Week 15: How to Fight the Enemies of Trust

This week, I reread The Enemies of Trust from which I think there are two main takeaways. First, the article defines three different kinds of trust that exist in an organization:

1. strategic trust - the trust employees have in the people running the show to make the right decisions
2. personal trust - the trust employees have in their own managers
3. organizational trust - the trust people have not in any individual but in the company itself

The authors point out that although these types of trust are distinct, that they are linked in such a way that a negative impact to one area will diminish trust in all areas.

Read that again...

The second takeaway is the enemies list - the things that most commonly contribute to diminished trust in an organization:

1. Inconsistent messages
2. Inconsistent standards
3. Misplaced benevolence
4. False feedback
5. Failure to trust others
6. Elephants in the parlor
7. Rumors in a vacuum
8. Consistent corporate underperformance

In this week’s post, I want to spend some time examining how Alan Mulally combatted these enemies of trust at Ford - an organization that had been attacked by every single one of them. In earlier weeks, we acknowledged the need for Mulally to build trust personally - especially as an outsider to Ford and the automotive industry - as well as to rebuild trust in Ford overall. Now, we will discuss a few of the culprits on this list and discuss how Alan Mulally sought to earn and regain trust by fighting them.

Inconsistent Messages

This is obvious - inconsistent messages occur when multiple leaders say different things about the same topic or when someone says one thing and their actions communicate something different.

Wow, we could really write an entire post on just this one topic but I’ll try to keep it brief. Alan Mulally articulated his priority of honesty and transparency. He understood this would help to combat inconsistent messages in his effort to build personal trust and rebuild strategic and organizational trust.

Personal Trust

We talked about this a lot already so I won’t extend this post to reiterate it.

Strategic/Organizational Trust

When Mulally stepped into Ford, the organization could be the poster child for what NOT to do. There was no trust to be found and, through the lens of this article, it isn’t hard to figure out why.

For example, when Mulally tried to get a handle on the data to better understand the operational reality, “he found that different sources offered different numbers to different audiences. For example, when estimating demand for a new product, inflated figures were often given to suppliers to help win lower prices while a more conservative figure was offered to analysts so that Ford would look good when it exceeded their expectations.”

Ok so it’s kinda sad when an organization is doing their best but unknowingly diminishes trust because of inconsistent messages. It’s unforgiveable when you’ve done it intentionally smh.

It was also clear that none of the executives had command over what was going on in their area. This was evidenced by the number who arrived with “trailing adjutants and subalterns armed with thick three-ring binders that presumably contained the answers to every conceivable question their new CEO might ask their bosses.”

You can imagine the misinformation those executives were spreading since they didn’t actually know the answers to anything. Shameful!

Mulally made a big impact towards rectifying this by insisting that the data and information presented reflect the true state of things and that each executive be responsible for their own presentations at the BPRs. It honestly seems like such a simple thing but you can see the bigger impact that it had now. Wow.

Additional supporting processes that Mulally used to combat inconsistent messages included:

• internal report card
• company-wide emails
• holding executives accountable
• communications with external partners
• press conferences

Misplaced benevolence

I’m not gonna lie - reading this section was triggering. It’s best you read it for yourself because my summary would be too snarky 🤷🏽‍♀️

Very early in my career, I worked in an office as a temporary assignment. Because I was inexperienced, I was paired with a more experienced, permanent employee who was expected to provide me with technical direction. However, when I asked her for guidance, she responded with “I’ve got nothing” about 90% of the time. It was maddening. She was so clearly incompetent.

Years later, she was promoted to lead a working group. I remember assuming she’d do a piss-poor job at that. However, she really excelled. In this role, she was required to build relationships and foster collaboration. Turns out that while she SUCKED at providing technical direction, she was REALLY GOOD at these other skills.

Incompetence is relative. Everyone is good at something.

If I’d stepped into a business like Ford where there were so many things going wrong, I would probably have fired most of the executive team. It just seems logical that they were not the right folks for the job. Clearly, this is why there’s no book written about me…

…yet!

Mulally, however, worked hard to learn the strengths of those on the executive team and find the right position for them within his new structure. Combined with his focus on accountability, this went a long way towards combating misplaced benevolence.

Rumors in a Vacuum

One of my favorite stories from American Icon is about what happens when Mark Fields confronts Mulally about the rumors that he’ll be fired soon. As a quick recap, Mark Fields led the Americas division and was thought to be in line to succeed Ford as CEO. He was also the first of the executives to trust Mulally enough to acknowledge…in a BPR meeting…publicly…that a major malfunction had happened in his division and would lead to a delay in delivery of a huge order. Following that meeting, “rumors of his imminent departure were everywhere.” This stemmed from a culture in which any failures, once acknowledged, went punished. So, naturally, everyone lied.

Fields felt like he had nothing to lose and that’s what drove him to confront Mulally. This gave Mulally an opportunity to add to his personal trust with Fields. Mulally told him outright that he had no plans to fire him and valued his being part of the team.

What’s amazing to me is what Mulally did next. He doubled down on this opportunity to also regain some organizational trust. One of the city’s leading columnists was heavily contributing to the rumors. Mulally called up the columnist right in front of Fields and told him “I heard you were writing something about Mark. Well, I just want you to know that I think he is a really, really fine leader. I have the utmost confidence in him…he’s done a great job. And I really believe in him.”

CAN YOU IMAGINE how Fields must have felt in that moment? It was a huge deposit in the trust bucket between them. The text doesn’t say it, but I bet you can also guess how many people Fields told about this exchange and what that did to instill the trust they might have in Mulally too.

Additional Takeaways

I think trust being so critical and fragile is intuitive to me. I didn’t find this article to be surprising at all really. However, it was extremely valuable in helping me put into words what I seem to have a gut feeling for. It also helps to create somewhat of a rubric to continually assess an organization with.

It also helped me identify other areas that I need to work on. Until I am in a chief executive role, I need to continue to work on my ability to help those who are in that role identify when trust is eroding, understand the urgency around addressing it and help them to do so. This is what I’ve found to be really difficult. So many leaders just don’t get the importance of trust and how important it is to pay attention to the signals that it is being degraded and to take action.

Leadership is complex.

In reflecting on it, I think some of the same strategies that we’ve learned about how to combat Reactance could help here too - asking questions, highlighting a gap, etc.

Between me and you, one of the reasons I think there are so many poor leaders is because they reach a certain status and they stop learning. Let’s not make that mistake. Keep learning with me and on your own. Thanks for reading!