Charles Feltman - How these 4 behaviours Build or Break Trust within teams

0:00Okay, I can do it by Friday, but I've got all these other things that you've asked me to do, plus some things that that person asked me and that person asked me, you know, so my plate is really full right now. So yes, it's going to be garbage what I give you. That's right. But I got it. I'm on it. I can do it. Get it there. I'm done.

0:20What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR. But trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:55Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm here with Patti McCord, and I'm Jessica Neal. And today we have a very special guest named Charles Feltman. And I came across your book because you're an author of an amazing book. I think this is the second edition of it, but the thin book of trust. It's the third edition. The third edition. Oh, look, I'm behind. And so you've been a coach for over 25 years. You're an author. And the reason why I got so excited to have you on the show is that your work is a lot of or all about trust. And Patty and I have thought about how to build trust within organizations and leadership.

1:43And we've spent our entire careers trying to do that. And so I'm really excited to have you on the show to help our leaders get a little bit more insight into this. because it's not as easy as you think. But the thing I love about your book and what you do is you make it more accessible and practical. So Charles, tell us a little bit about you and how you started on this evolution because I know you had a career even before coaching and worked with many industries. So tell us who you are. Well, sure. And I do want to say that although I do a lot of work in trust, And I have this book that's been out for, gosh, almost 14 years now.

2:26Like I said, third edition. And it's still doing very well in the market. Interestingly, it's sold over 100 ,000 copies. But that's not really the core of my business. The core of my business is executive coaching. It just turns out that pretty much everyone that I've ever coached at some somewhere along the line has run into a trust issue. And so before I wrote the book, I was using the framework and distinctions that I wrote about in the book, ultimately, to help those clients deal with the issues that they were confronting around trust, how to build it, how to maintain it, how to repair it when it gets damaged, how to create a kind of a culture of trust on a team.

3:15So that was the kind of some of the work that I was doing along with all the other coaching work that I was doing. And I had at one point written about an eight page sort of white paper that I had on my website that I could direct clients to download that and give it to your team members. You can talk about this. Talking about trust is a way to build it if you do it well. And a woman one day contacted me. She was one of two people in a small publishing firm, a husband-wife publishing firm called Thin Book Publishing. She explained that they published thin books for the business market and that she got in a hold of my white paper and thought that it could be nicely expanded into a thin book.

4:02And I said, oh, that's great. I can get this stuff out to a whole lot more people if there's a book about it. And I had, you know, I thought occasionally about writing a book, but I was like, wow, how do I do that? So she said, I'll help you. I'll support you. You know, we'll be your editing team. And I said, okay, well, I'll give it a try. It was a real journey to write a thin book. Yeah, I'm sure. But the point was that it was supposed to be, and I think what I achieved was something that's clear, concise, practical. You know, I've had lots of people say to me, I read the first chapter of so-and-so's book on trust.

4:42And I read your book twice. So the idea is that somebody can pick up the book, maybe take it on a flight from L.A. to Chicago, read it on flight, get off at the other end and be able to do something different than they've done before. that will help build or maintain trust with the person that they're, or people they're going to meet with in Chicago. Or if there's an issue that they need to address directly about damaged trust that they can, you know, they have some, something practical they can do to make that happen. Yeah. So before the book, when you were coaching and you came up with the framework, what was it about the framework that, that helped, that worked with the leaders that you were working with?

5:29The original framework, I didn't come up with. I got it. I added to it. But the original framework had a history long before I came across it. But what makes it so powerful is that it takes this sort of hard to understand, kind of amorphous, hard to pin down concept of trust and allows people to break that into, well, in my case, in the framework that I use, four distinct but interconnected. domains, if you will, which then allows people to think about it much more specifically. So that if I think about, okay, instead of trust being this kind of amorphous blob that I can't really get a good handle on and therefore can't talk about very easily.

6:19And also for many people, this idea that trust is binary. It's either I trust you completely or I don't trust you at all. and struggling with that, how do they deal with that piece of it? This allows people to see that, oh, I can trust somebody in one or two or three of the domains, but you know what? I can't completely trust them in this other domain. So I can now, once I've isolated that, I can go and talk about the behaviors in that domain with that person that might change that. So can you talk to us about the four things? For trust domains, yeah. Because they're each domains in which we make assessments or judgments, if you will, about other people's trustworthiness.

7:07And they're doing the same thing with us. They're making assessments about our trustworthiness in each of those domains. So the four of them, I'll start with care. Care is a domain in which I can say I trust that you have my interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take action. You have my back. Sometimes in a team setting, it may not be my specific interest, but I trust that you have our collective team interests in mind when you're taking action and that you're not going to say or do things that would somehow harm me. Well, that's an interesting one, because so many people come into work with preconceived notions about that concept.

