Invantage Advising

Author: Prudy Gourguechon

  • Why Inspiring Trust And Trusting Others Are Essential Leadership Capacities (Within Bounds)

    Why Inspiring Trust And Trusting Others Are Essential Leadership Capacities (Within Bounds)

    This is the first of two posts related to trust, one of the five essential capacities of cognition and character that a leader who shoulders great responsibility must have. These were originally published Forbes online.  This post explains why trust is a crucial capacity, how it has to be regulated and what happens when it is absent. The next post offers suggestions on the assessment of trust.

    The capacity for trust—both to trust others and to inspire trust—is a fundamental character trait every leader with great responsibility must have.  But it’s tricky.  A leader dependent on praise and affirmation or one who is overwhelmed by his duties can be too trusting.  Charismatic leaders excel at inspiring trust but can use it to manipulate their followers in ways that can turn malignant.  In fact, even the greatest leader—and each of us—sometimes trusts unwisely or lets down those who have trusted her.

    In this era of #metoo, “fake news,” “alternative facts,” integrity failures at businesses both old (Wells Fargo) and new (Uber) and Russian bots responding to our posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter, few would dispute that we are embroiled in a crisis around trust in the workplace and the wider culture.

    A quick Google search of “leadership and trust” yields links to dozens of articles on how to build trust, quizzes for self-assessment of how trustworthy you seem to be (with tips on how to improve your score) and numerous consulting firms offering their services to help your company build a culture of trust.

    This article looks at trust from a different angle—as a fundamental personality trait that needs to be part of a comprehensive evaluation of a potential leader.

    Elsewhere I have written about a model of leadership assessment and development that proposes five essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader must have.  Trust is one of the core five. (The others are self-awareness, empathy, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.) The model was derived from an unexpected but happy marriage of two bodies of thought—psychological studies of ego functions and executive functioning and the U.S. Army’s vision of leadership described in its remarkable Field Manual on Leader Development.

    In the case of self-awareness, critical thinking and discipline more is generally better. Trust and empathy are a little different, as an excess of either can lead to problems. A great leader needs to get it just right.

     The Capacity to Inspire Trust

    A leader’s capacity to inspire trust in others–that is, to be trustworthy–is essential in motivating and inspiring members of his team.  It’s also essential in helping everyone involved endure crises and manage difficult situations.

    The Capacity to Trust Others

    Trust in human relationships goes in two directions. The idea that a leader must be trustworthy is familiar.  That he also needs to have the capacity to trust others is less intuitively obvious, but the capacity to trust is essential. It’s a psychological predisposition learned in early childhood.

    The leader lacking in trust is unable to form effective relationships and functional teams.  Habitually feeling beleaguered and unfairly treated, he is drained of energy and focus and unfairly blames others, further creating a fragile, demoralized and suspicious environment.

    The capacity to trust others enables a leader to:

    • Create a shared understanding which is necessary for organized and strategic action.
    • Count on members of a team to fulfill expectations.
    • Delegate.
    • Maintain confidentiality throughout the organization.
    • Develop a cohesive team.
    • Build morale.
    • Absorb feedback, acknowledge errors and correct them.
    • Grow and develop leadership skills in followers.
    • Create a climate of respect and fairness.

    What Occurs When a Leader Trusts Others Too Much?

    Ideally, a leader possesses a general disposition to trust others but knows when and how to temper it with realism and diligence. When a leader is not discerning enough in his trust of others, blind spots flourish and, paradoxically, people in the organization feel unsafe.  Inappropriate trust may occur because a leader is too dependent on the approval of others or overwhelmed by his duties.  Here are some of the potential consequences:

    • Failure to attend to clues suggesting malfeasance or dishonesty.
    • Negligence and poor oversight.
    • Confirmation bias takes hold.
    • Vulnerability to being fooled by someone on whom the leader is dependent.

    When is a Good Thing too Much?

    Trusting Others

    Ken McCracken, head of Family Business Consulting at KPMG UK, writing about trusted advisors to family businesses, alerts us to the dangers of “affinity fraud,” a concept as applicable to corporate and organizational leadership as it is to family enterprise.

