Blog • Judith M. Bardwick

Mutual Trust and Communication

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

Without mutual trust very little can be accomplished. Gaining trust necessarily involves real communication, a process in which everyone involved really listens as well as speaks. Listening simply means focusing on what the other person is saying. It involves not interrupting and not mentally reloading your gun with new arguments.

Listening also involves checking, making sure you did hear the message the other person sent. After the other person has finished speaking, checking involves saying, “This is what I think you said. Did I get that right?” The process of checking assures accurate communication while it also slows things down and defuses emotion because checking is unemotional fact-finding.

But style counts: subordinates need to know what bosses and team members are comfortable with. Every organization has an unwritten norm about confrontation and disagreement and every employee needs to know what it is. And every boss has a very personal response to input, especially criticism.

When I was an Associate Dean at the University of Michigan, my boss, Dean Billy Frye, Ph.D., was intrinsically a humble man who really wanted input – confirming or challenging – from everyone before he made a decision. But the great majority of Executives that I have worked with see agreement as loyalty and have a built-in push-back mechanism any time they’re disagreed with, especially in public. A good rule is to make suggestions to them in public and disagree in private.

The reason trust is a huge asset and mistrust is a huge liability is that when people trust they’re not using a lot of energy protecting themselves because they anticipate being abused and manipulated. Without trust people are defensive, cynical and suspicious so there is no possibility of collaboration. Mistrust, therefore, makes it almost impossible to achieve important change, a shared focus and any sense of commitment and engagement. Success requires widespread trust because people, who trust the organization, its leadership and their boss are psychologically free to concentrate, collaborate and commit.

Interdependent and mutual relationships between people in an organization are based on trust. When the organization trusts its employees and employees reciprocate, everyone is psychologically free to fully engage their work. Without trust people are not preoccupied with their work; instead they’re obsessed with how to avoid the next betrayal.

Trust is created when people feel that someone’s word is their bond and when they’re told something will happen, it does. But the very rate of change in today’s world makes it hard to predict and be consistent. Trust, therefore, depends on unusual levels of candor – an open book culture – and on powerful values that support it which everyone buys into. Now retired CarMax’s CEO, Austin Ligon, started his Q&A sessions with employees by asking them to tell him anything the company is doing that is stupid or unnecessary, or just doesn’t make sense. That’s a clear invitation for employees to speak out and they do.

Many managers are not comfortable managing people and prefer to view their responsibility as limited to hitting the numbers. But achieving the numbers requires the enthusiasm and on-board enthusiasm of subordinates and that depends on positive relationships between subordinates and managers and between team members.

While forthright communication is very high on the list of Must-Happen, speaking out and telling the truth are not common behaviors in most organizations. Fortunately these are pretty easy skills to learn if you want to be good at it. Candor needs to be rewarded and evasion needs to become a behavior that people reject. In order to make this happen, managers need to use peer pressure from employee’s colleagues, and they must be models of the behavior they need from everyone.

Managers need, for example, to speak out about an important problem such as losing a major customer. The tone of the communication needs to express concern and curiosity about what’s going on. Bosses should ask questions and not volunteer opinions, especially those that that start with, “This is what I think.” That sets the stage for required agreement and the boss won’t learn anything from the people who actually interact with that customer and who might even be in touch with the competition.

After describing the problem management should ask for comments about why it happened and what the next steps might be. If there are no volunteers, the manager must call on people, for example: “Marilyn, you’ve been with us a long time. What do you think?” “Ron, you’re new and might see things differently. What would you say?” “Irene, you’ve heard from Marilyn and Ron. Do you agree with them or would you say something different?”

The goal is to have everyone willing to put their views out on the table. When I was a Dean and created an Executive Committee it took six months of hard work to get every member to really listen and speak up. But it’s worth the work. Silence is destructive because it simply masks disagreements. Disagreements that are expressed have a good chance of being resolved. Unexpressed disagreements usually end up as heated conflicts. In fact, when people disagree they don’t speak out to the boss, but they do speak out in anger and frustration to their friends and allies. That usually leads to employees taking sides and political in-fighting. It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome.

