Darryl Stickel: Unpacking Trust as a Leadership Superpower

0:00Trust is the willingness to be vulnerable when we can't completely predict how someone else is going to behave. And so for me, it means uncertainty times vulnerability gives us a level of perceived risk. And we each have a threshold of risk that we can tolerate.

0:18Mick:Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement, leadership, and relentless growth. No fluff, no filters, just hard-hitting truths, unstoppable strategies, and the mindset shifts that separate the best from the rest. Ready to break limits? Let's go!

0:42Mick:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back for another powerful episode of Mick Unplugged. And today's guest is the man that I call the architect of trust. building bridges where walls once stood. From global corporations to conflict zones, his work unlocks the human code behind true modern leadership. He's insightful. He's grounded. He's transformational. He is the good doctor, Dr. Darrell Sticker. Dr. Darrell, how are you doing today, brother? Brother, I really appreciate you having me on the podcast, and I'm looking forward to spending some time together. I appreciate you being here. You know, off top, we have to let the viewers and listeners understand this.

1:23Mick:We kind of don't like each other, Dr. Darrell. You know, I'm a UNC grad, and you went to that school that starts with D in Durham, North Carolina, that I can't pronounce very well. Right. How did we get here? Well, the cream always rises, is what I would suggest. And we may not like each other, but I think given time, we come to love each other. No, absolutely. Absolutely. As you know this, right? And I think most people understand this. Duke and UNC do have a love-hate relationship, right? A lot of hate, but it's a bunch of mutual respect, right? Like, take sports out of it. You have graduates of Duke, graduates of UNC.

2:06Mick:We always like to rib each other, right? But there's so much mutual respect. We just don't like when outsiders talk about the other school. Like, you can't hate Duke more than I hate Duke, I promise you. Right. And I'm sure that's how it is for you, too. Right. Like when it comes to sports, no one can hate UNC more than you can hate UNC. So unless you went to Duke, you don't understand. Unless you went to UNC, you don't understand. It's that intense rivalry. But also, as I was saying to you before we started recording, I took half my during my doctoral studies, I took half my classes at UNC Chapel Hill.

2:37I have so much respect for the faculty and the institution and the graduates.

2:42Mick:Absolutely. Absolutely. And you're wearing a Carolina blue shirt today in honor of the University of National Champion. So I understand. Appreciate it. So, Dr. Darrell, one, I am truly honored to have you on, man. Like, you know how much I respect you. I like to consider myself a person that's pretty well respected in the modern leadership phase of life. And I know that you are there as well, too. But before we get into all of your great work, I like to ask my my guest this first question is what's your because? What's that real why behind the why that keeps you doing what you do? Right. You are well acclaimed.

3:24Mick:Right. Lots of awards, lots of articles about you. You know, you have Fortune 100 clients and you're speaking all over the world. So what's your passion? What's your because that keeps you doing what you do?

3:39So I, wow. I'm going to get a little emotional here. I'm sorry. No, that's what we're here for.

3:53The path I've traveled has included some real hard knocks. And I believe that sometimes a hard road can be a good teacher. And I have learned from that experience how to help people better understand one another, how to help people build trust with one another. And I have a perspective that's unusual. I won't say it's unique, but it's rare. You know, there's a blend of theory and practice that gives me an unusual perspective on the world. I also have two sons that mean more to me than anything. Yeah. And when I see the world the way it is now, with trust levels, the lowest we've ever seen, our struggles to get along, I feel like I have an obligation to try to make the world a better place.

4:43And a strong motivation because of my sons. I want the world to be a better place for them.

4:49Mick:Yeah. That's beautiful, man. That's beautiful. You know, and you talk about your unique path. And I want to ask you about that and just why trust means so much to you and why it's so important that this is the message that's shared across the world. You know, knowing you like I do, doing a ton of studying of you, right? Like you're legally blind. So trust is multifaceted for you, right? So let's talk about your path a little bit and that journey that's so unique to you. So I grew up in a small town in northern British Columbia, Canada, and it was fairly remote. It was about an hour drive to the next tiny community.

5:35And winters were harsh. People had to pull together. There was a sense of if you could help someone, you should. And so I grew up with that kind of feeling, that instinct, that set of values.

5:53And then, you know, I played hockey because most people played hockey when I grew up.

5:59Mick:Yeah. I was playing at a fairly high level. I was playing junior and I got attacked by a fan with a club. Shattered my helmet, knocked me unconscious. I stopped breathing three times on the way to the hospital. It was traumatic. And at the time, I was 17, I knew that I was going to lose my sight, that I was going to become legally blind at some point. I had a hereditary retinal disorder that was, that was gonna rob me of the ability to do many things. And so I had come to the conclusion that I would train my brain so I could think for a living. Now, all of a sudden I couldn't think at all, right?