    Affinity fraud occurs when trust is automatically greater for those who are “like us” or part of an in-group.McCracken cites the case of infamous investor Bernie Madoff:

    Madoff “exploited his social connections to court investments from individuals and institutions among the Jewish community. Some of his clients seem to have relied on their shared background with Madoff to overcome any doubts they had about the barely believable financial returns that were promised. Investors it seems were persuaded that it was plausible that someone from the same community, or in-group, could be trusted to give them a great deal that would have sounded too good to be true had it been offered by an outsider without such ties.“

    However, having a tilt towards trust is not a bad thing. McCracken also identifies a group he calls “optimists”— those who have the disposition to trust people including those who are different and outsiders. Optimists count competence as more important than affinity.

    The intrinsic optimism in this attitude usually means that setbacks involving breach of trust … are absorbed without … sacrificing the view that people are generally trustworthy and that this attitude is the right way to live and conduct the affairs of the family business.

    Inspiring Trust

    Charismatic leaders inspire trust based on the force of their personality and the magnetism of their vision.  Their followers are prone to ignore information that would weaken the comforting idealization of their leader.  Charismatic leaders create a regressive psychological situation in the groups they lead where emotion holds sway over rational thought.  It’s best to think of the trust evoked by charismatic leaders as a very powerful tool that can be used for good or ill.  The wise charismatic leader will understand that the degree of trust his followers have in him is out of proportion to his merit and is careful not to exploit it.

    Conclusion

    Trust is a matter of finding the right balance.  It is essential that a leader has the capacity to trust others.  She must also be alert to reality, open to the limitations of trust and the possibility that trust will be betrayed.  She must be able to recover from disappointments in the realm of trust without a shift in basic attitude.  A leader must also be able to inspire trust, but he needs to temper his followers’ trust with a crisp understanding of his limitations and the possibility of inadvertently evoking blind and inappropriate trust.

    The single best measure of reliable and appropriately modulated trust for those assessing a potential leader is her capacity to admit errors, change course when new information comes in and welcome negative feedback and different opinions.

    Further Reading: How To Assess An Essential Leadership Capacity:  Trusting Others and Inspiring Trust

  • 10 Things We Keep Getting Wrong About Gun Violence: Especially when it comes to mental health

    It can’t be said often enough:  the vast majority of gun violence incidents cannot be linked to mental health diagnoses.  I’m all for more resources for mental health treatment and training but they will do nothing to decrease our epidemic of gun violence.  Only decreasing access to guns will.  Pleased to be quoted in a great article by Huffington Post’s Lindsay Holmes.  Read it here.

  • “Diagnosing From Afar: Discover Magazine Top 100 Stories of 2017” January 2018

    Interviewed by Andrew Curry for his essay “Diagnosing From Afar” on the so-called Goldwater Rule, which dictates parameters for psychiatrists commenting on public figures.  This became a major story in 2017 when mental health professionals challenged the ethics of the rule itself.  The story appeared as number 45 in Discover’s list of top 100. Discover Magazine January/February 2018.

  • The Single Most Powerful Tool For Assessing Other People

    The Single Most Powerful Tool For Assessing Other People

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 2/4/18.

    Assessing other people as you interact with them is one of the most important tools you can utilize in your professional life. It’s to your great advantage to learn how to interpret and then use your subjective reactions to people.

    Knowing how to read yourself and then what to do with you the information is a skill that takes some development and practice. But the investment is well worth the effort since your own responses to people will provide you with information about them that you can’t get anywhere else.

    Take empathy as a prime example. As I’ve explained elsewhere empathy is absolutely critical to leadership—it’s one of five essential character traits and cognitive capacities a leader responsible for the fate of people and enterprises must have.

     Let’s say you’re a member of a board search committee looking for a new CEO and you really want to know if your potential leader possesses the quality of empathy.

    One source of data is the way the candidate talks about the human side of her past business experiences. Does she show awareness of other people’s perspectives, needs and feelings? Does she demonstrate an understanding that these are important? Can she talk about instances where her empathy failed and what she thought and did about it? These are self-reports about the person’s experiences—how they have operated in the world. Useful, but basically hearsay.

    A different and deeper level of data can be gleaned during a get-acquainted conversation. When you’re in a meaningful conversation with another person, you are essentially creating a laboratory situation where the data is being created in real time, not just reported historically.

     What’s your personal experience as you’re sitting with someone, getting to know him? Does the candidate you’re interviewing show empathy for you? I don’t mean whether or not he is nice.  Rather, does he have the capacity and interest to investigate what you want from the interaction and respond appropriately? Is he smart and perceptive about your point of view and needs? Can he track your subtle signals of interest and shift gears when your attention moves on? Does he quickly figure out the direction your questions are going and then help by giving you the insight you’re reaching for?