Especially in today’s fast-moving and extremely competitive environment, an organization’s culture has to reinforce the necessity of speaking out in order to solve problems while really listening to the opinions of others. An open culture of speaking up and respectful listening invites participation and discussion. Then disagreement has a chance of becoming a situation in which different views are explored which often creates synergy and innovation as well as compromise and trust.

Mutual Respect in the Workplace

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

One of the big changes over the years is that the great majority of employees insist on being dealt with fairly, treated with respect and acknowledged as being good at what they do. The market for authoritarian leaders who treat employees with contempt is continuously shrinking.

The data are clear and powerful: employees are far more likely to make a commitment to the organization if they like and respect their boss and feel that they are liked and respected in turn. To a very large extent gaining commitment and engagement requires relationships of mutual respect and trust between bosses and their subordinates. But since non-peer relationships at work always involve a boss who has to make judgments about a subordinate’s abilities and potential, these relationships can be friendly, but they don’t involve friendship. In friendships, people feel that they are peers despite differences in education or status or power. A subordinate doesn’t and shouldn’t forget that even a friendly boss – is a boss.

Relationships between bosses and subordinates should involve reciprocal trust and respect akin to that between a teacher and an able student. But the difference in decision making power and responsibility can never be ignored. Sometimes a boss must be a boss and give orders and deliver a critique. But that doesn’t mean its okay to humiliate a subordinate or manage through fear. Humiliation and fear are normally breeding grounds for subversion and sabotage.

A friendly relationship at work means the people connect at a level that’s comfortable for them. In all likelihood it won’t involve disclosure of anyone’s deepest thoughts nor will it be totally honest because work is usually a political place. There will be great differences in the style of how people connect: many men use “male humor,” short bits of sarcastic humor that are really cutting but are also really funny. Many women connect by telling stories about things that happened to them. And lots of people use charm and wit so they’re fun to be around but they’re careful to never reveal anything like an opinion.

The best of relationships at work involve:
• Enough disclosure about where a person stands so people know enough to trust that person and take him or her at their word.
• Enough empathy so people connect emotionally – they like and care about the other person.
• Enough admiration for a person’s skills and personal qualities so the person knows they’re accepted.
• Enough commitment to the importance of good relationships so pressure from peers and management doesn’t allow narcissistic, manipulative behaviors.
• Enough good will and training so really listening is basic to every conversation.
• Enough mutual respect so disagreements are the beginnings of discussions and not the end of conversations.

It’s very common that people don’t speak up in important personal or work relationships because they’re afraid of alienating someone. While people always have to think about how much to say and how to say it, the absence of honest communication always jeopardizes trust for the simple reason that people don’t know where you’re coming from. Trust is a great asset because it makes it easy to get people on board. But trust is based on “What you see is what there is,” and that requires candor and effective communication. Trust always requires some level of transparency.

While communication at work should never be dishonest because that creates mistrust, it often does not involve total disclosure. Realistically, despite what many successful people say about wanting the raw truth, many bridle when criticized. Every member of an organization needs to learn the powerful but unstated and unwritten rules about what’s okay to say and do and what isn’t – and to whom.

A Focus on Me

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

The funny thing is the GenX and Boomer parents are making childrearing more stressful than it needs to be or ever was because they bring all their ambition and competitiveness to raising their children. Competitive child-rearing or the drive to create perfect children is driven by ambition displaced from yourself. Competitive child rearing has become a blood sport because educated, talented and successful GenXers and Boomers are competitive people.

A Focus on Me can be psychologically healthy as when we push ourselves beyond old boundaries and we thrill to unexpected accomplishment and a surge in confidence. A Focus on Me can also be unhealthy and destructive. The same is true: for Us involvements. When does a focus on your child become destructive? We’ve always had some competitiveness between parents about the accomplishments and potential of their children.

