Amazon.com
Who do you trust at work and who trusts you? By inviting readers to answer these two questions, authors Galford and Drapeau get their arms around the slippery yet strategic dimension of trust in organizations. The Trusted Leader is grounded in their research and experience in executive development. The authors define three areas of trust, including strategic trust (assurance the organization is doing the right things), organizational trust (belief in the way things are being done), and personal trust (confidence between leader and employees). These ideas are illuminated through self-assessments and definitions of the competencies of a trusted leader. One standout chapter introduces the enemies of trusted leadership, from the big daddy syndrome and the revenging angel to the rainmaker/jerk. Another section details how defining events such as downsizing can build or break trust. The book would have been strengthened by a clearer explanation of how trust inside the organization translates into gaining the confidence of outside clients and customers. Still, in this era of headline-grabbing corporate trust-breakers, Galford and Drapeau define what it means to be trustworthy. In their capable hands, trust stops being an intangible noun and becomes an active verb. --Barbara Mackoff
From Publishers Weekly
With Wall Street teeming with questionable characters and their equally questionable practices, trust is a hot topic these days; Galford and Drapeau have perfect timing with their handbook for becoming an executive employees can actually put their faith in. A knitting-together of management theory, real-life anecdotes and snappy tools and self-assessment quizzes, the book tries gamely to be both authoritative and accessible. Its strongest section is a discussion of the "enemies of trusted leadership"-office archetypes ranging from power-hungry control freaks to underperforming slackers-who can undermine what a CEO is trying to achieve. The authors also share helpful tips on how leaders can handle brutal situations (e.g., mass layoffs) with the appropriate amount of class. Although at times weighed down with turgid writing and an overabundance of lists, the book succeeds in distilling what the authors readily admit is an "intangible:" the essence of great leadership. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Richard Robinson Chairman, CEO, and President, Scholastic Inc. Since the bottom line is directly affected by people and how they feel about their work, The Trusted Leader shows us how building trust will keep the organization strong in the good times and the bad. The authors show us, through examples and lists, how to keep everyone working productively in a trust-based, positive atmosphere.
Carl Stern CEO, Boston Consulting Group Most of the many books on leadership are either vapid or worse, promising a silver bullet that just doesn't exist. Galford and Drapeau focus on a simple, empowering truth -- employees' and colleagues' trust in managers yields success. This highly useful guide to leading by building and mobilizing trust is at once pragmatic and inspiring.
George Colony CEO, Forrester Research, Inc. This is precisely the right book at precisely the right time. Trust in American leaders hasn't been at such a low ebb since the Vietnam/Watergate era. Rob and Anne give clear direction on how trust will be rebuilt -- on strategic, organizational, and personal levels. I expect their advice to become the touchstone for a whole new generation of leaders who will place trust at the center of their operational and personal values.
Review
Jon Younger, Ph.D. Senior vice president, leadership development, National City Corporation In this excellent and timely book, Galford and Drapeau show us how leaders consciously build and preserve the trust of their colleagues and subordinates. This book ought to be in the hands of every manager who is serious about driving the longer term success of their organization.
Review
Jon Younger, Ph.D. Senior vice president, leadership development, National City Corporation In this excellent and timely book, Galford and Drapeau show us how leaders consciously build and preserve the trust of their colleagues and subordinates. This book ought to be in the hands of every manager who is serious about driving the longer term success of their organization.
Book Description
As today's headlines remind us, trust is the hot-button issue in business today, especially for investors, managers, workers, and consumers. More than ever before, the success of an organization depends on leadership that fosters strong connections across teams and among bosses, colleagues, and subordinates. Companies are in urgent need of trusted leaders, but how can managers meet that need? "Be trustworthy" is the short, logical answer, of course. But being trustworthy and building trust in an organization are not one and the same thing. The former is an inherent part of a person; the latter requires developed talent and considerable skill. Based on highly specific research and experience that covers a wide spectrum of managers and organizations, The Trusted Leader identifies the three critical types of trust that leaders need to master: strategic trust, organizational trust, and personal trust. It introduces a practical and effective formula for building organizational confidence, and provides a unique analysis of the obstacles to trust and the sources of resistance to the building of trust inside organizations. Through a series of interactive exercises, executives will learn how to determine where trust is missing and how it can be supplemented in people, departments, and even whole companies. Perhaps most timely are the book's series of diagnostic tools and skills that help executives rebuild trust that has been broken or betrayed. As business insiders and authors Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau show, trust inside a company provides focus, fuels passion, fosters innovation, and helps employers to hire and retain the best employees. Trust inside, the authors argue, also builds trust outside by gaining credibility with today's skeptical consumer. Trust is all too frequently overlooked in other leadership books, and is even more important today as companies face uncertain customer demands and the pressures to compete successfully in a whiplash market. Crises, restructurings, mergers, downturns, and executive departures are often trust-destroyers. The Trusted Leader examines those defining moments, and helps leaders turn such situations into trust-building experiences, creating a culture and legacy of trust throughout the organization at large. Rich in true stories, examples, and practical advice, The Trusted Leader guides leaders on how to climb the ladder of trust and how to secure their legacy as trusted leaders. For managers of all levels, The Trusted Leader is the only comprehensive guide for building trust inside an organization -- the key to every company's long-term survival and success.
