Building Trust at Work: The Trust Equation

by LeeAnn Mallory | Culture, Engagement, Leadership, RiseRadio, Servant Leadership

Building Trust at Work| The Trust Equation

High Trust environments invite people to focus their precious energy and passion on creating and delivering value rather than on managing politics, their reputation and their image. In this episode, I walk through The Trust Equation, a model that illustrates distinct, yet nuanced elements of trustworthiness.

Links

LeeAnn Mallory

Trust Equation Guide

The Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor Associates

Show Notes

If you want a high-trust workplace, be trustworthy!

The Value of a High Trust Workplace

High Trust environments invite people to focus their precious energy and passion on creating and delivering value rather than on managing politics, their reputation and their image.

The ability to show up authentically and to openly collaborate creates a path of least resistance. The lack of friction produces freedom and flow. In high-trust organizations, people show up as their authentic selves, maximizing teamwork and solid relationships.

So how do you go about creating a high-trust environment? A quick search on Amazon for books on Trust reveals over 80,000 titles; narrowing the search to building trust gives us over 10,000 results. There is no shortage for approaches and models for Trust.

In this episode, we delve into Charles Green’s Trust Equation, a model that illustrates distinct, yet nuanced elements of trustworthiness. You’ll have the opportunity to explore the level of trustworthiness in one of your relationships from three different perspectives by using the Trust Equation.

Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy and Self-Orientation

05:06 – “(…) think of all models as a trellis. They give us something to hold on to – a structure for growth and reaching out. And not to get too deep with the metaphor, but we also need to remember to clear out the dead stuff that no longer serves the living organism.”

06:50 – “Both Credibility and Reliability can be observed, or measured, and take less emotional energy than Intimacy.

09:25 – “Self-orientation – Take a moment to reflect on the term, self-orientation. What do you think of when you think of someone who is self-oriented?”

14:26 – “Use the equation as a journaling tool, using the initial ratings as a starting point and going deeper from there. (…) Focus on yourself and raising your own rating. You can even ask someone whom YOU trust to share their ratings of you.”

How did you do? What were the most surprising results?

For more resources highlighted in this episode please visit the links below:

A Guide to the Trust Equation:

https://rise-leaders.com/trust-equation-guide-2/

Episode 15: How to Talk About Race at Work
https://rise-leaders.com/how-to-talk-about-race-at-work/
Charles Green: The Trusted Advisor on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Trusted-Advisor-David-H-Maister/dp/0743212347/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Charles+Green%27s+The+Trusted+Advisor&qid=1597958450&sr=8-2

I specialize in helping leaders and organizations thrive. Reach out if there’s a way I can support you.

Have Friends & Colleagues Who’d Like This podcast?

SHARE IT!

High Fidelity Conversations: Nine Elements for Launching Culture Change

by LeeAnn Mallory | Change, Culture, Engagement, Leadership, RiseRadio, Servant Leadership

High Fidelity Conversations: Nine Elements for Launching Culture Change

These types of conversations are High Fidelity because they provide strength and resonance for the people who engage in them. They’re designed to support the Core Ideology of the organization and especially support the people experiencing the change. LeeAnn describes nine elements important for launching these conversations.

Links

LeeAnn Mallory

A Guide to High Fidelity Conversations

Episode 15: How to Talk About Race at Work

Show Notes

“Waiting until you have created the perfect, most elegant solution keeps you out of today’s game. Launch it!”

High Fidelity Conversations Support Culture Change

Organizations are constantly changing and responding to both external and internal events.

Mergers and acquisitions, disruptive technology, and various economic pressures, like those brought on by the Covid pandemic are prime examples. This year, in addition to facing a pandemic, the US had to deal with hard truths on racial injustice, and the need to address the topic in the workplace was no longer avoidable.

On a previous Podcast episode, How to Talk About Race at Work, Drew Clancy and Lori Bishop shared how they tackled the topic head-on at PCI. They explained why they didn’t wait for the perfect long-term solution to address concerns about race and how they tied the conversations to their values and focus on increasing trust throughout the organization.

Whether your goal is to step fully into conversations about race, or to committing to the successful adaptation of a critical change to your culture, it’s important to provide strength, alignment, and resonance, – or fidelity – for the people who engage in them.

Do you know how to provide the proper framework for these delicate conversations?

This entire episode has been created to guide leaders on how to begin culture change in their organization by following these nine actionable concepts for designing high fidelity conversations.

A Few Elements from the Guide Described in the Episode

05:52 – “Create a vision that everyone can see themselves in. And what that means is, create a compelling future that matters for people. People need to see how the change is going to benefit them and the organization long term.”

07:26 – “And with conversations, that means listening and learning and being open to other points of view.”

10:36 – “Waiting will keep you out of the game today. And you want to balance this immediate action with the longer-term creation of policies and structures that provide resistance-free solutions.”

11:43 – “Naming the effort gives people language for how to refer to the change”.

For more resources highlighted in this audio episode please follow the links below:

Episode 15: How to Talk About Race at Work

A Guide to High Fidelity Conversations

I specialize in helping leaders and organizations thrive. Reach out if there’s a way I can support you.

