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Hanging By A Thread By Marshall Tarley

Hanging by a Thread

5 Ways to Nurture Trust and Protect It

Trust is the connective tissue in every personal and in every business relationship. It is tenuous. To thrive it must be cherished and nurtured. To survive, it must be meticulously minded, like a dutiful parent minding their prized child. A single misconstrued statement or action can send it reeling, with immeasurable and often unknown costs.

A Simple Scenario of Fragile Trust
I was warming up leftovers in the oven. Not known for my cooking prowess, I asked my significant other, “What temperature should I set this on?”

“Two-fifty,” she said.
“Two-fifty?!?” I asked.

I’m very impatient when I’m hungry and would have set it at twice that temperature.
“Yes, two-fifty.” She said emphatically.
“Okay.”

But, I set it at 450. I was in the kitchen. She was in the living room. I just figured it would get warm faster and she wouldn’t be the wiser. Ten minutes later, I was in another room, when she went into the kitchen to check on our leftovers. “You lied to me!”

Now, I have to tell you that she and I are rock solid, completely open and trusting of each other. It was a “white lie,” a tiny misdirection. But, it had impact. She had experienced mistruths in a prior relationship and I can only imagine what came flooding forward. For weeks afterwards, there would be little questions about most anything I told her. I would reference the “white lie” about the oven and joke about, but, at the same time, reassure her. I have been scrupulous about such “white lies” ever since. There was no crisis here, but I looked after the aftermath and cleaned it up.

The CEO and the Loss of Trust
We poured into the boardroom for the end of year department-head meeting. There was a touch of excitement in the air, as we anticipated the announcement of our end of year bonuses. The CEO began reporting results and approximately fifteen minutes into his remarks, he announced there would be no department-head bonuses. He said the organization had missed one of its key revenue goals. There was a palpable deflation in the room. Ouch! That hurt. And, though there was disappointment, there seemed to be some logic to the CEO’s statement. But, a bit later in his comments, he announced that our overall revenue for the year was the best ever in the company’s history and we should all be very proud. Proud!?! Everyone was disillusioned. The CEO didn’t pick up on the reaction in the room.

Afterwards, everyone buzzed about the total incongruity – best year of revenue; no bonuses because of a missed revenue goal. However, there actually was a logic. A great deal of money came in from a longstanding lawsuit. Revenues from regular business did fall a short. And, if it was up to the CEO, he would have given bonuses anyway, but the board of directors voted it down. This absence of transparency caused a major breach of trust that continued for some time along with a big dose of cynicism. What made it worse – this CEO was not open to feedback, so even those closest to him weren’t able to let him know what a bombshell he landed, and he had no opportunity to address it with his management group.

The Human Brain is Naturally Triggered by Questions
The human brain is naturally wired to be triggered by questions – questions that we care about. When that kind of question arises, the brain goes into a persistent and often relentless search mode, trying to fill in the blank and answer the open question, creating scenario after scenario. This happens in your conscious thinking and even more so in your other-than-conscious thinking. This natural brain process even runs in your sleep. If trust is breached, or if there is even a perception that trust has been breached, it triggers this mechanism and it may generalize such that mistrust is present in every interaction and communication that involves the person who committed the breach. This is true in personal relationships, business, professional, work, everywhere.

Perhaps the worst example is the “cheating” spouse. Once discovered and the relationship supposedly reconciled, the calls and texts may continue without end – “Where are you? Who are you with? When will you be home?” Suddenly, the stay at home spouse is travelling with the reformed “cheater” on every business trip. If a breach is bad enough, it may take the rest of time to continue to do repairs.

5 Ways to Nurture Trust and Protect It

1. Don’t Lie
Yes, sometimes it is difficult to say what’s true, but you must be brave. Most of the time, it’s not that big a deal. And, as opposed to what Jack Nicholson said, we really can stand the truth. You can be truthful and kind at the same time. Just tell the truth. It will become a habit.

2. White Lies Can Break Ties
While a “white lie,” in theory, has no evil intent, you can see from my little leftovers in the oven story that it can reverberate with serious consequences. It is unnecessary, a convenience, a habit that breeds mistrust. Break that habit and form a new one – the truth.

3. Pay Attention – Shed Light on Misconceptions
She asked how to turn on the light over the stove. “There’s a button called surface light,” I said.
I watched her searching, confused. “I don’t see any circus light,” she told me.
When I stopped laughing, I enunciated the words surface light more clearly. No foul, no harm. It’s just a small illustration of how often we hear different words than the ones intended to be communicated. How often words, tone, facial expressions and more are misconstrued, and if not corrected, can lead to distrust and discord.
Pay Attention – Watch faces, expressions, body language, responses. If something seems off kilter, it probably is. Ask questions. The best time to make corrections, to amend any discord, is in the moment. If you notice a change in behavior towards you later on, take note of it, find the right time and place to diplomatically ask about it. If there was a miscommunication that caused mistrust and/or discord, you find out about it and repair it.