    Here’s the secret sauce: If you’re trying to get to know a potential leader who lacks empathy, your own subjective experience is deeply telling.  You’ll find yourself feeling frustrated and bored.  Time will go slowly. You’ll search for questions. Because the answers you’re getting won’t satisfy you, you’ll keep looking for other ways to ask the same question. The conversation will feel like hard work. Why do you feel that way?  Because the person across the table doesn’t have the capacity to connect with you. A connection can only happen when both parties have some degree of empathy. And without that empathic connection, a conversation lacks vitality.

    In contrast, if you’re sitting with a person who does have the capacity for empathy, there will be more flow. You’ll feel invigorated; the conversation will have its own spark and creativity.

    A client asked me to interview a candidate for a potential leadership position. The potential hire had tremendous technical skills. Reviewing the materials I received before the assessment, I learned about a corporate blunder in which the candidate had been involved in his previous position. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but I wanted to know how he viewed his role in the poorly led episode. After an hour of conversation, which had gone reasonably well (though I did have a bit of that feeling that time was moving slowly), I brought up the blunder. I said I wondered what his thoughts were about it. He immediately got defensive and dismissive, which startled me. I persisted, saying I really wanted to understand what he thought about what had happened. He made another excuse, looked away, seemed bored and changed the subject. I tried one more time but was unable to get him to engage.

    I was annoyed and frustrated. I felt I wanted something from him and he wouldn’t give it to me! I didn’t care about the blunder itself. It was one of those unfortunate things that could have happened to anyone. But I wanted to talk about it. Beyond that, I realized, I was looking for him to show some regret or shame or ruefulness. I wanted him to say, “Yeah that was really awful, and I don’t ever want to be in that position again. “ He would have totally won me over with a sentence like that, showing some feeling about the matter and an interest in sharing the story — maybe because of, rather than in spite of, the fact it was painful.

    So in that two-person interaction, I had a specific need — to hear a feeling-full story about the blunder. He was unable to read me successfully and either satisfy that need or tell me why he couldn’t. “It’s confidential, I can’t talk about it” would have worked too.

    Contemplating a partnership? You definitely want to establish that your potential partner has the capacity for empathy. A professional colleague and I were considering a joint venture. We went to dinner with a contact of his who was key to our meeting the people we wanted to work with. My colleague spent much of the meeting describing my accomplishments and what I could do for clients. While on the surface it was complimentary and all about me, I felt uncomfortable and strangely invisible. Thinking about my internal reaction, I realized he made me feel like an object, not a person.  If he had been in my shoes, I imagine he might have enjoyed the attention. But empathy requires you to know how the other person feels in their shoes, not how you would feel in their situation. I don’t like that kind of attention, and that’s not how I like to present myself to or get to know new acquaintances.  Despite a superficially exciting and successful meeting, my subjective discomfort and feeling of invisibility made me realize that this was not a partnership to pursue.

    Even in a business situation, you have subtle, personal and specific emotional needs and preferences for how you like to interact. Think of it as a unique personality fingerprint. If the person you’re assessing has the capacity for empathy, they will automatically detect that fingerprint and do their best to respond to it in order to facilitate a human connection.

  • How to To Avoid Bad Business Relationships

    How to To Avoid Bad Business Relationships

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 1/1/18.

    Business runs on relationships. Which means that as with personal relationships, we can and will make mistakes. Every marriage starts out with the best intentions, but 30% (at least) end in divorce. Every CEO is hired with optimism (and great investment.)  But a significant percentage will end in forced turnovers, most of these due to ethical problems.

    Failed relationships in business have high costs, both financial and emotional –expensive golden parachutes, failed hires who waste costly training, partnerships and investments that lead to misery and conflict, investments that make you wish you had put your money anywhere else, buyouts that lead to the destruction of a business you’ve nurtured over decades.

    The owner of a branding firm, listening to a talk on how to get the ideal client, asked, in the Q &A, “Ok, but what about nightmare clients?” A venture capitalist told me her firm’s biggest problem is finding out—too late—that the founders of the firms they’ve invested in are impossible to work with.

    Can bad business relationships be prevented? Not entirely. But two strategies will help improve the odds of avoiding a painful business divorce.

    • Know what positive and negative indicators to look for before entering into a business relationship.
    • And think twice when positive values are missing or negative ones raise red flags.