8:00Right. I always say, you know, it's from what you saw on TV or what your mom or dad talked about when they came home from work at night. You know, don't trust them. They'll screw you if you don't watch out. And it's funny because people in Jessica and my function often go into HR with, you know, we've got to protect ourselves from those evil employees who might screw us. right and people sense that right i mean they they know coming so so it's an interesting first concept for me to hear from you because you know sometimes it's just built in and you don't even know it as a leader yeah if you sense from me that i don't fully trust you then you're gonna kind of look at me and go i wonder if he's trustworthy that's right that's right maybe i better actually put myself on guard.

8:55Better watch out for people like that. Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of a two-way street. The same as building trust is, you know. I come in trusting you, and you get that, and you say, oh, I want to be trustworthy for Charles. So you sort of, you know, behave in ways that are, and then you also invest trust in me or extend trust to me more readily. And as long as I actually live up to that, trust builds. So there's this domain of care, and there's a number of behaviors that we could talk about that build care or build trust in the domain of care. So that's one domain. Another domain is what I call sincerity, which is a kind of a combination of integrity, walking your talk, that the actions you'll take match the words that you say.

9:46You say this to one person and you're going to say it to another person pretty much the same way. You're not going to be speaking out of different sides of your mouth, different things. So there's this idea in the domain of sincerity, of integrity, of walking your talk, and also honesty. Honesty is part of that domain of integrity, which means I trust that I can believe what you say. You've already fact-checked yourself, if you will. So I don't need to go around fact-checking you. So that's the domain of sincerity. A third one is reliability, which is that you will keep the specific commitments or promises that you make.

10:28So if I say, Jessica, I'll have this report to you by 4.30 in the afternoon on Thursday, and it's going to have this information in it, and it'll be formatted in this way because we've talked about it and I know what your expectations are. and I make that commitment and I do it all as well, you will assess you can trust me in that domain of reliability as long as I do it fairly often. If on the other hand, I fail to do it and fail again and fail maybe a third time, at that point, you're going to say, I can't trust Charles in the domain of reliability. He either doesn't get it in on time or doesn't do what it is that we've agreed he's going to do, or maybe even both of those.

11:16So that's trusting in the domain of reliability. And then the fourth one is domain of competence. So I can trust that you have the skills, expertise, knowledge, experience, maybe even resources to do either what I'm asking you to do or to do what you're saying you can do. So I can trust that you are going to be competent to do this. And ironically, maybe, this is something a lot of people don't quite get, but if I don't have what it takes to do that, and I acknowledge it, which is kind of like the, you know, backed over to the domain of sincerity, I'm being honest, right? I acknowledge that I don't have the skill or whatever it is to do it.

12:05That's actually going to build trust with people in that domain. Right. Instead of trying to hide it and pretend. Or when it's done blaming. Right. Well, you should have known that I don't. I would have if I had only had this thing you should have known I needed to have. You know who does this to me on a regular basis? My five-year-old. He'll trip and it'll be on one of his toys. And he'll be like, well, you should have put it away, mom.

12:38He's already learning this behavior, Charles. I'm going to need you. Well, you know, I want to go back to reliability for a second. I mean, I know we'll go over these detail, but it's the key to efficiency, right? Right. If what you said about, you know, me trusting you is true, then I don't think about it until Thursday. Right. I can now spend the rest of my time making sure that everybody else on the team is aligned and that, you know, it's like sometimes when we use words like trust, they're so soft and they're so touchy feely that people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. they trust me, you know, I'm a good guy, right?

13:19And reliability is the key to efficiency, because if I know you're going to deliver, I don't even, I just know you will, right? Yeah. Right? That's what makes us a really great team is when you know that when people commit, they follow through. And I talk about this in the book, but there's a kind of process, a linguistic, a conversation, if you will, using certain elements that can help make that more likely that I will actually be reliable. I will actually complete what it is that I've said I will and get it on time and all that sort of stuff. A colleague and I years ago went and did some work with a bunch of project managers in the company that were falling behind.

14:08Their projects were falling behind pretty badly. And we were tasked originally to figure out what was going on. And then when we did, which was around reliability, they were not reliable. They were missing their commitments constantly. Not the project managers themselves, but the people who they were trying to manage the projects around. So we asked them at one point, what would happen, to your point, Patty, if someone said that they would do whatever it is, they'd make a commitment, and you could just forget about it because you knew that they were going to actually do it. They were going to follow through.

14:44Or if they couldn't, for some reason, something outside of their control, you know, they, then they would tell you. And the, this group of project managers kind of, at first they just laughed and said, oh, if that were true, we'd be out of work. Cause that's all we really do is go around and bug people about whether they're going to get the stuff on time And then they got kind of quiet for a minute and one of them said, you know, I could get a whole lot of other important things done. No kidding. No kidding. Oh, really? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I always say the job of NAG is a really sort of soulless job with no real rewards.

