As a leadership onboarding coach, I know that to achieve anything, the necessity is to show trust.
Leaders in new positions often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people. However, onboarding coaching of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure.
As a new leader, you go on to explain, to those who report to you, what you want to focus on, and how you want to work. When you get up to go to the first team, one of the associates asks you, "What is it you need most of us?"
You smile a bit about the words she chose ('needs'...), and answer, "What I need is results. The results to improve the situation." With that, you leave the room. You don't hear them saying to you: "We agree, but we lack trust..."
You are gone. Just at the moment when they needed you, and you could have had a big impact on the situation. You do not realize that had you noticed this need, and acted on it, the message would have gone to all involved faster than the speed of light. Trust and confidence would have begun to grow. Results would soon have followed. All this just because you have related to what was the obvious first need of those involved.
Instead, you are now telling the first team what must be done, and how you work. You don't ask them anything. They listen to you, some of them take notes, but you don't see them interacting. You repeat once more what needs to be done, and that you expect a thorough approach.
What you don't grasp yet, is that for control to work for these people, there has to be trust first. We don't begin by controlling the process, but by laying down the foundation based on cooperation.
"GETTING IT DONE: How to Achieve Results and Accomplish Fulfillment in Work and Life" shows business professionals how to get results and strike balance through positive relations and cooperation. "Getting it Done" is a personal and professional guidebook that gives pointed direction on how to mindfully create the best possible personal experience and professional outcome.
Source: Iris Dorreboom and Rudi de Graaf: Getting It Done