4. Cultivate Feedback
In your personal life and in the workplace, it is so important to develop and cultivate sources of feedback – people you can trust to tell you when something may be wrong – or when you may have done something wrong without even knowing. Anyone who offers you these gifts is to be greatly appreciated. If you fail to notice a shift or change in attitude of one person or several people towards you, because they believe you’ve violated their trust, your sources of feedback will key you in and you will have the opportunity to repair it. Our CEO (above) would have benefited greatly from this kind of feedback. Don’t kill the messenger, she won’t come back. And, you want that person who can tell you what’s really going on to come back often. Don’t kill them, embrace them and thank them.

5. Give the Gift of Trust
When you’re a manager and a leader, and you give one of your workers an important assignment with significant consequences, and you explain the seriousness of the assignment, and you let them clearly know that you are putting your trust in them, it is a major gift to this person. He or she will cherish this gift. When you invest real trust in someone – a parent to a child, a friend with a friend, a leader with a report or staff-member, you have validated them as a person in a deep and special way. It is a gift that will pay many good dividends.

Hawaii Five-No. This Is Not a Drill! Check & Balance or Bust.

Hawaii Five-No. This Is Not a Drill! Check & Balance or Bust.

A Good Leader Must also be a Good Manager

October 2000. I got into the office early that morning and already had a voicemail to get to an 8:30 meeting. I quickly found out that a distribution system that was running for about a year had maxed out the bank account that drew funds to make these payments. I was put in charge of a task force to find out what happened and get it fixed. It didn’t take long to determine that data from one system was being transferred to another system that was paying the money out. The problem: when the payment system took the records in, there was no confirmation to determine whether the output equaled the input in the number of records or amount of money…nor were there any other validations. While one might expect a check and balance that went to a more granular level, at the very least, there should have been a systematic check at the macro level. And, that was only the beginning. The distribution system was designed so badly, it was making duplicate payments – and sometimes to people who shouldn’t have been paid at all. I came to call it the Chernobyl System*, after the shoddy Soviet-era nuclear power plant that had no containment system. It blew up, contaminating millions of people with radioactivity and creating a forbidden zone with a radius of at least thirty miles that will remain uninhabitable for at least 180 years, and some scientists say 3,000 years.

Hawaii Incoming
Fast forward to Monday, January 13, 2018. Vern Miyagi, the man in charge of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA), standing side by side with the Governor of Hawaii, had the courage to say, “This was my fault.” The procedures in place allowed one single individual to “push the button” to issue a live alert that there was an incoming missile minutes away from impact to Hawaii. What!?!?!! Yes, you heard me right. No checks or balances or confirmations. One person can make this error, and it can go through to strike fear and panic in the hearts of 1.4 million Hawaiians and tens of thousands of tourists.

Hacked to Death
C’mon, stuff like that is one in a million. Really, let’s go back into the ancient history of
September 2017. Equifax, the giant credit agency, announces it has had a data breach of
143 million Americans – including their Social Security Numbers, driver’s license data, security questions and answers and more. Equifax CEO, Richard Smith, who was forced to resign, testified before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and said, “The human error was that the individual who was responsible for communication in the organization to apply the patch, did not.” One person – no checks, no balances, only errors…one huge error.

These are examples of inexcusable malfeasance and incompetence, yet it seems to go on more often than we could imagine in the most important organizations. Most managers are competent, but when they are not and when processes are put in place that lacks the appropriate necessary checks and balances, there should be a leader at the top and leaders up and down the line who are asking the right questions.

Check, Check and Double-Check…Really?
So, let’s get a few things straight. Checks and balances cost money. You don’t need to check everything all the time. You need to have the appropriate checks and balances in place. So, how do you know when to check and how often? There is no black and white answer to that, but let’s set down some sound rational ground rules.

When the distribution system I described at the top, the so-dubbed Chernobyl distribution system, was reprogrammed to have the appropriate checks and balances programmed to work systematically, we went forward to use it for the first time. When we did, I put in place manual stops, where we downloaded data and checked it manually in Excel. Each step of the process was manually audited in this way. It was tedious, laborious and time-consuming, but that was the first time we were using the revamped system, and after all, we had already lost millions of dollars, most of which could not be recouped. Think of the financial and political exposure of repeating the mistakes that were already made. We conducted the same validations the second time we ran it, confirming each step of the process, and we were verifying that the system itself was performing the checks and balances correctly. Now, we could have a reasonable expectation that it would run right and pay accurately. We pulled back many of these laborious manual audits and, as we went forward, we did spot checks and a reasonability analysis at the end of a run.