15:29I mean, nobody goes, oh, here she comes again. Yeah. Great to see Patty. She's going to nag me about not doing what I said I'd do. Exactly. So when you think about some organizations or leaders that you've worked with that, or these teams, like these project management teams that don't have trust, how do they build it? How do they get it when it's pervasive, right? It takes work. It takes having conversations, honest conversations about what's going on, about trust, about the elements of trust or the behaviors of trust that might be missing, as well as the ones that are there. And, you know, we're doing, we're really doing well in the domain of care, for example, and we're doing well in it.

16:13We're great at competence. We're all really competent. That's fabulous. But we, you know, maybe we're missing in the domain of reliability. We're missing our targets. We're not following through. And also we're, you know, kind of missing in the domain of sincerity. We talk about accountability, but we don't actually hold each other accountable. So, you know, we're not really being sincere or honest with each other. So, it takes having those conversations and being able to talk about what's there and what works and also what's missing, and then make some commitments around shifting that. So, that's really the work.

16:54It can be done by a team leader who understands what builds trust and what doesn't, or at least understands the underlying framework so that they can use it to lead those conversations. As an outside coach or facilitator, I can bring that in and help a team through that, and I do it. Part of that may include doing a, I use an assessment tool that it's kind of like a 360 that the team is doing on the team. So, then it allows us to start off from a place of, oh, these are our beliefs about this team's trustworthiness in these four different domains. We can see, you know, nobody can argue that it's somebody else making this up.

17:47They're the ones who are actually, you know, making the assessments. So then they can see which domains they think they're doing well in and which domains are not so healthy, if you will. And so then it's a good starting point to then say, OK, what's going on? What's happening here and what's not happening here? Yeah. When you have seen organizations that are really struggling with this for whatever reason, what's the impact to the business? Not good. Negative. Let me turn it around, flip it the other way. There's also been some great research that shows the upside of strong trust. And you have, of course, obviously define what that looks like.

18:33The researchers who do that and do it well come back with, okay, high trust environment in the company, high trust teams. Actually, the productivity goes up and the output, the bottom line, actually. There was a great piece of research that came out just about the time that I was writing my book from a guy at Cornell University, Tony Simons. He had a little article in Harvard Business Review, and he basically summarized a bunch of research he'd done that showed even a slight increase in trust, and the level of trust as he measured it in his research resulted in a significant increase in bottom line profit.

19:27I believe it. Yeah, I believe it. I mean, we worked extremely hard on it at Netflix. I would say we weren't perfect, but we had a leader and a CEO in Reed that really pushed us to talk about the hard things, you know, and, and it, you know, we weren't running around doing trust falls. We were forced to like - Please don't do those. They're dangerous. Because they might not catch your ass. But we were forced to give each other feedback in a respectful, caring way. We were first to talk about the hard things with the business in a really caring way. And then we would walk away from those conversations knowing each other better.

20:13we also talked about things personally that we would struggle with, with being, you know, having trust with others in the room. But because we talked about it, we were stronger from it. And, you know, when we went through hard things, it was much easier to navigate them because we had trust. And I don't know if we had it at every domain that you're thinking, but I think we had it at most of them. And when the tough got going, we got going way better than other teams and our competitors, just because I think we had that. So talk us through some of those behaviors. What are some of the behaviors of a trustworthy person?

20:54Okay. And then I'll do that by domain, because it's easier to think about them that way, at least for me and seems to be for most my clients. So in the domain of care, some of the trust, the behaviors that build trust in that domain are listening, you know, really listening, not I'll listen while I'm reloading. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But really genuinely listening so that the other person understands that you're listening, that you care about them. It is being, what's the word I'm looking for? respectful. So how do you quantify respectful behavior? Well, again, it's listening, it's giving someone honest feedback in a way that is kind, which means clear.

21:44I love Brene Brown's clear is kind. So giving people clear and kind feedback saying, you know, hey, I got your back here. What do you need? How can I help you? How can I support you? Those are all things that tend to build trust and then following through that. If you say, how can I help you? And someone tells you and then you don't do it, that's not going to really do anything. So that's in the domain of care. And there are other things that are idiosyncratic to people that you work with. You go, oh, this person really likes it, seems to respond well when I come in in the morning, I stop by their office or cubicle or whatever and say hi to them.

