A Leader Must Gain People’s Trust
It’s important that people can trust a leader to have their best interest in mind. By “best interest,” I mean what they find important, not what the leader believes to be important for them.
A leader needs to take all considerations into account, but people need to have confidence that the things they care about are important to the leader and are thought of.
A leader must do several things to gain trust:
- Care about people and about whatever is important to them; listen to people, to their needs, and to their thinking
- Be open-minded, authentic, and intellectually honest
- Explain their thinking in detail so that people can know what went into a decision, including the considerations that were not acted on
- Not just talk about the benefits of their policies; be open about (and show sorrow for) people who are negatively affected by the policies and anything people must give up by adopting the policies
- Speak about building trust, and supporting leadership based on trust, rather than about agreement
- Fully and vocally support leaders they disagree with (without hiding the disagreements)
In the polarized societies we live in, we often feel we are obligated to dismiss (and silence) any concern, need, desire, thought, feeling, or even fact that doesn’t support the “one true and good ideology” that we are expected to promote. This is of course not useful. We always need to think, and we need to think about everything.
Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders in the transformation of society
(Present Time 207, April 2022)