Have Friends & Colleagues Who’d Like This podcast?

SHARE IT!

How to Talk About Race at Work

by LeeAnn Mallory | Change, Conscious Capitalism, Culture, Engagement, RiseRadio, Servant Leadership

How to Talk About Race at Work

Publishing Concepts (PCI) didn’t wait for the perfect long-term solution to address concerns about race. Drew Clancy, President, and Lori Bishop, CPO, saw people hurting and they responded. They thoughtfully organized Meaningful Conversations as a way to talk about race. This is their first step for improving long term trust and for healing throughout the entire workplace.

Episode 15 | August 11, 2020

Links

Show Notes

“What we’re creating here is, first and foremost, just living our values. Just being who we say we are and digging deeper as it relates to the structural racism that we have all been forced to live in here in the United States...”

Lori Bishop, CPO, Publishing Concepts – PCI

“I think this calls for leadership and leaning into it… I think it’s a tremendous opportunity to ultimately strengthen the culture of the organization and have better conversations, better relationships, a stronger organization. ”

Drew Clancy, President, Publishing Concepts – PCI

Are You Having Meaningful Conversations About Race?

Organizations are all over the map in terms of how they’re addressing the issue of racial and social justice within their own companies. I can empathize with the feelings of uncertainty and fear of doing or saying the wrong thing.

Where do you even start?

Conversations in this domain can be delicate and deserve to be handled with care. It takes courage, commitment, and humility to open oneself to hear the experiences of those who have been marginalized. It can be uncomfortable.

It can also be transformational – on all levels.

Following are a few quotes and several links. I will be following up with more podcasts and tools to help you along your journey. Stay tuned.

I specialize in helping leaders and organizations thrive. Reach out if there’s a way I can support you.

Start By Listening to Experiences

[06:28] Drew: …what I said to them that afternoon was, I’m really just here to listen and I’m interested in your perspective. Many of these guys, we’ve worked together for many years but we’d never had a conversation about race or these types of issues, and it was, I will say, for me, very eye-opening and just the level of frustration, the level of discouragement, the hopelessness in certain cases around what was going on.

Each of the men told some version of a story of growing up and a parent or maybe a grandparent saying, “When you leave this house, you need to be very careful what you say, how you act, especially around law enforcement.” After that conversation, it really struck me that the advice they were getting was you essentially have to be invisible. Again, good advice, but what a message to hear.

I’m just fed up, and we’ve reached a moment in time when action is required here. As businesses, as a for-profit business, perhaps businesses can be on the – We can be part of the solution.

Vulnerability + Courage

[10:21] Lori: I was afraid. I have learned that I’m going to have to take off some masks. …. There was a level of safety and caution that I wasn’t sure I can let go of and really embrace from a trust perspective. I had to tell myself, as a black person, all the things that I’ve heard from growing up and how my safety depended on me never trusting in white people. I had to admit that to myself before I could help Drew on this journey.

Structure Your Conversations About Race

[19:04] Lori: … the original conversations had breakout sessions … and people are very unvarnished and open … people are embracing it. They’re asking questions. They’re doing their homework. They’re sharing stories. They’re coming into levels of self-awareness that they never thought that they would have as people, and they’re doing it at work. To be able to experience this with people has been incredibly fulfilling.

… and people are answering with real-life experiences. We’ve made that a rule because we don’t want to start debating, as Drew says, politics and a bunch of whataboutisms and frankly just ways to stay stuck on either side of this issue. … We decided that trust was the only way to get there…

More Links from this Episode:

Additional Guides and Articles

Storycorps Guide to Talking About George Floyd’s Murder and Black Lives Matter Demonstrations

Forbes: Yes, You Must Talk About Race At Work

Wharton: How to Begin Talking About Race at Work

Wharton: Leading Diversity: Why Listening and Learning Come Before Strategy

Have Friends & Colleagues Who’d Like This podcast?

SHARE IT!

Regoal and Reframe for Reslience: Gloria Park, PhD

by LeeAnn Mallory | Awareness, Leadership, RiseRadio

Regoal + Reframe for Resilience: Gloria Park, PhD

As an applied positive psychology and sport and performance psychology practitioner, Gloria Park, PhD is uniquely qualified to speak about how we continue to learn, grow, evolve and even thrive in the face of challenge. And we are certainly being challenged in 2020! Gloria shares transformative skills and strategies during the interview.

Episode 14 | July 14, 2020

Links

Gloria Park, PhD

Perform Positive

Articles on Eudaimonic by Design

Choosing Optimism: The Art of the Reframe

Embodied Resilience

Hope in Uncertain Times

Episode Transcript

Download Episode

Show Notes

“I’m often navigating the tension between helping people do better at whatever craft they’ve chosen for themselves…and balancing that with how [they] do that AND maintain some degree of wellbeing. It’s my fervent belief that you can have both; that you can do well and be well.”

Gloria Park, PhD

Regoaling vs Reacting

It’s easy to get overwhelmed these days while we’re in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis and also trying to thoughtfully enter and positively impact the domain of racial injustice.

