Leading with Trust

JULY 10, 2022

Talking with team members about their performance challenges typically falls in the category of “least favorite” managerial tasks, along with things such as budgeting, attending all-day meetings, and completing performance reviews. It’s usually not something most leaders enjoy, but it’s a necessary and critical part of helping your team perform its best.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 26, 2022

Trust never takes a vacation. When you go on holiday this summer, will you be preoccupied with how things are going at work? Do you have low trust in your team’s ability to manage without you? Or perhaps your team doesn’t trust you , and they can’t wait for you to go on vacation, so they don’t have to look over their shoulder every minute of the day.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 12, 2022

People want an empathetic leader. Many managers strive to be one. But ask someone to define the term, and you’re likely to be met with silence. Let’s start with the definition. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy means “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”.

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Leading with Trust

MAY 22, 2022

In my line of work, I get the opportunity to interact with leaders from a wide variety of organizations from a diverse range industries, including government and non-profits. A common factor that most are dealing with right now is adjusting to the new world of hybrid work. Hybrid work means team members work from both the office and remotely. Some organizations employ a formal schedule that requires employees to be in the office certain days of the week, while others leave it to the discretion o

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Leading with Trust

MAY 8, 2022

There are a few four-letter words that leaders would like to use more at work. You can probably guess the words I’m thinking of because you’ve almost certainly wanted to use them yourself! (Or perhaps you have…or do!). Although there is some research that advocates the benefits of cursing at work, I’m still old-school in my approach. My mother would frequently remind me that the language we use reflects our level of intelligence and maturity, so instead of using curse words, we should find bette

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Letter Servant Leader Blanchard Leadership Styles 106

Leading with Trust

MARCH 30, 2022

The slap heard around the world, otherwise known as Will Smith smacking Chris Rock in the face at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony after Rock made a joke at the expense of Smith’s wife, has been the buzz of social media and pop culture. Less than an hour after the embarrassing debacle, Smith won the Oscar for Best Actor (awkward!), and gave a quasi-apology/acknowledgment of his juvenile actions mixed with an excuse for his bad behavior.

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Letter Learning-by-Doing Class Commitment 81

Leading with Trust

MARCH 20, 2022

The following article is a guest post from my friend and colleague, Brock Brown. Brock is a Channel Partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies, an executive leadership coach, servant leader, and a man of integrity. I’m sure you’ll enjoy his wisdom about the intersection of character, trust, and ethics. “HIRE FOR CHARACTER, TRAIN FOR COMPETENCE,” I have said it a thousand times.

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Leading with Trust

MARCH 13, 2022

Life has been turned inside out and upside down the last few years, hasn’t it? Political and social unrest, a global pandemic, a massive shift to remote work, record levels of low trust in institutions, supply chain bottlenecks, the Great Resignation, rising inflation, and now war in Ukraine, are just a few of the challenges affecting us in one way or another.

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Servant Leader Leadership Blanchard Supply Chain 101

Leading with Trust

MARCH 9, 2022

My colleague, Madeleine Blanchard , writes a regular column for the LeaderChat blog titled, “Ask Madeleine.” She responds to questions from readers who are facing some sort of leadership/organizational-related predicament, and offers sound perspective based on her expertise as a master certified business coach. Mad is a legend in the business coaching community and one of the most thoughtful people I know.

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Leading with Trust

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

“How do you practice servant leadership and build trust in a toxic culture where servant leadership isn’t valued, and can even be looked upon as being a weakness?” That was the question I received in a recent training class I conducted, and unfortunately, it’s a common one. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the benefits of high-trust and servant leader-led cultures (see here , here , and here ), many still view it as being a “soft” management style or ̶

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Leading with Trust

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Leave a comment on this guest post by Jim Dittmar and John Stanko to be eligible for for one of three complimentary copies of their new book, “The LEADERS Model: Essential Practices for Today’s Leaders.” Deadline for entry is February 22, 2022. When you hear or see the word leader , do you think of yourself? Your initial reply to this question may be, “I’m not in a position of authority or supervision.

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Leading with Trust

JANUARY 23, 2022

Effective leadership is an influence process where leaders implement everyday, commonsense approaches that help people and organizations thrive. Yet somehow, many of these fundamental principles are still missing from most workplaces. In our new book, Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust , Ken Blanchard and I share fifty-two Simple Truths about leadership that will help leaders everywhere make commonsense leadership common practice.