From the Inside Flap
Praise for The Trusted Leader "Since the bottom line is directly affected by people and how they feel about their work, The Trusted Leader shows us how building trust will keep the organization strong in the good times and the bad. The authors show us, through examples and lists, how to keep everyone working productively in a trust-based, positive atmosphere." —Richard Robinson, Chairman, CEO & President, Scholastic Inc. "Rob Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau have illuminated an overlooked aspect of the leadership equation. The Trusted Leader is practical and insightful. Extremely relevant in these days of executive excess." — Richard G. Hamermesh, Professor, Harvard Business School. "Most of the many books on leadership are either vapid or worse, promising a silver bullet that just doesn't exist. Galford and Drapeau focus on a simple, empowering truth -- employees' and colleagues' trust in managers yields success. This highly useful guide to leading by building and mobilizing trust is at once pragmatic and inspiring."—Carl Stern, CEO, Boston Consulting Group. "In this excellent and timely book, Galford and Drapeau show us how leaders consciously build and preserve the trust of their colleagues subordinates. This book ought to be in the hands of every manager who is serious about driving the longer term success of their organization." —Jon Younger, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Leadership Development National City Corporation "None of us or our organizations will be as successful as we'd like to be unless we heed The Trusted Leader's advice to incorporate trust consciously and thoughtfully into our business practices and management approaches."—Michael Goss, Managing Director and Chief Administrative Officer Bain Capital, LLC "This is precisely the right book at precisely the right time. Trust in American leaders hasn't been at such a low ebb since the Vietnam/Watergate era. Rob and Ann give clear direction on how trust will be rebuilt – on strategic, organizational, and personal levels. I expect their advice to become the touchstone for a whole new generation of leaders who will place trust at the center of their operational and personal values." —George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research. "The Trusted Leader is extraordinarily well-written, engaging, and insightful about an ordinarily inscrutable topic. Building trust is the critical success factor of management, yet it is often nonexistent in today's world. This book is a must read for every MBA and anyone aspiring to move up the corporate ladder or holding a position of authority. Read it and succeed as a leader and a person." -- Rich D'Aveni, Professor, Amos Tuck Graduate School of Business at Dartmouth, author of HYPERCOMPETITION
About the Author
Robert Galford, managing partner of the Center for Executive Development in Boston, has taught in executive education programs at Columbia, Kellogg, and most recently, Harvard. He is the co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with David H. Maister and Charles H. Green). Anne Seibold Drapeau is chief people officer of Boston-based Digitas and has held management positions at Pepsi, J.P. Morgan, and FTD.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction This book about trusted leadership is a surprising, accidental byproduct of the work Rob was doing around the skills of trusted advisors (the topic of his first book, with David Maister and Charles Green). Rob was teaching in a series of executive programs jointly delivered by the graduate business schools at Columbia and Kellogg/Northwestern, for the executives of a single firm. In each of those thirty sessions, he asked the participants to rank themselves -- and then rank their colleagues -- on how trusted they were as advisors to clients and customers. The striking results of that particular survey question, repeated every single time, session after session, was that a sizable percentage of the respondents had little or no confidence in their own partners' abilities to build trust! If such a gap in the level of trust existed inside the upper levels of an organization, Rob wondered, how could the organization ever develop the trust of its customers? That question led us to explore just how to create and sustain trust among the members of a single organization. This challenge affects companies large and small, centralized and decentralized, global and local, and in our own work in recent years with and for companies of all sizes and shapes, we've personally learned a great deal. We wrote this book because we feel strongly that creating a community of trusted leaders who can then help trust permeate through all levels of an organization -- particularly in today's business context -- is critical to every company's long-term survival and success. We wrote this book because even though there has been a great deal published about the role of the leader in creating a successful company, no one has ever given due credit to the important implications of having an organization with a trusted leader. A lot of literature addresses trust in families, between friends, and in society, as well as trust -- and the related loyalty -- between company and client. But trusted leadership -- the force that guides and builds trust inside companies, between employees, between senior managers, across levels and departments -- hasn't received nearly as much attention. Part of the reason is a widespread misconception that trust is trust, and that if you understand the dynamics of trust in one arena, you'll understand them in any other. This is simply not so. Just to cite one example, consider the relationship between company and client. If trust breaks down, one party or another can usually exit the relationship, perhaps not without some difficulty, but with few, if any, long-term aftereffects. "That relationship is over, but no worries; there are other, similar, vendors (or suppliers, or consultants, or what-have-you)." Trust issues