might be liked, but you will not be respected that way. That is level one, the pleaser. Level two is the resume recit and at this level you try to establish credibility by talking about your past. You mentioned your old company. You drop credentials in the conversations or what you’ve achieved.

You tell stories about how you did things at the previous company. All those things sort of like set the bar like, don’t mess with me, I know what I’m doing. So what the team learns is this person you is insecure. They’re not sure they belong here, which is why they have to bring that up and sort of try to convince us of it.

In terms of trust, while you might think that every credential that you list and mention makes you look more trustworthy, it actually does the opposite. It’s very likely that it makes you look more uncertain and hence less trustworthy.

So the first two levels here, the pleaser and the resume recite are short term strategies that we apply because we think they’re gonna help us gain trust. Level three and four are more longer term.

Place level three is when you put your head down and you hit your numbers and you hope that people will notice you work harder than everyone you deliver results. Often, quietly, and you wait for trust to develop naturally. Now what the team learns is that you are competent and that gives you trust, but you are not in charge.

So yes, this works over time and eventually. But you might not have eventually, by the time you’ve proven yourself, the power structure, ’cause like who is going to lead? Who’s in charge here, might have already formed up there and you are not in it. It’s taken too long for you to build that trust. That’s the downside.

Level four is the trust investor, and this is when we give trust before they actually earned it. And yes, it’s a bit counterintuitive but it is backed by science.

There’s a study called the Trust Game Study. It’s by Burke, DeKalb. And McCabe from 1995. It showed that when someone extends trust first, meaning they take a risk on another person. It actually triggers a powerful reciprocity reflex. The receiver of that trust feels a biological pull to prove that trust was deserved.

Now in leadership terms. You don’t wait for trust like you wanna invest in it. So you might delegate a meaningful project to someone before they’ve proven themselves to you. You might give autonomy before you are actually comfortable. You might say, Hey, I trust your judgment on this. Don’t make me regret it.

What the team learns is that this person trusts me. I don’t wanna let them down. And so what you’ve done at this level is now that you’ve created an ally instead of an employee, I’m gonna give you a quick example here. ’cause I know that we hear often like, okay, but I can’t just trust them.

I have to like also double check and triple check and there’s something to that that’s not to be ignored, but let me give you an example first,

Let’s assume you’re two weeks into a role, a senior manager, let’s call her Rachel, starts to CC your boss and include them or direct questions to them when actually all this should be coming to you.

They’re kind of going around you in this case. So a level one response for a police that it would, that would basically mean, hey. I assume there’s no ill intent. They may just being extra cautious and we’re not gonna say anything and I’m gonna hope it stops over time once they trust me. That’s the level one response, the level two response, their resume, recit response would be that you would send a long email explaining your role and your authority. You would try to convince them and also tell them that they must send it to you because that is how it’s all laid out.

Level two, level three, that slow burn is to keep delivering results and hope that she notices that you’re competent. So you just might be dial it up a notch, doing extra work, extra proving, being extra quick in responding to the emails so that ultimately they realize like, oh, actually this would be a more competent person to talk to.

The level four response, being a trust investor would actually mean that you walk to her desk, calm, open, and say. Hey Rachel. I noticed that you’ve been CCing our boss, Steven, on items that are in my lane. Can you share what the reason is for that? And then you pause now what you just stood there is that you named the behavior, Hey, you’re CCing people and you demonstrated that you want to tolerate it. The reason why you’re bringing it up and you say like, can you explain is because you’re not having it, but you also showed curiosity, and with that you’re trying to build trust, but you’re being direct and you’re being transparent that something is off here with them.

CCing your boss. That’s level four.

Now, let me zoom out for a moment. Everything that I’m teaching you in this episode works, but there is a deeper truth. You can only build trust as fast as your own security allows. So if you are terrified of losing your job, if your entire sense of self-worth depends on another person’s opinion of you,

if you are playing the like, don’t get fired, please like me instead of let’s build something great. You will respect me. Game, then you will never fully own the room. So we have to start with security and confidence first, and that is why I’m obsessed with helping new leaders become not just competent, but also confident.

Inside the leadership accelerator, we help ambitious first time managers. Build stronger leadership skills so they can manage well even when things get tough. Become strong communicators to align the team and build strong leadership relationships from day one. And develop confidence and reduce self-doubt so that insecurity and worries don’t get the best of you, especially in rooms with senior leaders.

, If that resonates, the link is in the description to the program, but also for us to have a strategy call, there’s no pressure. This is just an invitation. If you’re ready to play a bigger game. Okay, now back to the science.

 to build trust fast. Let’s look at another study to see what we can learn. Vulnerability is a status booster.

Research by Elliot Arnon showed that high competence individuals were rated as more likable and trustworthy when they made a small human mistake, could be as simple as spilling coffee. Then when they were flawless. Now why this matters for new leaders is that you don’t need to be perfect.

In fact, being too perfect, especially in the first 90 days, makes people suspicious. So if you are already demonstrating competence and you’re coming in strong and you are a perfectionist and you wanna do it right, and again, you wanna prove yourself and you wanna make sure you’re on top of everything.

Admitting a small mistake or a learning moment, or telling people something that you actually don’t know yet and you’re really challenging that thing and you’re digging deep in order to learn and understand that actually accelerates trust. So being a human with human vulnerabilities makes you a trustworthy leader.