    Positive Indicators

    Elsewhere, I’ve laid out a model of leadership that identifies 5 essential character traits and cognitive capacities you should look for in a leader before you entrust him or her with responsibility for fortunes and lives. The model is based on a marriage of two unexpected bedfellows—100 years of research and thinking in psychology and psychoanalysis, and a remarkable document on leadership, the Army Field Manual on Leader Development. Possession of these five vital capacities does not guarantee success. But significant deficiencies, combined with a failure of self-awareness and absence of the ability to learn and develop does guarantee failure or disaster. The five capacities are:

    • Trust—the ability to inspire trust and trust others
    • Self-control/Discipline
    • Judgement/Critical Thinking
    • Self-Awareness
    • Empathy

    Assess these five positive traits before committing to an important business relationship.  We all have weaknesses and deficits.  Probe to see if your prospective partner/CEO/President/senior manager is aware of the areas where he needs to improve and has specific, meaningful ideas about how to accomplish that. He should be open and non-defensive with a concrete plan for dealing with areas of deficit. You don’t need to worry about a leader who can say, “I know my vision and drive gets in the way of my being empathic, so I make sure I have a trusted advisor who says, ‘Slow down’ and tells me I’m neglecting to take into account the effect my decision is going to have on others.”

    Negative Indicators

    If you feel something is off or wrong, it probably is. Don’t ignore your gut reaction out of wishful thinking or search fatigue.

    If someone has behaved badly in the past they are likely to do it again, unless they’ve gone through an extensive process of self-examination and personal change and can openly describe this process. By all means, give someone a second chance, but only if he or she has tackled the personal vulnerabilities that led to past problems and has an ongoing plan to deal with them. Non-defensive openness in discussing this plan is essential.

    Pay attention to red flags.  A history of litigious behavior is a non-starter. So is any hint of dishonesty.

    As you are getting to know a potential partner in business, listen to what she reveals when talking about her past business relationships. And pay attention to how she treats you as you jointly negotiate the early phase of a working relationship. A person’s character comes through whether she’s planning a get-acquainted lunch or negotiating a high-stakes merger. If someone is exhausting when you are trying to set up a phone call, you can be sure it won’t be any better when you are closing a major deal.

    I watch for personality traits and habitual behaviors that predict business relationship difficulties. Here are some character types that lead to problematic and tiring business relationships:

    • Blamers – Don’t sign on with people whose narratives of their past business relationships are dominated by grievances and blaming. Oddly, some people with this character trait can be very engaging. They tell stories of alleged unfairness that are compelling and may activate an urge in you to prove you’re better than all the villains they’ve encountered in the past. Don’t fall for these “convincing blamers.” Always look for self-awareness – does the person think about his contribution to a past problem?
    • Dependent types—While this is unlikely to be a problem in CEO selection, be on the lookout for this trait when you’re considering taking on a new client. Do you feel like you have to do all the thinking, planning and organizing? Some people quickly turn every relationship, business or personal, into a parent-child one. They don’t want your expertise, they want to be taken care of.
    • Over-idealizers –Beware of individuals who think you are just fantastic and tell you that repeatedly. Some who practice this flattery are sincere, but the idealization can flip into blame when you disappoint (see “blamers,” above). For others, it continues unabated, covering up an immaturity and mental laziness that will leave you doing all the work.
    • Entitled and exhausting—This trait will show itself in the earliest contacts. The danger is you won’t take it seriously. I was once approached by another consultant who wanted to talk about collaborating on an approach to a new market. As we planned a get-acquainted coffee, she suggested a café near her apartment, in a neighborhood I never have reason to go to.  I decided to be agreeable and met her at the place she requested, telling myself the inconvenience was no big deal.  And it wasn’t. But the character trait of entitlement was. I should have known that our first foray into joint consulting would be awful. I had to quickly terminate the nascent partnership.
    • Strangely passive/indifferent—Unfortunately, this personality problem is difficult to detect early on—it emerges over time. As you try to work together you find yourself getting increasingly frustrated by the other person’s lack of initiative, emotional flatness and willingness to let nothing happen. Get out when you can.

    People in business are constantly entering into relationships—choosing a critical leader, engaging an advisor, considering a partner or buyer, investing in a new CEO’s business, contracting with a new client, agreeing to be a mentor. Giving some thought to the personality issues and interpersonal psychology underlying relationships can help prevent sunk cost, regret and frustration down the road.