What are the ground rules?
When a process, an operation or a system is in place, here are some criteria to follow:
Criticality, Newness, Reliability
How critical is this?

Criticality
What are the stakes? The more that’s at stake, the more checks and balances you need.
Legal – Are there legal considerations that could make you, your organization or others legally liable if something goes wrong?
Financial – Is there significant financial risk to the organization or are you dealing with monies that amount to a virtual rounding error?
Political – Will there be fireworks in the boardroom? Will a key client, a key board member or the public be negatively impacted in a significant way?
You can add to the list, but these are the main events, and each of these have a scale. You have to balance the scale between the risks and costs.

Newness
How new is your process/operation/system?
When something is new, it needs the checks and balances to ensure that it is running right. This may mean a number of checks along the way. Over time, as you have ensured that it is running correctly and accurately, you can pull back on some, even many of these checks, but you always need some verifications. AND, you must always keep criticality in mind.

Reliability
We’ve run this over and over again without a single problem.
Don’t get lulled to sleep by this. Things change. All of sudden, they’ve replaced the server, or someone new is on the job. If something has been humming along, that’s great, but you still need to beware of the unexpected and still need to have appropriate checks and balances in place. AND, you must always keep criticality in mind.

*Note: In the wisdom of the senior management of this organization, the software designer who built what I called the Chernobyl distribution system was later promoted and went on to build another system with equally disastrous results.

 

The Parent Manager

The Parent Manager

It was a lunch break at a conference when a woman started talking about how stressed she was.

She’s a single mother, working full-time, caring for her two daughters and trying to complete her Ph.D. thesis.  “If I just didn’t have to make their lunch every day. That little bit taken off my shoulders would be such a relief,” she said.

I asked how old her daughters were. She said they were twelve and fourteen.  “Twelve and fourteen,” I said, a little surprised.  “Well, I have an easy solution for you. Why don’t you have them make their own lunches.”

“I tried that,” she said. “They did it once, and never did it again.”

The conference was reconvening, and the conversation was cut short.  The next day, I ran into her again. We talked about a few topics from the conference. Then I said to her, “You know, that lunch thing is important.”

“You think so?”

“Really important,” I said. “After all, what else will you enable your daughters not to do? Or, disable them not to do?”

“Yeah, I get it,” she said, “but how do I get them to make their lunches?”

“First, you have to sit them down and explain how important this is to you.  Don’t just mention it in passing. Make it a somewhat formal meeting. Explain how hard you work and how determined you are to see that they have everything they need. Next, tell them what a big help it would be to you if they make their own lunches every day. Explain that in life, it is so important to meet your responsibilities, just like they see you doing every day. Now, you’re giving them a responsibility.  Emphasize that you are placing your trust in them. People feel honored by this. 

“Make a plan together. Decide the best time each evening or morning for them to make their lunch. Start with two days of the week. After a week or two, make it a regular daily routine. You can prompt them the first time or two. After their first success, thank them and remind them how much it means to you.  When they complete their first full week, get them a little token gift or treat.  Don’t overdo it. Once you have them routinized on this, you can drop off the prompts and rewards, except for a little reward once in a while as a good reminder that they have achieved something important.”

Then, the obvious question came. “And, what if they don’t do it,” she asked.

That’s where most parents fail. They throw up their hands and do it themselves. There are often two dynamics going on here. One, the parent wants to feel needed, wants to be in control and retain authority.  Secondly, they’re afraid to be firm with their kids. They’re fearful of their children’s ire or to see them unhappy.  But, these are the key moments where parents have to tough it out, brace themselves, and wait for the mini-storm to pass. In almost every instance, the storm will be minor and pass quickly.  Parents who fail in these critical moments are the ones who may end up picking their kids clothes out to wear in the morning  when they’re twenty years old, or paying their credit card bills when their twenty-eight, or making all kinds of excuses when they’re living at home and don’t have a job at thirty. Yikes!!!  I’ve seen it all and so have you.

“You have to be able to show some genuine anger and disappointment,” I told her. “You can’t just let them off the hook. In addition, you have to be willing to take something away, even if you’re feeling some hurt over it yourself.  You might tell them that if they can’t do this small thing for you, and for themselves, then you won’t be able to take them to that birthday party this Saturday or their soccer practice on Sunday.  Will that be hard for you to do? Will that pain you?  I’m pretty sure it will. But, it will likely happen only once in a great while, and it will save you from so much more pain down the line.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to do it.”

She looked a little shaken and resolute. I believe she took in every word I said.  I didn’t keep in touch, but I do believe she followed through.

A week later, a middle manager called me asking for help with his team. “They just don’t meet their deadlines,” he told me. “I have to remind them, get after them constantly, and they still don’t meet their deadlines.”

I wish I had gotten that woman’s contact information. I would have had her coach him through his problem.

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