Why Don't You Trust Me? The Five Cs of Trust
By Michael Wilkinson
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies
As a leader of a team or a department, what do you do when a member of your staff accuses you of not trusting him or her? And what if the staff member is correct? What if you really don't trust the staff member? Over a decade ago we had someone join our organization who had spent many years in a marketing role in an unrelated industry. She brought tremendous energy to our staff and a clear vision of what she felt needed to happen to propel our organization to being the leader in the facilitation training industry. While she had a compelling vision, I had concerns. For though she had significant marketing expertise, her experience was not in the training industry and was with much larger organizations. I questioned whether these same strategies were appropriate for us.
- As an example, she felt strongly that all of our marketing collateral pieces were too detailed and needed to be reduced from the four-page fold-out format to a half-page post-card. Yet when I showed her the marketing literature distributed by our competitors, the predominant model by far was more detail not less, as most competitors used four-page or eight-page documents to gain interest. (As it turns out, she may have been a little ahead of her time. With the popularity of the Internet today, many advertisers have gone to interest grabbing post-cards that point readers to the web for additional information.)
- As well, she wanted to invest in brand awareness strategies (e.g., sponsorships to raise awareness of our company) rather than lead generation strategies (e.g., radio spots that promoted specific services). Again, I felt investments in brand awareness may have made sense for the larger companies for which she had previously worked. Yet I believed smaller companies like ours needed a direct return from every marketing dollar spent and therefore lead generation was the way to go.
She finally said one day, "Michael, why don't you trust me? Why don't you get out of my way and just let me do it. Why do you have to control everything?"
That question sent me to my closet for some self-examination. Why didn't I trust her? Why wouldn't I get out of the way? Did I really have to control everything? - It was easy to answer the last question: No, I don't have to control everything. I could easily point to people in our organization who made decisions in which I had little, if any, involvement. It was obvious, then, that I didn't have to control everything; I just felt like I needed to control decisions related to marketing.
- The second question was answered by the first. Why wouldn't I get out of the way? Because I didn't feel I could trust her.
- So now the real question: Why didn't I trust her?
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