When I was a kid I grew up in the far reaches of The Bronx, in a small village of about four square blocks. Everyone knew everyone and everything about anyone. Every parent knew the order of the kids in each of their children’s classes: the first on the list was number one in the class. Every child felt the pressure to do well in school to uphold – or increase – the family status. But direct parental involvement was very limited.

The children, including two and three year olds of today’s Gen-X and Boomer parents, especially ex-career stay-at-home 30-45 year old mothers, are astonishing in their knowledge, their verbal skills and their sophistication. They go to good restaurants as well as petting zoos; they go to museums as well as amusement parks; they’re in preschool as well as gymnastic class … these children are polished like fine diamonds.

But competitive child rearing has reached an alarming level. A 48 year old successful CEO told me recently that he was terribly alarmed by his 42 year old wife’s response to their 3 year old daughter’s failure to get accepted by a preschool. His wife had been a successful executive and left work to raise their child full-time. When the child didn’t gain entrance to the school the wife didn’t talk to the child for a day “because she failed the interview”. “She’s only three I kept telling my wife but she doesn’t hear me, the father observed.” Though extreme, the wife’s reaction is no longer unusual.

The privileged children of today’s stay-at-home educated and successful parents have frequently become the overwhelming commitment of their caretaker parent. Someone drives them to school and then to private classes or athletics after school and on weekends. The children have the latest technical “toys” or tools, they fly to wondrous vacations … they are the recipients of a vastly disproportionate amount of the family’s money, focus … and ambition. The children have little or no free time, time in which they’re not responsible for achieving. Too often the children are pushed too hard in order to fulfill a parent’s ambition and justify a parent’s life choices – all in the name of love.

This parental, notably maternal behavior looks, at first, as though it is an extraordinary commitment to the children; it appears as though an Us goal is being achieved. But this level of involvement and ambition “for the children” actually reflects children as an alter ego of the primary caretaker. The goals which are actually being fulfilled are Me goals and they are not healthy.

Bleak prospects, early plateauing and massive layoffs are not the soil in which optimism grows. A generation, especially a generation of educated women, entered a post-feminist labor force and institutions of higher education which they took for granted because they didn’t have to fight to get in. They assumed unlimited work opportunities and when the bottom fell out, many opted to leave. There are more constructive ways to handle disappointment and stress than giving up your own ambitions and striving to achieve them through your children.

A Prescription for Revitalization

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

Turning a mature, stable organization back into a vibrant one requires overt acts by top management. Executives must do some fine-tuning.

• First, they must determine where the organization is in terms of anxiety or apathy.

• If the mood is primarily apathetic, some level of tension must be constructed. that’s done by creating significant positive or negative outcomes as a result of performance, There has to be an institutional response to what people do and that response must have some clout.

• If the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty.

• Uncertainty is reduced when people are told what’s going on and what will happen to them. In the “no news” vacuum, people imagine the worst. Good news or bad, honesty is the best policy.

• If the basic emotional tone of the organization has been altered through dramatic change, a period of decompression or consolidation, of getting back on keel, is necessary. The object of this period is to allow emotion to level off. In this transition state, the survivors, those who made it through the changes, may need a lot of supportive attention.

• After the emotional level is brought closer to the midpoint, the organization must create a future for itself and for its employees. Fresh institutional goals or an organizational vision must be formulated, articulated, and broadcast with missionary enthusiasm. The goals must be clear, worthwhile, and measureable and achievable. This is the beginning of the transition from institutional defensiveness to organizational initiative.

Forward momentum results when managers give employees short-term goals which are definitely and swiftly achievable and when executives create long-term wins. Employees need to know where they’re heading, what’s happening, and the strategies that have been designed to get them there. As accomplishments are achieved, they must be loudly publicized and the achievers have to be visibly rewarded.

Emotional Leadership

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

When life is orderly and tasks are predictable and most things are going well, people neither want nor need much leadership. Comfortable people are not looking for a leader and change. In those circumstances people want “peace time” management and leadership.

