Building TRUST in 2025 What Top Leaders Wish They Knew - Charles Feltman

0:00Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. We have a phenomenal episode for you, a conversation with Charles Felton. He is the author of the business classic, the thin book of trust. This book has sold more than 100 ,000 copies. And guys, when I was when I was when I bought the book on Amazon. Right. And the very first quote is from Brene Brown. I have used his definitions of trust and distrust in every book I've ever written. Yes, the Brene Brown, one of the leaders, one of the absolute gurus, one of the best and deepest thinkers on the idea of trust and leadership and connection and communication.

0:44Brene uses Charles definitions of trust and distrust in her books. And that just gives you a little preview on what you're going to get today from Charles felt and couldn't be more excited to have him on the show and dig into this topic my friends if you're listening to this on spotify apple wherever you listen to podcasts or you're watching it on youtube please if you're not subscribe tell a friend leave a comment leave a review i read every comment that comes in i read every review that comes in i respond to all of them i I love you guys for taking the time to share your thoughts, your feelings about this show, the work we're doing here to help you get better as a leader, to help you become the person that you were meant to be, that God intended you to be, to hit peak performance.

1:38I'm all jacked up today.

1:49In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

2:05to talk about the weather when we meet each other or we're just like not real humans i guess i guess that's what it is right like you have to you're forced to talk about the weather always when you first meet somebody yes yes well in a funny way interesting because our topic is to some degree trust. Do you think that that's something that we've just like has come up through our culture and just literally every business meeting ever, the first time you meet with someone, your first five minutes are talking about where you're from and what the weather is. And then everyone commiserates. And then you kind of like have this moment of awkward silence.

2:39And then you go, well, let's talk about what we really came here to talk about. And it's like every conversation, every day it's like built into our DNA. Well, I think it's more built into our DNA than the cultural, because it's true of anyone I've spoken to all over the world. So to that point, when I was going down the rabbit hole, digging deep into it, there was one stat that's like was right at the top that just caught my attention immediately, which was this disconnect between, you know, 86 percent of leaders feel that they're trustworthy, yet only 60 % of employees or team members actually trust leadership.

3:17And like, there's this disconnect between those two things. And that just immediately caught me. And where does that come from? I want to dig in and kind of, there's so many people in leadership positions more towards even the early side of their career that listen to this show, right? It tends to be entrepreneurs, people who've, who maybe have found leadership positions, but tend to be newer to leadership positions. and they might not even one, be aware that that gap in trust exists. And two, I'd love to take our time together and really work through things we can do as individuals and organizationally to start to bridge that gap.

3:55Well, let me just say that that little poll that I did, which is unscientific, it's, you know, it was totally informal. It came out of my own curiosity about that. I wanted to see what was going on. And so the leaders that I talked about there, you notice there's a difference between the higher leader, the people at the top, the C-suite and so on, and one's direct managers tend to be trusted more than the top level leadership of a company. And I think part of that is that there is a gap. There's a pretty big gap often between the top leadership and the people who are actually doing the work in the company or even the middle management.

4:40There's a pretty big gap. And part of that is that as people move up in an organization, they tend to forget what it was like and what they needed when they were further down in the organization. so they they tend to act in ways that can't cut them off from trust of the people they're leading they tend to be less and less transparent as they move up in the organization this is there there's been some there's been some pretty good research around this that actually leaders do become whether it's intentional or not they become less transparent and they become more They're often more autocratic, and that damages trust, the trust that they could have earned of the people who report to them, the people further down in the organization that they're attempting to lead.

5:37And it varies, too. I mean, there's some leaders at the top of organizations that are highly trusted, but many of them are not. And it's kind of an unfortunate situation. And there are things that they could do to change that. Do you think I really like this idea that we forget like we needed when we're in that position? And do you think that forgetfulness, is it ego? Is it stress of the position? Is it preconceived notions on what a leader in this position is supposed to be? Or is it just time away from doing that day to day work or some other factor? I think it's a combination. I think a big part of it really is the role that we think we're supposed to play at that level, that we're supposed to know everything, right?

6:25You know, the leader is supposed to have all the answers. The leader is supposed to not have any doubts, which in effect makes us less transparent. Leaders at that level really don't want to divulge in any way their insecurity around not knowing. so they act as if they know even if they don't and that doesn't go over that well people lower down in the organization get it anyway they see it they're like what's going on here you know so one of the things that leaders can do is when they genuinely are not sure when they don't know acknowledge it don't know we're going to find out we're going to figure it out this is new to me This is a new situation.

