DISCIPLINE 1

Builds Interpersonal Trust

INSTILLS TRUST VALUES DIFFERENCES

AT TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD, JUAN GALARRAGA WAS asked to take a high-risk assignment. He was charged with turning around a high-volume, high-visibility, and severely underperforming Target store in South Florida. An ambitious Venezuelan immigrant, he accepted the turnaround assignment and within a week had moved to Naples, three hours away.

The situation was even worse than he had thought. He had seen the poor financials before arriving, but not the depth of low morale and hostile finger pointing. Recognizing the skepticism aimed at him due to his relative youth and his being an unknown, and given that he had precious little time to show he could turn things around, Galarraga’s top priority was to quickly build interpersonal trust—not just between him and his new associates but also among the team members themselves.

During his first week, Galarraga called a mandatory all-team meeting behind the store, before the doors opened to customers. When people arrived, they saw a big bonfire. Galarraga instructed them to sit in a circle around it. He asked everyone to write down a story about a disappointment or frustration with something that was going on at the store.

One after the other, each read what they had written. When they were done, Galarraga had them throw their pieces of paper into the bonfire and watch them go up in smoke.

“No more,” he said. “It’s a new day, a new life. Let’s have each other’s back. Today, we start anew!”

That Target store became one of the most successful in the region.

Builds interpersonal trust is a foundational discipline of inclusive leaders. In fact, 100% of the talent professionals who responded to our Inclusive Leader survey said building interpersonal trust is either extremely or very important to being an effective inclusive leader.

Trust leads to credibility and an increased willingness to listen and adhere to directions. It creates a reciprocity between leaders and team members in which both feel comfortable sharing themselves and their perspectives.

Two competencies make up this first discipline: the ability to instill trust and the ability to value differences. Interestingly, each initially leans in the opposite direction of the other, but then they come full circle to reinforce each other, for optimal inclusive impact.

Instilling trust requires finding common ground across differences, while valuing differences requires surfacing the implications of differences to better understand others. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is the paradox of inclusion: inclusive leaders must focus on what we have in common and also proactively unearth our differences.

Finding common ground comes first, before the harder work of surfacing differences constructively. To do so, leaders often highlight the organizational mission and values employees are meant to live, and they communicate the shared short- and long-term goals they are working toward together. As in Juan Galarraga’s story, the messages tend to emphasize that “We are all in the same boat,” “We are family,” and “There is no I in team.”

But focusing on commonalities as a way of establishing trust has its clear limits. There is a point of diminishing returns, where the drive to find commonality as an act of solidarity devalues differences. When this happens, the trust born out of the discovery of similarities begins to erode.

When differences are brought out into the open, inclusive leaders can shape more inclusive practices and procedures to achieve that often touted but often elusive goal of greater diversity leading to greater creativity and innovation.

This is how instills trust and values differences end up reinforcing one another. Finding commonalities instills the initial trust that allows for the higher-risk exploration of differences. Then, as leaders surface and embrace differences, they build further trust with all their team members.

INSTILLS TRUST

He who does not trust enough, will not be trusted.

Lao Tzu

There are plenty of strong leaders who are very good at instilling trust in people like themselves. Inclusive leaders, however, are distinguished by their ability to instill trust in the face of all forms of difference. This is particularly difficult because, biologically and neuroscientifically, we are programmed to be less trusting and more critical of those who are not like us.¹

The following leaders, in very different organizations and from very different cultures, instilled trust in similar ways: by focusing on what their very different team members had in common.

Hengliang Pan, General Manager of the Global After-market Business at LiuGong Machinery, headquartered in China, said:

I was leading a project on global cost pricing and one of the VPs [vice presidents], also from China, was much older than me and had significantly more global experience. We were so different from each other that there was a lot of conflict; it affected the other team members, who were from other countries and functions as well. We had a meeting where we got to air our different points of view, but the turning point was when we talked about how we all were working for the same business and we all wanted to grow it. It is important to find a common goal, because everything we do, we do not do for ourselves but for the business to grow.

Gabor Gonda, Managing Director–Central Europe at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), related, “I have had to restructure various projects or start them from scratch. Every time I grant 100% trust from day one, with the assumption that people are good. I assume that everyone will respect if others take the risk of sharing something vulnerable about themselves. It makes you look human. If you are willing to do this, the others become more comfortable in doing the same.”

Freada Kapor Klein, founder of SMASH and co-founder of Kapor Capital with her husband, said:

I am completely underwhelmed by people who lead with where they work and where their degrees are from. I’m much more interested in their stories and the emotional, social, and geographic distances they have traveled. We look for people whose lived experience actually leads them to identify problems and solutions that those in the majority don’t see. We ask them not what they believe but what have they done to work on diversity and inclusion. If they can’t tell us specifically what they did yesterday or last week toward greater equity, I don’t believe them. We found that in the entrepreneurs we fund, if they have been confronted by the injustices of the criminal justice system, the education system, the credit system, this is what has driven them to create a business to solve those very problems.

Of course, the universal experience of eating is a surefire way to break down walls and build inclusion. Mervi Lampinen, a Director of Information Technology (IT) at MSD Sharp & Dohme in Germany, shares her inclusive approach, which is in some ways countercultural to her German context: “I cook! Any time we have people coming to Germany I always invite them to my home, where I cook. The food and home environment is very informal and inclusive. It brings people together by bringing down barriers. This is especially helpful in German culture, which has a very strong hierarchy. Food helps dismantle the hierarchy and brings everyone to the same level.”