Now, what happens when trust breaks down? That is usually because two people are watching two different movies of the same situation, and you can’t win by proving that your movie is the right one. You win by acknowledging that both movies exist and then directing the next scene together.

And so this two movie method you can actually use literally when a conversation gets stuck and you realize that you don’t trust that other person yet to take the lead or to go with what they suggest or what they think, and they don’t trust that.

You know what you’re doing, or they don’t trust that you fully understand the context of the situation. Here, you can say, “Hey, it sounds like we’re watching two different movies of the situation in your movie, and then you can describe their perspective without any judgment in my movie.

And then I describe my perspective. Both can be true, but we can’t reshoot the last scene, so let’s design the next one. What do you need from me here? And here’s what I need from you. ” does a few different things. One, it validates their reality without you having to surrender yours.

Second, it moves from who’s right. To what’s next? That’s leadership. It actually establishes you to stick with that movie analogy as a director, not just another actor.

things such as, Hey, it sounds like we experienced that meeting very differently. Can you walk me through your version? And then here was my version of it. Or, Hey. In your movie I was being X. In my movie, I was trying to do Y. Let’s figure out how to reconcile or what would you need to see from me to trust that my intent is…, and then whatever positive thing you wanna insert. That strategy to bring two sides together helps you maintain trust when you realize you’re sort of at the point of friction, where two people come together that don’t fully trust each other to let go or sort of surrender.

And instead you might be pushing against each other. Don’t try to fight that you’re right. Instead, acknowledge the two different stories, and then be the director for the next scenes.

Let me give you an example here too, and we’re gonna stick with this example of the all hands. Let’s say this time you’re a few weeks into your new role.

You run an all hands meeting and you’re being pretty direct, right? At this point, now you’re sharing numbers. You lay out your personal 90 day plan, and where you see the team going and what your expectations are.

Afterward, your HR partner pulls you aside and they say, Hey, just a quick heads up. Some people felt that meeting was a little intense. They’re worried because you were fairly direct and concrete, that you might not be valuing their input.

Now, your first instinct might be to defend yourself. Well, no, I was just being clear. I asked for questions at the end. My goal was to really provide that clarity on what’s next. But instead of trying to argue your case here, and again, demonstrate to you, you are actually right.

If you try and stand to apply that movie analogy, you could say, Hey, thanks for telling me. It sounds like we had two different experiences. I was trying to create clarity and build momentum ’cause I didn’t wanna waste time and ambiguity, but to them it felt like I was steamrolling and not listening.

That both of that can be true. What is one thing that I could do differently next time

To land that same message, without them feeling that way. What you just state here is that

you acknowledged the gap, but you didn’t surrender your intent. You asked for action feedback, and you stayed in the director’s chair.

I mentioned earlier that whoever controls the why, controls the trust, and who controls the trust controls the team.

And so we’re going back to why the framing of the why is so important. People don’t trust what they don’t understand.

So, when you say, here’s why we’re doing this, and it’s not because I said so, but because the math says so you’re being very concrete and clear with your why. Then start every initiative basically by explaining the why and state it in one sentence.

Put it in every slide if you need to repeat it until they know it by heart. The why for your strategy, the why for your mission, the why for your initiatives. It may sound repetitive, but it’s worth it, and it’s consistent and predictable, and it builds trust. Next, I’m gonna repeat what I said earlier. Invest trust forward. Trust given is trust multiplied. Hey, I’m giving you ownership of this and trust that you got it. In Week one, delegate one project to someone and provide full autonomy.

Don’t micromanage. Let them feel the weight of your trust. Now, of course, be mindful with whom and with which project. You do this for some people, and some projects, a higher level of engagement would likely be appropriate, so choose wisely. With whom do you do this and with which project so you actually feel comfortable enough handing over full ownership.

But that is the deliberate act of trust investing. Next, specify the standard. Speaking of predictability, vague expectations. Create resentment, not trust the standard for this role is X. Now right now we’re at Y, so let’s close the gap. You might have to actually write down the standards for each role, but make them measurable so that you can remove the situation where you might have to say like, Hey.

I thought you meant this. And they say, no. I thought you meant that. That should not happen when you set your standards clear. Next one, terminate ambiguity. Ambiguity is where trust goes to die. End every meeting with, okay, what are the next steps?

Who owns each by when? No meeting ends without that clarity.

So here’s the power move when you stop waiting for permission to lead managers wait to be trusted leaders create the conditions for trust. Managers might ask, do they believe in me yet? Leaders ask,

have I given them enough reasons to trust me? Managers might try to be liked. Leaders try to be clear and be respected, and here’s the one to truly remember.

Trust isn’t something you earn by being patient. It’s something you built by being predictable. Predictable in your standards, predictable in your consequences, predictable in your support. When people know exactly what to expect from you, good and bad, they stop guessing and they start performing. That is trust.

 use what we’ve just talked about here and spend the next week establishing who’s in charge and creating that environment where trust can be built.

If this hits home and you haven’t yet, please subscribe to this channel or to this podcast. Share this with someone who just stepped into a new role and is feeling that first week anxiety. Also, check out the show notes for additional links to our leadership accelerator, additional episodes specifically for new leaders.

I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.

If you enjoy this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader. People love to work with. This includes a free master class on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out@ourcova.org forward slash masterclass. 

The second resource is my best-selling book, the confident and competent new manager, how to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out at our cova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. 

You can find all those links

In the show notes down below.