In April I attended a webinar co-lead by Gloria. It was very timely given the newness and shock concerning Covid-19. When I first heard the term, ‘re-goaling’, I thought, YES!, this is how I would describe the thoughtful and intentional shift I see some people making. It’s different from simply reacting. Re-goaling means that I consciously disengage from the old goal and thoughtfully create a new goal. It also means that I feel and acknowledge the continuum of emotions and engage in hope. In this interview we explore ways to our own resilience.

The quotes stood out for me:

Covid’s Impact on the Human Psyche

[11:31] …everyone is dealing with this very deep sense of grief about things that matter deeply to them and now look no longer like they used to…the second place where people are really struggling is the uncertainty.

The Important Role of Hope and Goals

[13:43] …what gives me hope is that people are finding things to be hopeful about despite all of the uncertainty and despite all of the grief…

[26:36] …But if you think about the average person and the goals we set for ourselves, we set those goals because they’re a reflection of things that are really valuable to us and they’re often tied, especially in the performance domain, deeply to our sense of self-worth and our identities, and you wouldn’t have set those goals if they didn’t mean a lot to you.

(C.R. Snyder’s Hope Theory): People feel hope whey they have three things: they have a goal that they’re focused on; they have beliefs that they have the capacity within them to strive towards that goal; and that there are avenues available for them to be able to pursue those goals.

[29:38 ] A lot of the foundation of resiliency training as well as a lot of the foundation for performance psychology is about understanding the connections between those three things: your thoughts, your emotions and your behaviors.

[43:51 ] But the accomplishments will always be there. The world will be there to await you to show up and be able to strive towards those things again. I think, right now, we really need to be paying attention to our wellbeing and figure out how we can support our families and support our employees in an organizational context to really help them navigate this crisis successfully.

SMART and DUMB

We’ve all heard of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-driven); Gloria is also an advocate for DUMB goals! (42:05)

Have Friends & Colleagues Who’d Like This podcast?

SHARE IT!

3 Vital Questions for Transformative Results: David Emerald Womeldorff

by LeeAnn Mallory | Awareness, Leadership, RiseRadio

3 Vital Questions for Transformative Results: David Emerald

David has followed up his wildly popular and super sticky book, The Power of TED: The Empowerment Dynamic with 3 Vital Questions: Transforming Workplace Drama. When we answer these questions and re-orient our perspective, we become more resilient and more likely to create the results we desire.

Season 2 | Episode 13 | May 11, 2020

Links

3 Vital Questions website

The Power of TED: The Empowerment Dynamic

3 Vital Questions: Transforming Workplace Drama

David Emerald

Donna Zajonc

Episode Transcript

Download Episode

Show Notes

“All leadership really starts with self-leadership and the way that we lead our own lives has everything to do with the quality of leadership that we bring to our organizations, frankly our families, our communities, our school system, etc.”

David Emerald Womeldorff

Energy Follows Attention

We’re built for survival. Our default mode is to scan for danger and then react. If we want to create a wonderful life and build great places to work, then we have to move past problem-solving. We have to build habits that support designing futures rather than reacting to problems. David Emerald’s 3 Vital Questions takes our focus from a problem to an outcome orientation.

Highlights from the Interview

These excerpts have been edited for context.

[07:10] …The first vital question is, Where are you putting your focus? The subtext to that is, are you focusing on problems, or are you focusing on outcomes? What informs that question is an organizing framework that I call FISBE. FISBE is an acronym that stands for Focus, Inner State and BEhavior. The idea is that what we focus on engages some emotional response. That inner state that then drives our behavior.

[17:16] …Vital Question Two is, How are you relating? How are you relating to others? How are you relating to your experience? And how are you relating to yourself? Are you relating in ways that produce, or perpetuate drama? Or are you relating in ways that empower others and yourself to be more resourceful, resilient and innovative?

If our orientation is problem-focused, fear-based and reactive in nature, that creates the environment and the conditions for the Dreaded Drama Triangle, or DDT, which I’ll explain in more detail in just a moment. I also want to say that if we can consciously choose to operate as much as possible out of that Outcome Orientation, where we’re focused on what we care about, that our inner state is more passion-based and we’re taking creative action, that creates the conditions for a different set of relationship roles and dynamics that we call TED or The Empowerment Dynamic.

[31:29]: What actions are you taking? Are you merely reacting to the problems of the moment, or are you taking creative and generative action, including the solving of problems in service to outcomes? Dynamic tension informs the Third Vital Question.

[32:42]: The three basic steps of dynamic tension are first and foremost, focus on the outcome and to be as clear as we can on the outcome, that the outcome can sometimes be clear and concrete, other times it may be more vague and directional.

Then the second step is to step back and tell the truth about, what’s my current reality in relation to the outcome? That engages a tension between what we want and what we’re currently experiencing.

The third piece of dynamic tension is to then determine and take baby steps that move from our current reality toward our envisioned outcome. Baby steps to me are things that as an individual, or team, we can choose to do that tend to be short-term and in organizational terms. LeeAnn, it could be as simple as, ‘I need to have a conversation’, or ‘we need to go gather this information’. It’s just whenever the next little step is, that’s going to help us move toward and/or get clearer about the outcome.