6:52I had the attention span of a fruit fly. And it was the mid eighties, 1984. And we didn't know a lot about concussions. And so people were saying, well, it'll just pass, just walk it off. It'll be fine. It took a couple of years for the symptoms to reside. And, you know, I, I was tired all the time, struggling to pay attention, struggling to learn. And so there was this feeling of helplessness and hopelessness and loss that gave me real empathy for people who were struggling. And when I started to recover, I moved to Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island, just off the West coast of Canada. and I was going to school there and I'd be on the bus and complete strangers would just sit down next to me and say, I'm really having a hard time.

7:54And so I wanted to understand what it was that drew people to me that allowed them to feel open and comfortable with me. And so I started working with families in crisis and troubled teens and working on crisis lines, trying to hone those skills and come to a better understanding of what it was that was driving that. And at the same time, I was going to school, right? Like I did an undergraduate degree in psychology, a master's degree in public administration.

8:28And while I was working in native land claims in British Columbia, they would ask me these deep philosophical questions like, what is self-government? Or what will the province look like 50 years after claims are settled? The last question they asked me, Nick, was, How do we convince a group of people we've shafted for over a hundred years? They should trust us. Wow. And I thought, man, that's a good question. Wow. And so I went to Duke, wrote my doctoral thesis on building trust in hostile environments, and had the good fortune of having two of the world's leading academics on the topic of trust on my committee at Duke.

9:10One of them showed up the year I did. The other one showed up the year after I did.

9:16And it's hard not to feel like it was intentional somehow, right? Like this whole pattern of events was leading to me learning and understanding this topic the way that I do. And after I finished, they sat me down and they said, you know, when you first came to us, we had a conversation with each other. We said, topic's too big. He'll never solve it. It's too complicated. We'll give him six months. He'll come crawling back to us. And we'll let him chisel off a little piece of this and that'll be his thesis. He said, six months in, you were so far beyond us. We couldn't help anymore. All we could do is sit and watch.

9:53Mick:Wow. Now here we are a couple of years later and we think you've solved it. and so i ended up going

10:07to mckinsey and company working as a consultant and they said wow you've got good client hands let's send you to the worst place as possible so now i'm getting a chance to apply the concepts that i've worked on right right and then i was injured again post-concussion syndrome i was on the way to a client site cab I was in rear-ended another vehicle and I was back to struggling with fatigue and memory and concentration problems and um and so I ended up starting my own little company called Trust Unlimited yeah and for the last 20 plus years I've been helping individuals and organizations better understand what trust is how it works and how to build it and I've I've been learning that whole time, Nick.

10:56Right. You know, from helping financial services organizations to helping nonprofits to helping the Canadian military try to figure out how to build trust with the locals in Afghanistan. Each of those teaches me something, which is what helps differentiate me. Right. It's a very practical, applied approach to what feels like a complex problem.

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12:30Mick:You know, Daryl, you've said trust is a risk, right? Can you unpack that for the listeners and viewers? Like, what makes trust a risk in this high-stake world that we're in? yeah well yeah so for me trust is a combination of uncertainty and vulnerability right the definition that i use is that trust is the willingness to be vulnerable when we can't completely predict how someone else is going to behave and so for me it means uncertainty times vulnerability gives us a level of perceived risk and we each have a threshold of risk that we tolerate. And if we go beyond that threshold, we don't trust.

13:19If we're beneath it, then we do. And what that means then, Mick, is that if uncertainty is really high, vulnerability has to be pretty low. And as our relationships deepen, the uncertainty comes down, the range of vulnerability we can tolerate starts to grow. what we're seeing right now is that our vulnerability is fairly set but uncertainty is bouncing all over the place and so you and I connect and you're already experiencing discomfort with how volatile the world is and I ask you to make yourself just a little bit more vulnerable for me that's a harder ask than it used to be because you're already feeling overexposed.

14:10Yeah. That's why our trust levels are so low right now.

14:16Mick:That's great perspective. I didn't even look at it from that lens, but you're exactly right, man. And working with all the organizations that you do and leaders that you do, what's like one common trust destroyer that you see as a common theme amongst companies, big or small? What are companies and leaders getting wrong about trust that they could easily do to fix it? Wow. That is a great question. I don't know that there's a silver bullet. I think that for me, there's 10 levers that we can pull to build trust. Yeah. and those who are really good at building trust understand that and they know how to pull multiple levers and when to pull them right a lot of people have this profound lack of awareness of trust and they have a lever that they pull over and over again right so So if we wanted to build trust, we'd have to understand where does uncertainty come from?

