Trust is Your Leadership Superpower: Dr. Darryl Stickel Reveals the Three Core Pillars That Build Unbreakable Teams

Trust is your leadership superpower. Dr. Darryl Stickel reveals the three core pillars that build unbreakable teams. Welcome to another powerful episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today we are diving deep into the currency that makes or breaks every business relationship trust. Joining us is Dr.

Darryl Stickel, who is the founder of Trust Unlimited, the author of the groundbreaking book. Building trust, exceptional leadership in an uncertain world. And he’s also the host of the Imperfect Cafe podcast. He spent decades helping leaders from Fortune 500 companies right through to smaller businesses, build unshakeable trust in the most hostile business environments.

In the next 50 minutes, you are going to discover why 95% of leaders overestimate their trustworthiness, how vulnerability actually strengthens your authority, and the three core pillars that underpin trust in any relationship. Plus, we’ll explore practical levers you can pull to close the gap between how trusted you think you are.

And how trusted you actually are. This is an amazing episode play. Please pay special attention to the way Darrell introduces himself as well. We’ll reveal more as the episode goes on. A lot of value from this one for every single person in business.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and today we are going to have, I know a very interesting discussion about trust. How do we build it? Where does it come from? What are the implications of it? So many things to unpack in this short word. That people hear all the time in business, but what does it really mean?

We have I would say one of the foremost experts in the world on this topic. Darryl Stickel joining us. Darryl, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you and with our listeners.

And I know you’re a podcaster as well, but I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself to the audience so everyone understands a little bit more about who you are and what you’re about.

Sure. So I grew up in Northern Canada. In a small community, and it was isolated, harsh. Winters minus 40 was not unusual. And so people had to rely on each other. And so I got a sense that if I could be helpful, I should, and growing up there you developed a strong sense of community. When I was 17, I was playing hockey and I got attacked by a fan with a club shattered my helmet, knocked me unconscious.

I apparently stopped breathing three times on the way to the hospital. Wow. And when I was growing up I had a. Retinal disorder, hereditary retinal disorder. I knew I was gonna eventually lose my sight, that I’d become legally blind. My intent had been to think for a living, and now all of a sudden, here I am, I can’t think I’ve got the attention span of a fruit fly.

And so there was this long stretch of helplessness and hopelessness, and what it provoked in me was a really strong sense of empathy. And it took me a couple of years to really recover. But what I did. Strange things started happening. So I would be sitting on a bus and a complete stranger would come up and sit next to me and say, I’m really having a hard time.

And people would open up to me quickly. And I wanted to understand why that was happening and it felt like maybe I was destined for a life working as a clinical counselor. So I started working with street kids and families in crisis and troubled teens and working on crisis lines. To further hone those skills and gain a better understanding of what was going on for me.

And I, I came this close to becoming a clinical psychologist and I realized that, it would, it had taken these people a long time to get where they were. It was gonna take a long time for them to find their way out of it, and then it would drive me crazy. And so I transitioned. It ended up in public administration doing a master’s degree in public admin, working in native land claims in British Columbia.

And they would ask me these deep philosophical questions like, what is self-government? Or What will the province look like 50 years after claims are settled? The last question they asked me was, how do we convince a group of people we’ve shafted for over a hundred years? They should trust us. And man, that just seemed like such a good question.

And it gets to the heart of these long-term disputes, why they’re so resilient, even when they’re not doing anyone any good anymore. So I went to Duke and wrote my doctoral thesis on building trust in hostile environments. And I had two incredible academics on my committee who were both experts on trust.

And they sat me down after I finished and they said, when you first came to us. We had a conversation with each other. We said, it’s too big, too complicated. He’s never gonna solve it. We’ll give him six months and then he’ll come crawling back and that’ll be his thesis. We’ll let him just shave off a little piece of this.

They said six months in, you’re so far beyond us. We couldn’t help anymore. All we could do is sit and watch. Said here we’re a few years later, we think you’ve solved it.

So I left academia, went into consulting. I got hired by McKinsey Company, a big management consulting firm. Now all of a sudden, I’m getting a chance to apply these concepts that I’ve theorized about and they recognized, they said, wow, you got great client hands. Let’s send you to the worst places possible.

So places where there had been strikes or hostile takeovers, they would send me in to work with clients. And I’m getting a chance to apply these concepts and having success doing it, and then I get injured on the way to a client site. The car on me rear ends another vehicle. I end up with a really bad concussion again, and I can’t work 80 hours a week anymore.