7:13We've never confronted it. I've never confronted it. But nonetheless, we can learn. We can figure it out. We'll get through it. So acknowledging I don't have the answer now and I do have the capacity to go after it and figure it out. Yeah, I actually learned this lesson the hard way. I've started a national digital commercial insurance agency back in 2020. And my, my expertise has come out of the insurance industry. I've been an executive in the insurance industry for a long time. And I started my own insurance agency and built on tech and idea, whatever, all good. And for the first year and a half, I think one, because I was kind of early on, you play all these different roles.

7:55So I had my hands in most of the pieces. Right. And as I as the organization started to grow and as you described earlier, I stopped having my hands in all the pieces and started focusing more on the things that someone in the in the CEO position needed to focus on. I kept pretending as if I was supposed to have all the answers. And one day on a call, and it was a team call, we had, I think, low 20s at this point in terms of number of people in the organization. Someone asked me a question about something that I just had no clue how to solve the problem. And it was not intentional, but I just said, I literally had that kind of reaction.

8:34I have no idea how to solve that, like literally on the call. Right. And I said, I'm you know, I need one of you to figure it out. Like, I don't know. Like, I literally don't know what the answer to this problem is. Right. And then we moved on. What woke me up to this idea was I got three emails after that meeting from different team members. One, you know, with with solutions, all with individual solutions that we then use to actually come up with what we did. But there was one of the emails that said and it was from I think she was kind of boots on the ground CSR customer rep. and she said i've never been on a call with my boss before and have him say he didn't know the answer to a problem thank you and it was like it was like a a gut punch and a light bulb going off at the same exact time right like i was like oh my god wait a minute i don't actually need to know everything that's what all these other humans that i hired are for right like they have they have answers to questions too and then that like completely changed you know how you know how i've operated as a leader since but it was really an eye-opening moment for me that like I had been trying to be this thing as you mentioned like the role I was supposed to play and I was doing it wrong and and really the course of our business changed because then all of a sudden I started well actually I don't know that thing over there I don't know that thing over there either so well you guys got to start and then all of a sudden incredible solutions started coming from places that you wouldn't have otherwise traditionally expected which which really helped us grow so you know i can i can be a testament to exactly what you're saying you know i i had actually how we got connected was through one of your team members i had done an episode with an individual who his position was we need more autocratic leadership but almost in like a benevolent dictator kind of way not dictator is the wrong word he did not like that word he liked autocratic but like i guess one i'd love your take on just that that term autocratic in general especially because the audience would have heard it positioned before.

10:35But also like his main point was you need a you need someone making decisions that that we've gotten to committee based. And he believed and this is really where I'm interested in your take is that an individual making a decision, if using some of the principles of trust that you're describing, you could generate more trust in an organization that way than if it were nine people in a room, you know kind of closed off making a decision that it felt more it felt less tangible was kind of what he was saying it didn't it didn't feel like you could really grab on to something if it were this group of people versus a single individual that they thought was making the decision do you think there's a case to be made there obviously with the glossing that i've put on the idea yeah i think well let me sort of take a step back and say one of the things that builds trust whether you're the leader and you're you're taking an autocratic approach uh or you are doing you're arriving at decisions through consensus or whatever the process is, what builds trust is making sure that the people involved understand what the process is.

11:43They understand this is how we're doing it. And it also helps to explain this is why we're doing it this way. We're not just doing it randomly this way. We actually have, we've thought about it. And this seems to be the process that will work best for us in our opinion or my opinion or whatever it is. So in terms of whether that opinion or that choice, that decision is made by one individual after taking counsel with other people, or if it's made by a small group of people, or you get input from a larger group, whatever it is, that's important is that everybody understands. The other another piece of that that's really important is that and I'm sure you've heard this phrase before disagree and commit.

12:31So if you're working with a group, if I'm leading a team and on that team, you know, we've got like maybe eight, nine people and we have a decision to make and we have some differences of opinion. And what's really important in the process is for people to be able to really speak freely about their opinion, to support their opinion, and also listen to other people who might have different opinions. In fact, when someone, any of the people on that team can say, hey, here's my opinion or here's my proposal, poke holes in it. You know, tear it up. Let's see if we can come up with something better.

13:12that's very powerful decision you know decision process but at some point whether the leader makes the decision or the whole team comes to a consensus even if you still disagree the idea is that you commit to it outside of that environment outside of that meeting you don't go leaving the team of a team meeting and start bad-mouthing the decision or second-guessing the decision or you know, then going into the boss's office and saying, hey, you know, I have a different opinion. We've got to change this. No, at that point, until you have new data, you stick with the decision and you support it fully.