“Peace time” management involves incremental modification of what exists without major disruption and without any major emotional consequences. In “peace time”, when there’s no sense of emergency or urgency, “leaders” don’t have to be special and they don’t have to generate an emotional following. “Leaders” are simply people who occupy positions of power. Anyone in those positions is seen as a “leader” irrespective of what they do, because there’s no need to do very much. And that’s fine with their followers as long as life remains comfortable and orderly.

Today there are few circumstances in which “peace time” conditions prevail. It’s just the opposite in this era of globalization we must find comfort in endless danger.

Technology has created a borderless world. More and more, it doesn’t matter where work is done. Everyone has lost the protection of distance and time, as this results in increased opportunities and greatly increased competition.

The desire for leadership results from crisis and urgency – what I call “war time”. In “war time” conditions, when the world is scary and the future uncertain, when people are experiencing fear, dread, and exhaustion, they have an emotional need for a leader, a person whom they can trust and to whom they can make an emotional commitment.

Emotional Leadership in “war time” requires the leaders:

Define the business of the business. Deciding what’s the business of the business is the first step in setting priorities. Setting priorities is a major leadership responsibility, because without priorities, efforts are splintered. Leaders must get people to focus, to be involved only in what matters the most. The best leadership frames the organization’s mission and values in ways that people find transcendent: The goals of the business are transformed from the dross of ordinary work into goals worthy of heroic efforts.

Create a winning strategy. Leaders create a strategy that causes the organization to succeed, to grow, and beat the competition. A winning strategy depends on what the organization does better than anyone else to be the customer’s choice. For strategy to succeed it must anticipate, create and guide change and it must create commitment. It needs to be so plausible, bold, and achievable that it generates the conviction that even if the journey is hard, it’s worth taking because the strategy has created a major competitive advantage.

Communicate persuasively. Leaders know that trust is a competitive advantage. Basically, trust is a matter of predictability. People trust others when they’re told something will happen and it does which is why major change always threatens trust and confidence in the leadership. Absent or ineffective communication results in an enormous increase in mistrust, cynicism, and a huge decline in confidence in the leadership. During periods of change, most leaders send out too many communications so not much gets through. Leaders must decide what few pieces of information people really need to know, simplify the messages, and communicate in person.

Behave with integrity. Without integrity, trust is never achieved. The best leaders are transparent; they do what they say, they walk the talk. People believe them because they act in line with the values they espouse; there are no Machiavellian games of manipulation. Having integrity requires being truthful with one’s self as well as with others. Behaving with integrity means being consistent in choices and actions which require conviction and a steadfastness of purpose in distinguishing between right and wrong, wise and foolish.

Respect others. The best leaders don’t waste other people’s brains. Leaders need a core sense of confidence which allows them to be comfortable receiving input, including disagreement, from others. They don’t experience needing other people’s input as demeaning. Today, subordinates can bring lots of experience, knowledge and skills to the table, if their leaders are willing to hear. Hearing others, like empowering others, isn’t a matter of process; it’s a matter of respect.

Act. The “peace time” manager is great at planning and logistics, tasks in which people work hard but no one gets hurt. In contrast, in “war time” leaders must consider doing the unbearable. Thus “war time” leadership requires strength of character, self-discipline, courage and often deviance from what’s popular. When leaders don’t act they are perceived as indecisive and weak – and that increases people’s sense of anxiety, powerlessness and insecurity. People need to perceive that leaders believe that change creates more opportunity than threat. Thus, even while leaders must keep contact with reality, they also must be optimists.

Today, leaders must convince people that dealing with unending change will result in something better. Leadership, ultimately, is an emotional bond, sometimes even a passionate commitment between followers and the leader’s goals. Leaders generate hope and conviction in followers.

At the emotional level, “war time” leaders create followers because they generate confidence in people who are frightened, certainty in people who were vacillating, action where there was hesitation, strength where there was weakness, expertise where there was floundering, courage where there was fear and effective optimism where there was cynicism.

“War time” leadership is not intellectual or cognitive, it always is emotional.

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