Reference no: EM133092999
Case Study
We think about trust as rare and precious, and yet it's the basis for almost everything we do as civilized people. Trust is the reason we're willing to exchange our hard- earned paychecks for goods and services, pledge our lives to another person in marriage, cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. We rely on laws and contracts as safety nets, but even those systems are ultimately built on trust in the institutions that enforce them. We don't know that justice will be served if something goes wrong, but we have enough faith in the system to make deals with relative strangers. It's not coincidental that trust ultimately found its way into the official US motto, "In God We Trust." Even if trust in our earthly structures erodes, it's so vital to the national project that we threw in a higher-order backstop.
Trust is also the input that makes the leadership equation work. If leadership is about empowering others, in your presence and your absence, then trust is the emotional framework that allows that service to be freely exchanged. I'm willing to be led by you because I trust you. I'm willing to give up some of my cherished autonomy and put my well- being in your hands because I trust you. In turn, you're willing to rely on me because you trust me. You trust that I will make decisions that advance our shared mission, even when you're not in the room. The more trust that accumulates between us, the better this works.
How do you build up stores of this essential leadership capital? Here's the basic formula: people tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers. You can find the roots of this framework in Aristotle's writing on the elements of effective persuasion, where he argued that you need to ground your case in logos, pathos, and ethos. You will also find this pattern in much of modern psychology literature.
What signals are you sending about whether the world should trust you? We don't always realize what information (or more often, misinformation) we're putting out there about our own trustworthiness. What's worse, stress tends to amplify the problem. Under pressure, we often double down on behaviors that undermine trust. For example, we unconsciously mask our true selves in a job interview, even though it's precisely the type of less than fully authentic behavior that's going to reduce our chance of being hired.
The good news is that most of us generate a stable pattern of trust signals, which means a small change in behavior can go a long way. First, we tend to get in our own way, in the same way, over and over again. In moments when trust is broken (or fails to get any real traction), it's usually the same driver-authenticity, empathy, or logic-that gets wobbly on us. In fact, we call this pattern of setbacks your trust "wobble." Your wobble is the driver that's most likely to get shaky in periods of low trust. Everyone, it turns out, has a wobble.
We also all have a driver where we're rock solid, one that stays strong and steady in our interactions with others, regardless of the circumstances. One of the three trust drivers rarely lets us down, even if we're woken up out of a dead sleep at 3:00 a.m. and asked to perform. We call this pattern your trust "anchor." Your anchor is the attribute that's least likely to get wobbly on you, even when the proverbial clouds start to gather and winds start to howl.
1. Describe the nature and role of Managing People:
2. Discuss why this is important as a result
3. Identify the concepts
4. Discuss the three components of the subject and how it can assist positively
5. What kind of leadership philosophy applies?
6. What kind of leadership solution has to be applied?
7. What is your overall analysis on the matter? Are your solution based on a long term or a short-term plan?