13:56That also builds strong trust throughout the organization. When people further down in the organization see that happening at the top or even in the middle, it builds strong. It doesn't feel, however, like that is our natural inclination. Most of the larger organizations that I worked with earlier in my career, etc., it tends when these committees get formed or decision-making bodies get formed, they tend to be hand-selected with the individuals that you know are going to vote alongside you or are going to vote in a similar pattern. It tends to be a way a lot of these, you know, you get labeled as the disagreeable one Or the, you know, this guy's always got, you know, something else, something different to say.

14:38And why do you feel like, why do you feel like it seems like we really have to work to get to what you just described? And how if you're part of an organization, and you want to build, you want to build a space where people can feel like they can come in and disagree or take different viewpoints, and they're not going to be punished for that? How do we start to build that? How do we how do we let an employee know who may have a different opinion that they're going to be, I hate this term, but safe and sharing that opinion and not being penalized down the road for sharing it in a meeting? Well, that comes from the experience.

15:11When people are penalized, when people, whether it's, you know, the team leader or other people on the team that penalized them in some way, then they're going to just, you know, oh, okay, I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to speak up even if I think I have a better idea. I'm sure as heck not going to bring it up in this conversation. or the opposite, when somebody does bring up a contradictory idea and tries to lay it out for the rest of the group and actually gets encouraged for having a different idea, thanked for having a different idea. Even if that idea isn't taken up, even if something else goes in a different direction, that person still gets it, that it's okay to do it.

15:59So that a big part of that falls to the team leader. They have to go first in that regard. And other people on the team, when the team leader does that, genuinely does that, then the other people on the team tend to follow suit. So you create the you know what I'm sure you've heard the term psychological safety. Right. So there's this one on one trust between the team leader and the individual team members and also between each of the individual team members. is it's the foundation for psychological safety, the sense that these individuals actually have my interests in mind. They actually have my back here and they wanna know, they wanna hear from me.

16:43And then that begins to build that sense of psychological safety. Doesn't happen overnight and it happens through experience, through how we work together. Yeah, this is, you know, I think about like the culture that Ray Dalio has created inside of his organization. He's written books about it. He's done a lot of interviews around how their team, in some regard, and again, I'm kind of glazing this idea, but they're almost ranked based on how often they bring, I don't want to call them dissenting because it's not meant to be negative in any way, but as often as someone is willing to bring alternative ideas to the conversation and present them in a quality, They're like ranked inside their organization almost for being disagreeable, but in a positive way.

17:29And he equates that to the massive growth that they've had and the sustained massive growth that they've had to the fact that they're literally incentivized to come up with alternative ideas, to be disagreeable, to present arguments that go against the common or accepted narrative inside the organization. And you think about the like emotional strength that you have to have one to do it. And to the cultural strength that he's created, that they feel like they can do that and not and not be penalized. I mean, that's an enviable or organizational culture. I think that's kind of where we would like to get not easy and certainly taking time.

18:11But does that feel like the direction that ultimately we're trying to go? Well, in my experience, that yes. Yes. The short answer is yes. I want to point to something that you said there, being disagreeable. I think bringing up contradictory ideas, approaches, thoughts, have we thought about this? What if we tried this? There are people who do that very skillfully. And there are people who are not skilled in doing. They come across as disagreeable. and that actually can be a problem. So one of the things that I think is important if a leader is wanting to create that kind of team, that kind of organization where people can do that and feel comfortable about that, they have to help those people who are not skillful at disagreeing in a positive way to be able to do it, to be able to shift so that they can bring their contradictory or or alternate views in without ruffling feathers on a personal level so keep it at the level of ideas as opposed to making it personal yeah yeah that's you know that was one of the things you know as our organization grew and we started to have this culture of alternative ideas right i think it started to be at first it was all very positive and then you know people start doing these internal calculations you know these calculations in their head of how often their ideas accepted in this person's and then you know and and you know we had at a certain point to do like a we'd have a hard conversation around framing and that was one of the like there was like a month of my life at the organization where i was working with individuals around framing their arguments to be not his idea or her idea but the idea right like what is the thing they said not you know you don't like the way his tone right we got into these crazy semantic nonsense in my mind in my mind i know they're important but in my mind as a leader arguments around the tone used in slack and i was like guys one we can't hear them so like that diminishes tone two not everyone is great at conveying in a short form context like slack they're right you know they're not perfectly articulating all their ideas like you know as you know we had to talk about not filling in the blanks between the words because people would like inject and i'd be like wait a minute he didn't actually write that or she didn't actually write that she wrote this you stuck this word in this word in these two places and made it sound like they're accusing you of something when really they're just you know asking a question from a different direction and that framing exercise was one of the most exhausting things I've ever done as a leader.