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Leading with Trust

DECEMBER 12, 2021

Effective leadership comes down to implementing everyday, commonsense practices to help organizations thrive—and yet so many leaders are still missing these fundamental principles from their personal and professional lives. That’s why Ken Blanchard and I wrote Simple Truths of Leadership—52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust , being released February 1, 2022.

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Leading with Trust

OCTOBER 10, 2021

Leadership is a complex endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. We often tend to make things more complicated than they need to be and that’s true in the field of leadership. To prove my point, go to Amazon.com and search their book listings for the word “leadership” and see how many returns you get (but wait until you finish reading this article!).

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Leading with Trust

AUGUST 22, 2021

Trust is often one of those things we don’t think about until we don’t have it. Much like oxygen, we take it for granted, but once it’s gone…YIKES! We suddenly realize how critically important it is and we’ll do just about anything to get it back. The good news about broken trust, if there is any, is that it can be rebuilt in most circumstances. Trust is incredibly resilient when it’s been properly nurtured in healthy relationships.

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Leading with Trust

JULY 18, 2021

Enjoy this article that was recently published in Ignite! , the newsletter of The Ken Blanchard Companies. I was interviewed about the opportunity to build trust as organizations develop plans to return workers to the office. Organizations have an opportunity to intentionally increase trust with their people by the open and collaborative way they handle plans for people returning to the office, says trust expert Randy Conley.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 27, 2021

Many organizations are embracing hybrid teams (a mixture of onsite and remote employees) as a model of working in the post-COVID19 world. Hybrid teams are not new, but this model of working is new to many organizations and leaders. I’ve been leading hybrid teams for 15 years, so I have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t. I’ve learned a lot over this time, mostly through trial and error.

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Leading with Trust

MAY 16, 2021

By their very nature, unionized workplaces and industries often promote a culture of distrust between stakeholders. Each party is suspicious of the other and is afraid of being taken advantage of, so they hold their cards close to their vest and try to cut the best deal possible for their stakeholders. It’s us on one side of the table versus them on the other.

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Leading with Trust

MARCH 9, 2021

While watching a college basketball game today, I saw this statement in the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the television screen: “From our conversations, he understands that forgiveness must be earned, and he is willing to work for it.” Uh…what? Forgiveness has to be earned? Since when? Let me tell you the backstory. Gregg McDermott, head coach of the men’s basketball team at Creighton University, recently stuck his foot in his mouth, big time.

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Leading with Trust

JANUARY 24, 2021

The legendary college football coach Woody Hayes once said there were four ways he could cheat his players: do for them what they can do for themselves, allow them to get by on less than their best effort, allow them to believe their athletic talent is the only education they will need, and allow them to believe that football makes them privileged. As a manager you may have never thought of it this way, but there are times when you cheat your employees.

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Micromanagement Management Learning-by-Doing Team 118

Leading with Trust

JANUARY 7, 2021

The events of January 6 th , 2021 in our nation’s capital starkly illustrate the results of self-serving leadership. As I tweeted last night, there aren’t enough adjectives to describe the despicable acts that took place yesterday. I’m embarrassed and ashamed for our country, and totally disheartened that those who accepted the mantle of leadership for our nation have failed us so miserably.

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Leading with Trust

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Judging the performance of a leader can be tricky. One person’s notion of a successful leader can be the polar opposite of another’s. It’s hard to agree upon a common definition of leadership, much less the definition of success. Do you define a leader’s success as hitting the revenue goal? Is it the satisfaction scores from your customers? How about employee engagement statistics?

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Leading with Trust

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

While teaching a class this past week on Building Trust , I found myself giving the participants this admonishment: “Just like anything in life, you’re going to get out of this what you put into it.”. I’m not quite sure where that came from, but I suspect it was the words of advice given to me over the years from my mother, teachers, coaches, and bosses.

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Leading with Trust

OCTOBER 25, 2020

A trustworthy politician…some might say, “Is there such a thing?” Listening to the rhetoric of this year’s presidential election would make one think neither of the two major party candidates has a trustworthy bone in their body. But trust isn’t an “all or nothing” proposition. Very few people are unequivocally trustworthy or untrustworthy in every aspect of their behavior.

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Leading with Trust

OCTOBER 4, 2020

If you’re like millions of other people, you’ve been working remotely part or full-time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Literally overnight, teams were challenged with finding new ways to communicate and collaborate, and the bonds of trust those teams had established were put to the test. High performing teams thrive on trust and research has shown that trust in one’s team leader is one of the two primary factors that drive employee engagement.