15:30Where does vulnerability come from? How do we influence perceptions of outcomes? And what are the emotional stakes? I think the biggest challenge for most organizations is just a complete lack of awareness. I agree. And so 95 % of people believe they're more trustworthy than average. like I suspect you and I could go to a prison and we could interview the inmates and say do you think you're trustworthy and they go oh yeah yeah you can trust me nobody else in this place but me I'm I'm golden right the problem that creates for us is that if we do have a misunderstanding if we do have a disagreement I assume it's somebody else's fault I don't do the work I need to do.

16:15And I don't take their perspective into account. Right. And so, you know, the biggest gap we find is between how much leaders believe they're trusted and how much they actually are. So I think the impact that we see is often around creating a vocabulary that people can use yeah talking about uncertainty talking about vulnerability talking about you know what's a good outcome look like being clear and actually having conversations with one another um yeah one of my you know my aspirations to be one of the best guests you've ever had which is a high bar but you're doing a great job but to do that i'd have to ask you what does great look like for you.

17:07Right. Right. So what's, what would it look like if I was a great guest for you? Yeah.

17:13Mick:A great guest for, for Mick Unplugged provides amazing insights that the viewers and listeners can put into application immediately. Right. I like things in simple forms and so do my viewers and listeners. Okay. And if I wanted to do an even better job, we would ask your listeners. Correct. What are some of the best episodes you've heard from Mick? and what was it about those episodes that really drove things home for you? And so if I don't include you in the conversation, I just assume what excellence looks like. I miss often, right? I could come on here and say, oh, I'm from Duke and be naive to the fact that that actually doesn't work in my favor for you.

18:00Mick:Correct. Correct. And I could say, oh, I've spoken at Harvard. you could say la-di-da, right? So does the janitor. Right, right. And so I could trot out all these things, but if I don't know what you think excellence looks like, then I'm going to miss. And so a lot of times what we encourage people to do is actually have a conversation about what good looks like. You know, and I do that with my sons. I say, what does a good dad look like? And I got to tell you, it's terrifying, Mick. It is. because what if they say not you? Right. That's the risk, right? Trust is a risk. Trust is a risk. And it wouldn't be so rare if it didn't have the potential to be harmful.

18:48Correct. Right? We know that trust provides incredible benefits and it's actually more valuable now than it's ever been because it's so scarce. But the reason we don't have it is because it comes with risk.

19:04Mick:Totally agree. Totally agree. You know, on the leadership track, I asked my kids, you know, tell me who a good leader is, in your opinion, like, who are your top three people that you would classify as good leaders, right? Take dad out of the equation, right? I did a little bit differently. Daryl, I took myself out so they couldn't say dad. Right. Right. I wasn't going to hurt my feelings. Good call. But what each of them did was they gave me three social media influencers. OK. And it made me pause. And I was like, but you don't know that they're a good leader. You don't even know that they're famous.

19:46Mick:You just know that they have a lot of followers. Right. And that's someone that you listen to or that you follow. And it really made me pause. And it's and I said, okay, when I grew up, right, like we went to libraries and there were biographies, right? There used to be exposés on TV around great leaders and the history of leaders. And when you go to an amazing school like the University of North Carolina, you know, you're indoctrinated into great leadership because we have libraries about specifically great leaders and good leaders. And I said, the world is missing that. And it made me go a little bit further.

20:24Mick:And this is why I connect with you so well. You know, I say for the modern employee, trust is the number one form of currency today. Right. It's not your benefits package. It's not your pension. It's not your 401k because the modern employee, whether corporations want to believe it or not, 63 % of modern employees are thinking about how to become an entrepreneur, whether that's a side hustle job for them. But they're thinking of some other means of income that they can control. Doesn't mean that they're going to go full fledged, start another company. But the benefits aren't as important to them as much as me trusting Daryl as my leader to be transparent about his vision, his purpose, where the company is going good or bad.

21:13Mick:That's what the modern employee seeks first and foremost. And I'd love your response or your take on that as well, too, being that you are who I consider the guru of trust, the godfather of trust. Yeah, brother, you've nailed it. We see there's a Gallup poll not too long ago that showed that 70 % of employees are disengaged. Yeah. I believe the social contract is broken. Yep. you know we used to have this mindset of you go to school you work hard you're going to be successful you're going to have a house and a family and vacations and the things and a retirement yeah yeah and it doesn't feel like any of that's true anymore right and people sort of denigrate the generations that are following us my son gave me this great quote about you know the kids of today are lazy and ill-informed and lack motivation.

22:10And it just went on and on. Right. And, and the quote was from the 1930s. Yeah. So this is not a new phenomenon. And what older people like us need to realize is that they're reacting to the context that they're embedded in. The rules of the game have changed and they have a better understanding of it than we do. Oh, for sure. Sure. And so when they don't sell out for a corporation, you know, when they hear these billionaires saying you need to work harder, what they hear is you need to work harder so I make more money. And I believe that the more senior we become, the less direct control we have over outcomes.