21:07But we did start to get better at it. Not perfect. But, you know, I guess if if I were, you know, getting free consulting from you, which is essentially what a podcast is in general, you know, like how how would you help leaders who are out there going, you know, I'm I'm trying to create this space. I'm trying to help people. But geez, they just we always seem to drop back into he said it this way or she said it that way or, you know, she said this, but I know what she really means. Like, how do we start to pull our team and even ourselves out of the person delivering the message and extract just the message and try to, you know, remove that human attachment that oftentimes can corrupt the message they're trying to get across?

21:50So I don't want to put myself out there as a communications expert because that's, you You know, really, I mean, I certainly have helped people improve their communication. A lot of it has to do with, and it's the same with email. It's always been since the dawn of email. And probably long before that, people were filling in, you know, they were adding tone and color to words that weren't necessarily there in the first place. Or they were reinterpreting words in different ways. And so one of the things that a leader can do, I think, is to help. Slack, for example, is a great communication channel, but like email, it has its best uses and its not so good uses.

22:41And its best uses are for either, I think, personal opinion, or for short form. Hey, the meeting is happening today. Here are the topics. End of story. or more long form, but making it clear that this is like, okay, I'm going to put this out there. This is my opinion. This is my argument, if you will, for the case I'm making for this proposal or whatever it is. And that's just what it is. It's so making it clear that that's what I'm doing. I'm making a long form proposal argument here. And I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. This gets tricky because younger people tend to, you know, ego is not quite formed fully yet.

23:26People are still defensive. So, you know, if I put my thought out there and somebody attacks it, you know, in quotes, or at least that's how I read that in the Slack channel there somewhere or in an email, I'm going to get really defensive right away and I'm going to not trust this person. So again, it's leaders' job to help ameliorate that, help mediate that by helping the individuals see. Leaders think that their leadership is 95 % about making business decisions. No. It's about 50 % maybe making business decisions and 50 % supporting their people in building and maintaining trust, in communicating clearly and positively with each other, in dealing with the emotions that they're all experiencing.

24:24And there was some great research years ago now. Barbara Fredrickson did some good research about positivity and negativity. And, you know, it's like, okay, if you have 100 % positive emotions, a string of positive, that's actually damaging. You need to have some, a few negative emotional experiences in any given time period or through any given process to have the process be meaningful. And so trying to create a totally constantly positive environment, I think I've read articles lately about toxic positivity and so on. There's something to that, you know, too much of it. So it doesn't help. So I think it's the leader's job, again, to to get involved at that level as well, helping their employees build and maintain creating the environment in which their employees can build and maintain strong trust with each other that they can deal with and help repair damaged trust.

25:25but they can help their employees communicate more effectively with each other. So yeah, that's a big part of a leader's job, whether they feel comfortable with it, whether they like it or not. And if they don't feel comfortable with it and they don't like it, it's the organization needs to help them get better at it. And you can, we all can. Why a lot of times incredibly high task performers who get elevated to leadership positions often struggle because maybe they were an incredible salesperson or they were just the best on the phone with service people or whatever that thing is and then they get elevated to a leadership position and they're like wait a minute i was really good at the decisions that it took to execute this task now all of a sudden i'm dealing with people all day what the you know what the hell's going on here when i was training my management team at my company we came up with a phrase in service of i said your job is no longer to sell insurance policies or service insurance policies or whatever you are now in service of the humans that do that and if you don't want your day-to-day life to be in service of the other humans that do that task then this is not the right spot for you and and you don't have to be it today i need you to want to get to that place but that's where your mind needs to be you are no longer the person doing the thing you are the person in service of the people doing the thing and that phrase seemed to really grab them and we that became like a mantra like anytime someone started to get a little squirrely we'd be like just remember in service of right and so i know she's difficult but we're in service of her because she kills it you know she's selling her butt off Like, you know, we need to be in service of her.

27:09How do we how do we help her? How do we help the team, you know, work together, whatever? And that seemed to really work. But I want to transition to to a scenario that I think has been popularized by Elon Musk, but I think can create trust issues. And I just wanted to help you navigate this. And it's something that I outside of Elon Musk, you know, I didn't even really know he did this until I started to research it. But I had a scenario where I needed to make a decision on a thing. So I went all the way down to the boots on the ground level, like the actual salespeople, you know, doing the calls, talking to the customers, and I asked them for their help.