inside an organization, however, more closely resemble the relationships in families living under one roof. Individuals usually can't just walk away and forget, and every action or reaction has a lasting ripple effect. Yet trust issues inside organizations don't completely mirror those among family members either. Trust inside has its own unique set of dynamics. They are not widely understood, yet they are vitally important. Today's customer demands, the pressures to succeed competitively, and the new "employment contract" (the reality that there is no "employment contract" anymore) mean that trusted leadership is more important now than ever before. We have come to believe that creating organizations that are bound by strong, deep connections between peers, across levels, and across functions may be the only recipe for sustainable success. Trusted leadership is not a "new economy" versus "old economy" issue. Nor is it an issue that is solely the challenge of running a large company versus a smaller-sized entity. Our background research and review of trust-related episodes at a number of companies (ranging from $20 million technology firms to $20 billion multinationals) demonstrate that trusted leadership is, above all, an issue of human interaction, and, as such, requires constant and vigilant treatment. Trust is intangible -- like culture -- but it is useful to think of it as an "outcome" that results from very tangible processes. There are management tools you can use to become a trusted leader, and established, proven methods for sustaining trust inside and for repairing once-trusting relationships that have broken down. The Trusted Leader is primarily for people in senior leadership roles. It is presented in five parts. The first part, "An Overview of Trusted Leadership" (Chapters 1 through 4), defines trust inside, the characteristics and competencies of the trusted leader, and the natural enemies of trust, in broad strokes. It also includes a self-assessment drill, to help you define where you are in your efforts to become a trusted leader and build trust inside your organization. (We're list-happy, and we like to put our readers through the occasional exercise.) In Part Two, "Identifying and Applying the Tools of Trusted Leaders" (Chapters 5 and 6), we identify and demonstrate the tools of trust-building on personal relationships inside the organization and relationships between leaders and the organization. Part Three, "How Trusted Leaders Work" (Chapters 7 through 9), drills down into what trust looks like -- and how it can be created, reinforced, and strengthened -- across levels, functions, and locations. Part Four, "Defining Moments" (Chapters 10 through 12), identifies those critical junctures when trusted leadership is tested, and also pinpoints specific opportunities for building trust inside. In Part Five, "Building Trust in Perspective" (Chapters 13 and 14), we take a longer, more personal view, examining in detail how trust breaks down, what a leader can do in a situation where trust must be rebuilt, and also what it means to build a legacy of trust. Finally, in the Afterword, you will find information about how you can participate in our ongoing research on trust after you have read this book. All of the advice we offer is "pressure-tested." That is, it comes directly out of our research and work with companies of varying sizes that have experienced the pressures of roller-coaster change, market uncertainties, and strategic and operational turmoil. It comes out of leadership mistakes and successes we have observed. It also comes out of our own personal experiences as top managers working with middle managers and front-line employees. The real case examples we present throughout the book provide a level of detail that paints a clearer picture than a generic description ever could. Some are disguised (to protect both the innocent and the guilty), some are directly reported by the people involved. Some are several cases merged into one to emphasize a particular insight. They're all true, and we hope you think they're as compelling as we do in their illustrations of our theories. We should note that in the course of our writing this book, the Enron case rose to the fore, calling into question the very essence of trusted leadership. It was followed shortly thereafter by revelations at Global Crossing, Adelphia Communications, Tyco, WorldCom, and others. We haven't dwelt on those cases, but we have included examples that are representative of some of the problems that those companies experienced, particularly since, to us, Enron's saga is, for example, the Perfect Storm of how trusted leadership goes awry. One of the most interesting aspects of that debacle has been its effects on Arthur Andersen and many other entities. (To be sure, this book does rest on the premise that the reader is trustworthy. In no way are we attempting to show people how to feign trustworthiness!) September 11, 2001, also hadn't happened when we began to write. That tragic event has had a profound, enduring effect on how employers and employees think about what trust represents within organizations. It has highlighted the responsibilities of leaders and companies regarding the personal safety and emotional well-being of their employees. The influence of that horrific day and the issues it rediscovered are throughout the book, most prominently in the chapter on trust in times of crisis. The ongoing issues of trust and trusted leadership in organizations have led us to create a Web site, thetrustedleader.com. We invite you to visit us there in order to contribute to the conversation. In the meantime, we hope that this book will help you become a better leader, more capable of building and sustaining trust-based organizations than before. With trusted leadership, organizations are better positioned to weather any crises and to seize any opportunities for success in the marketplace over the long term. Copyright © 2002 by Robert Galford
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