22:25That's something that they really value as an indication of care. So sincerity, obviously, don't lie. But I'm going to dive down a little bit deeper in that. So it's actually being as transparent as you can be about something. Sometimes leaders can't be transparent about everything. Yeah. But being transparent about not being able to be completely transparent. it. Yes. Yeah. No, and I would try to do that a lot, right? Like say, look, here's what I can tell you. I can't tell you the rest, but this is why. And when I can tell you the rest, I will, right? And I would. But the other thing I was thinking about when you're talking about sincerity that I used to do, I guess I learned to tell people that worked for me what they can expect from me and what they can't and what I'm really good at and what I'm not really good at.

23:26And I think that that built a level of trust. And I was just me being really honest. And I'm not the person that's going to be the most organized. Patty knows my desk was horrible. But - Ah, you're revealing yourself. Oh, yeah. The worst desk. But anyways, is that in a sincerity vein? Is that - Absolutely. Yes. I think that builds trust in the domain of sincerity. sincerity and care, the honesty behind that. I care about you enough to tell you this stuff about me. And Charles, I don't know how you feel about this, but I do think that for leaders to really embrace this and do this, there is a certain level of vulnerability and authenticity that they have to have to admit these things.

24:09And most leaders don't want to appear weak or to appear like they don't have the answers or that they've made mistakes. Or they think they should. Yeah. Yeah. They think that there's, they should. Yeah. I think I want to go back to what you said a little while ago, Jessica, about starting off telling people what they can expect from you and what they can not expect from you. That's something that I counsel people who are managers coming in as a new manager or, well, actually it goes in both directions. Yeah. If you're coming in as a new manager, have that conversation with your direct reports so they understand, but also have that conversation with your new boss.

24:52So, you know, here's what you, here are the things that I'm good at. Here's the things that I'm not so good at. What can I expect from you? How do you like me to communicate with you? How often do you want me to communicate with you? Under what circumstance? All that kind of stuff. So that you have that conversation right up front begins to build trust. Yeah, exactly. In a new situation. Yeah, exactly. Tell us about one of your success stories. And it can be with like a leader or it could be a company. But where were they and where did they get to? So I'm thinking about a particular team that I work with, leader of the team and the team itself that, and here's something else I'll tell you that I've found is that there's a range, right?

25:37And one end of the range is really strong trust. The other end of the range is terrible. You know, trust is in the toilet. Right. But most teams are somewhere in the middle. Mm-hmm. And, you know, so this team was kind of more towards the high trust end. But the team leader came to me and said, look, I think we can do better. We're pretty good. We meet our commitments for the most part with our, you know, our outside stakeholders, the other teams and whatever, we get stuff done. And I think we could do better. And I think trust is what's kind of the foundation for doing better. And so can we work on that?

26:21So I had a couple of days, two different sessions with them over a couple of different days, took them through some different processes for trust building. And at the end of those two days, they had specific, They make specific commitments to each other about things that they were going to do differently, either things that they were going to start doing more of, do less or none of, and things that they were going to just continue doing, you know, keeping their eye on. And by their account, they achieved that. They achieved stronger trust by the leader's account in particular, but even by the team members.

27:02They achieved stronger trust in a couple of domains where there were some question. One of them was in reliability, internally meeting their commitments to each other. And the other one was a strong sense of care, but sometimes sincerity wasn't as, you know, particularly they didn't feel like they got all the information from their team leader or even from each other. Yeah, right. And so we had some good conversations about that and the impact of that. and the team leader recognized, oh, okay, yes, I can do better and differently. And so, yeah, I would say that that was a success story. That's a fine road to walk, right?

27:46The difference between withholding and oversharing. And I think it's something that for leaders, experience gives you because you think, oh, can I tell him that? Can I not tell him that? Can I tell him that? Can I not? Can I tell him to keep it? Like, is it a secret? Is it not a secret? Will I be giving away my power? Right. If I there is enormous power in I know something you don't know. Right. That's that is I used to say that was the cheapest form of power withholding. Yeah. And it's interesting because I don't find many leaders who use that form of power, claim that form of power for themselves with their teams, for example, with their direct reports.

28:29But I find that on a team, one team member will use that, you know, as their form of, you know, holding power is that they don't reveal stuff. They don't share. But you should know that. They have information that the others don't. Right. So, Charles, when you were talking, and I do believe that that's true, is that most teams, most companies are somewhere in the middle. Right. Right. Because to your point earlier, you know, 98 percent of the people are coming with good intention and care and trying. And then with this team in particular that that you were working with, it's so great that the leader recognized that, hey, we're good at some of this stuff, but we can be better.

29:13Right. And so I love that client, by the way. Yeah. I love that about them. Yeah. So in what what way were they better? What was different in the team after they worked on this? They changed the way that they made requests and commitments to each other. They used a particular language that I offered them to do that, which it talks about in the book and turns out to be something that I do a lot with teams and even with individual leaders, is they committed to using that with each other, which helped a lot, I think, for them to actually meet the commitments that they made to each other. Can you give us an example of that language?