27:46And I, you know, and I think this was the major mistake, but I bypassed the middle, the manager. And frankly, I didn't want the manager there because I wanted to get the kind of unfiltered response from the person doing the day to day work. I didn't want to get a filtered version, and I certainly didn't want the day-to-day person to feel like they had to filter because their manager was there, etc. And that, if I had to do the calculation, it boosted my trust with the person on the ground, but it definitely had an impact on both the trust from the manager to the boots-on -the-ground person and the manager to me.

28:26So I like this idea of go to the person doing the thing to get the answer. But how do we navigate that, say, as an executive level? How do we navigate through the manager layers so that we all know we're working the same direction? No one's being stepped past or stepped on. And we can all kind of, you know, understand what we're trying to do, you know, in this type of scenario. How do we how do we work through that process from a trust perspective? So my first question to you, if I were coaching you on this, would be to ask you, what did you say to the middle management folks about what you were up to?

29:04Well, see, I think my first problem was I didn't tell the management folks. I just called the person directly and said, hey, I'm working on something. I want to get your thought on it. Right. So that's kind of how I said. Now, in my mind, I'm going, you know, again, I don't mean this to sound egotistical, but in my mind, I'm like, I'm the CEO of the company. Like I should be able to call whoever I want and talk to them on the phone. Like I didn't I wasn't purposefully trying to bypass the manager, but I wanted that person's opinion and I didn't want it filtered. Right. So that was kind of my idea.

29:32So I just picked up the phone and I called them. And I didn't even realize there was a problem until a couple of weeks later. There was like a passive aggressive comment in a meeting. And I was like, something's wrong. So then I called the manager on the phone. And then that's when this kind of all shook out. And I was like, you know, I need some crow. And, you know, I apologize. Look, I'm not trying to step on your toes, whatever. But yeah, I didn't I didn't say anything to the manager, you know. So explaining ahead of time, what it is you're doing, why you're doing it that way so that they get it, that this is not sort of an end run around their authority.

30:06Because in middle managers, you know, that's like one of the toughest jobs, way, way more difficult in many ways than being CEO. They just, they're trying to bridge the gap between strategy at the, you know, at the C-suite level or, you know, whatever, a little ways down from there to the people who are actually doing the work. And, you know, it's hard. And then when it looks like your CEO or your senior leadership is doing an end run around you and not including you in this, it just feels crappy. So step one, you know, tell them what is your up to and for the sake of what are you doing it that way?

30:51Well, because I want to hear directly from them. I don't want them to be influenced by you in the room. I don't want it to come up through you. And, you know, another thing you can do, of course, is say to them, you know, after I get the, you know, what I want to get from them, I'm going to come back and I'm going to ask you some stuff, too, because I want to hear some things from you as well. You know, you may want to, for example, hear, how would you answer this question? And if there's a difference there, that would be, you know, kind of a useful thing to know, too. So, but yeah, I think the main thing is communicating, communicating and communicating some more.

31:27Well, I was going to see you can't over communicate, but you can. That can be bad, too. But I think the important thing is to communicate the essence, you know, the important essential aspects of what it is you're doing and why you're doing it. To that point, kind of bringing up the topic of transparency again, what is the right balance? How do we find harmony with transparency? Right. Like I, I always tended to just full transparency. Right. because one i have hardcore adhd add i i just move very fast my brain moves very fast and i always found trying to be less transparent just like an anchor around my way like should i share this should i not share it's like that thought alone just like slowed me down enough that i was like screw it i'm just gonna tell everything because it's just easier i don't have to i told this person this i didn't tell this person this right like but that also comes you know there are negatives to being completely transparent too and what i ultimately tried to find was a good balance i don't know that i found it so you know being that you know this is a topic that you definitely have expertise in i would love your opinion on how do we start to find and i know there's not like a certain number it's not you can come back and go 73 right and i'd be like what how do we as leaders start to figure out what a good level of transparency is so that our team knows we're being honest with them, that we're sharing with them, but maybe we don't need to barf every single thing onto them that's happening in the organization, every number, et cetera.

33:02I think it starts with the question, what's useful for them to know? What's important for them to know in order for them to do their jobs well, feel like they're part of the team, feel like they're respected and honored in their role. And if you can answer that question, and that will lead you directly to what can I tell or should I tell them, should I talk about. I would err, my advice would be to err on the side of transparency. There are times when we can't be, right? There are things that we can't share with our teams, especially at the middle management level. One of my clients, actually more than one of my clients, but one in particular that stands out in my memory because he was a middle manager and he had a team and his team members had you know people reporting to them and kind of on down the line and the company was doing a riff or actually it seemed to be in a permanent riff mode but there was a big one coming up and everybody knew about it's like you know it wasn't a secret but he basically knew that some of a couple of the people on his team he was going to have to walk out of the building sometime in the next couple of weeks.