Frode Berg, Managing Director of Nordics at Experian, zeroes in on people’s common desire for those around them to be reliable:

It’s important to really do what you say you are going to do and be fanatical about it. Do not change your story line; if you have promised something, then you better deliver it. That is the way you build a bridge of trust with someone, who may have every reason to be a bit biased against you if there are cultural or language differences. And if for some reason you cannot do what you said you were going to do, be quick with acknowledging it, and share how you will fix and address the situation—and abide by the new time frame.

Anil Sachdev, CEO of the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), in Gurgaon, India, told us how common it is for people to long for transparency and reliability; even when the truth is painful, it instills trust. He shares his story of heading operations when the market was in very bad shape and cash for salaries and other spending was very tight: “We were transparent about the current state and made a commitment that we would not lay off the workers as long as there is cash. Further, once cash shortages began to cut into payroll, we started reducing compensation at the top with layoffs as the last resort.”

Missteps in building trust may arise when people build on shaky or irrelevant ground. Lou Nieto, former president of Consumer Foods at ConAgra, shares how people often build trust by building teams around them with people similar to them: “I was a director-level person reporting to a VP who was not a very strong performer. He tried to build trust with me on the basis that we went to the same fraternity, though in different schools. But this wasn’t a social setting, it was a business setting, and at the end of the day my loyalty was to the business. The commonality that needed to matter to build trust was high performance, not both of us knowing the same secret handshake.”

Instilling trust also requires learning to be discerning when, even when valuing differences, it would be best not to highlight differences. Sachdev from SOIL tells this story:

I was in Japan with people from twelve different countries in a fellowship program to learn about the Japanese culture of productivity. In the evening, after the fellowship program was done for the day, my Mitsubishi colleagues would entertain me. On the bus the next morning with the fellowship participants, I would be asked what I did in the evenings.

Then one day a Japanese woman brought this up to me in that most gentle of Japanese ways: “Anil, do you know that when you share those stories, it makes the other people feel sad?” She explained that because most of them came from poor countries, “when you share about your lavish experiences, you are reminding them that they are poor.” I had no idea! This really helped me to be sensitive to intercultural sensitivities and what other people might feel and what you should and should not share in groups.

For Deena Al-Faris, founder of fashion brand Qamrah and cofounder of Caviar Court sturgeon fish farm and caviar factory in Saudi Arabia, instilling trust begins with trusting yourself first: “When you know what you want, you will know better what you should ask and what you shouldn’t ask.”

VALUES DIFFERENCES

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

Stephen R. Covey, American educator

Getting out of the “find commonality” and into the “value differences” mode can be difficult, as it is so much easier to trust the familiar than the unfamiliar. The best antidote inclusive leaders use to overcome this barrier is to fully go against this primal current of distrust of the different. Instead, they lean into their differences, leveraging the enabling traits of curiosity, empathy, and humility.

Hengliang Pan of LiuGong Machinery, a Chinese multinational that makes construction equipment, shares this story of valuing personality differences:

I tend to be very calm and not have a passionate demeanor; therefore, I have ended up being more distant from the people who work with me. But then I started working with Mr. Wang, who was very energetic, highly encouraging of the people around him, and much older than me. He was also a very good critical thinker who approached problems systemically, first diagnosing their root causes and then developing ways with others on how to solve those problems.

While I valued his technical and problem-solving know-how, I especially noticed how he engaged others both emotionally and intellectually. I learned from him how to be more energetic with my team and show them that I was passionate about the business plan.

Gabor Gonda at HPE told us about how he learned to value nationality diversity, while acknowledging the extra work this difference requires to build trust:

When I was appointed as the managing director of this Central Europe region, I had talent from three different countries. They were not getting along with each other and it was hindering the work. I encouraged them to be explicit yet sympathetic about the obstacles caused by their differences. It turns out that some did not feel comfortable talking and problem-solving in English, our corporate global language, in front of customers. Our solution was to create a guide that documents our processes and selling points that everyone could use instead of having to explain things on the fly in an unfamiliar tongue.

For Jenny Ni, Human Resources Director of Dow China, her lesson came from valuing generational diversity:

My team is over 90% Millennials. One example of their different way of thinking was when we launched the annual campus recruitment campaign. We had always gone on campuses for campus recruiting, so I was surprised when they suggested we don’t. Instead, they wanted to stage a big pop music concert to bring the students to one venue in the city. They also created a social media campaign to invite students to come to our corporate campus or join via live webcast to discuss “life experience with students.” A lot of our more senior leaders did not really understand any of this, and I was a bridge between our younger talent and older leaders. Ironically, though, sometimes with the Millennials I had to just use my seniority to keep the ideas manageable!

Tram Trinh, CEO of VITANLINK, in Paris, describes herself as patient and as having an indirect style of communication. She learned to value a board member who had an opposite temperament: impatient and direct.

“I learned that a lot of time can be wasted trying to be polite when it is clear it’s time to walk away.”

Frode Berg from Experian calls himself the archetypically brooding Norwegian. His client was the archetypal optimistic American from Florida. Their phone and video call negotiations were not going well, and just when it felt like things could not get any worse, the American announced, “I am going to jump on a plane and fly to London so we can get this deal across the line.”

“I didn’t see where that would help, as we were so far from each other’s positions,” Berg shares. But the sixty-year-old American would not take no for an answer from the thirty-year-old Scandinavian. He came to London and they overcame their differences. “His optimism and can-do attitude rolled away the fog of my own pessimism and overcautiousness.”

Inclusive leaders confront their own conscious and unconscious biases, open themselves up to approaches that they are uncomfortable with, and lean into their differences with others. And when they do—despite the discomfort, the friction, and the conflict—good things happen.

Building interpersonal trust requires learning how to instill trust and to value differences on a one-to-one and a one-to-group basis.

Next, we will discuss the discipline of integrates diverse perspectives. It requires the leveraging of differences in a manner that expands the spheres of impact beyond self and team to the wider organization.

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