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Leading with Trust

AUGUST 30, 2020

In my last two articles, I’ve explored the concept of a team’s Conversational Capacity ®. Conversational capacity is the ability to have open, balanced, non-defensive dialogue about tough subjects and in challenging circumstances. Teams that have a high conversational capacity know how to stay in the “ sweet spot.” The sweet spot is where candor and curiosity are in balance.

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Leading with Trust

AUGUST 2, 2020

In my previous article I wrote about the conversational “sweet spot” that unlocks team performance. The sweet spot is defined as the balance of candor and curiosity in team discussions. It’s a reflection of a team’s “ conversational capacity ” – the ability to have open, balanced, non-defensive dialogue about tough subjects and in challenging circumstances.

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Leading with Trust

JULY 19, 2020

It’s ok, you can admit it. We’ve all been there. Working in teams can be incredibly frustrating. Whether it was in school, work, or a community organization, you’ve probably had a dysfunctional team experience. It’s that team who can never seem to productively discuss challenging topics. Either they avoid the conversation completely and pretend the issue doesn’t exist, or when someone does get the courage to raise the topic, the discussion becomes heated and spirals out of control.

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Leading with Trust

JULY 12, 2020

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash. Death and taxes have traditionally been viewed as the two guarantees in life, but I think a third item has officially made the list: change. The pace of change accelerates with each passing, day, month, and year. The exponential growth of technology has enabled new products, services, and businesses to rise to prominence in short order, and has caused others to become obsolete just as quickly.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 29, 2020

Building and maintaining trust is an issue that most leaders agree is critically important, but few have a plan to achieve it. A recent survey by YPO showed 96% of chief executives said building and maintaining trust was a high priority for their success, yet just 34% of the respondents said they had defined and specific plans for building trust in their organizations.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 22, 2020

Everyone wants to be respected and valued. As long as you have a heartbeat and breath in your lungs, you will have the desire to be appreciated, honored, and trusted in your relationships with others. We all want to “save face.” Saving face, the notion of preserving individual honor and dignity, is often associated with Asian cultures. Although having it’s cultural birth in China, saving face is a universal concept that transcends national culture.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 7, 2020

Who do you see when you look at a black person? Do you see a husband, father, wife, mother, son, or daughter? Do you see a businessman, tradesman, doctor, lawyer, scientist, soldier, or educator? Do you see someone with hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, and insecurities? Do you see a person who is very much like you? Unfortunately, whether we realize it or not, many of us don’t see those things.

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Leading with Trust

JUNE 2, 2020

Coaching has become a ubiquitous term these days in the field of leadership. It can mean anything from giving advice, teaching, encouraging, training, mentoring, or even using a specific leadership style that incorporates a defined set of behaviors. In her new book, Coach the Person, Not the Problem—A Guide to Using Reflective Inquiry , Marcia Reynolds defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and

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Leading with Trust

MAY 17, 2020

I miss baseball. By this point in the MLB season in previous years, I would have attended a few Padres games at PETCO Park (one of the best ballparks to catch a game, IMHO) and watched several more on TV. Instead, in the coronavirus lockdown world in which we currently live, I’ve had to make do with watching replays of classic Padres games. Recently, it was game 3 of the 1984 National League championship series, when the Padres found themselves down 2 games to 0 to the Chicago Cubs in the best o

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Leading with Trust

MAY 6, 2020

Whether you wanted it or not, you’ve likely had a lot more free time as of late. Photo by Christopher Sardegna on Unsplash. As COVID-19 continues to keep America — and most of the world — in lockdown, we’ve given up our nights out, our trips to the movies, and, for many of us, our standard work schedule. The new surplus of time allotted to us can lead to boredom and binge-watching, yes, but it can also be a beneficial period for productivity: finishing up old projects, exploring new hobbies,

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Leading with Trust

APRIL 19, 2020

Have you given much thought to how you will be remembered as a leader after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed? If you’ve been fortunate enough to not be laid off or furloughed, you’ve probably spent the last several weeks just trying to keep your organization afloat. Meeting the needs of customers, your employees, and even figuring out how to deliver your product or service in this new environment has been consuming your time and attention.

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Leading with Trust

APRIL 5, 2020

Now, more than ever, leaders need to decisively and powerfully nurture trust in the workplace. Although much of what it takes to build trust is common sense, it’s not always common practice. In this short video, I share 10 practical ways leaders can immediately build trust with their teams and organizations.

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