And so I start my own little company called Trust Unlimited, and I start helping people better understand what trust is, how it works, and how to build it. And over the next 20 years, my learning curve is almost vertical. As I’m applying these concepts, formulating better ideas, learning how to help people understand the concepts better and how to prob problem solve with them.

So that’s brings us up to today.

That is quite a journey. Yeah. I love, I love that. You know what’s fascinating to me as I was sitting there listening to you and I asked the same question of everyone coming on the show to introduce themselves, and we get a variation of people that give me the 15 second version to what you did, to the more elaborate one and the interesting thing about what you’ve just.

Given us is a story, a journey of your life and where you’ve got to, and you can feel already, and I, it’s not a matter of what you feel because there’s a mixture of different things in there. There’s admiration, there’s empathy, there’s lots of different things that are going on. But immediately with that, what’s interesting to me is I feel like I wanna trust you already.

How much. Of building trust is emotional.

It’s a really big part. And man, that’s good insight because that was the core of my thesis. One of the things that really differentiated most of the 99% of the trust research treats people like they’re rational actors. And you’ve met people before, right? We’re not always rational and the more emotional we become, the less rational we are.

And so for me I developed a full fledge model for how the trust decision works and how we can actually take practical applied steps to build it. But in the heart of this whole thing is our emotional states, whether we like or dislike somebody else. ’cause if we like people, we have this positive story about them.

We want to find reasons to trust them. We’re more likely to trust them, we’re more likely to evaluate the outcomes we have with them positively, and that makes us like them even more. It creates these virtuous cycles.

It’s really fascinating to me that. The, we live in these two sides of our brain.

In fact, we probably live most of our time in our very rational side of the brain. Yet from a marketing perspective, we always say that 90% of decision making is is, is the emotional side and 10% is justifying the emotion. With that in mind is that. The key to the formula for trust is it really building that emotional connection first before you can start to rationalize it in some way?

For me it’s about resetting those emotional states if they’re negative, right? And we can start a positive cycle fairly easily by finding things that we like about the other person, having a positive narrative about them, a positive story. When it comes to my sons, I have a relentlessly positive story about them, which means that new information that comes to me, I interpret it through that lens, right?

And so when they were younger and they were in school and their teachers would say, yeah, he’s misbehaving. I would start to get curious, what’s provoking that? Because I’m not prepared to just blame him and say he’s dysfunctional. I’m more curious about what are the settings, what are the triggering events?

What’s the environment that you’ve created that’s bringing that out in him? Because I don’t see it. But I think for me, we just need to be aware that these negative emotions, if they’re really strong, are gonna trump any kind rational approach that we take to try to build trust with somebody else.

We need to at least be aware of them and try to reset those emotional states. First, if they exist.

It’s really intriguing when you talk about some of these areas, because we do have a lens that is. What our life is, right? The, our experiences and things that we’ve been through, right? It is going to impact our ability to trust someone we’ve just met, for example, right?

Because I’m gonna give you an example. I was brought up in a time when very few people had tattoos, okay? And so you were brought up with a lens that if they had tattoos, they were probably from the wrong side of the street. Now fast forward to Australia. Now I watch a lot of football. There’s barely a player that doesn’t have tattoos.

The whole it used to be that you couldn’t get a job if you had them. You had to cover them up all those sorts of things. And that’s completely changed. So it’s very interesting how things change, but it’s interesting. But I was very aware when that transition started happening in society, that became more common, became very aware that I had this lens.

That said, don’t trust these people. It wasn’t a rational one. It was just brought up on, people don’t have tattoos and therefore if they do, they must be this kind of person. And it’s interesting how those things not only, I became very self-aware of it, but also how it can change when you are aware how it can change the way you think and how indeed.

Those things change. I suppose one other obvious example is, it wasn’t that long ago that people would say, don’t trust anything where you have to buy it online. We, don’t trust putting your credit card down online. Now you would argue that it’s probably more trustworthy to do it in some online secure environments than it might be to do it in person.

So again. Things change. So how do you accommodate that and how important is being self-aware and noticing those changes that happen?

Wow. So you’re opening up all kinds of things for me here. And it’s gotta be because you’re from down under, because you’re taking me in reverse order. Through what I normally talk about context is I hope that’s a good

thing.

Make it more fun.

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re talking about context in some respects, which is the formal and informal rules of the game. And context is one of the other pieces that I added in my doctoral thesis because I needed a way to explain why we trust or mistrust some people without knowing anything about them.

And overwhelmingly the literature talks about trust from an individual perspective, but it ignores the elements of context. And a lot of times what I would do is, I would say to people, if you could be anywhere with anyone doing anything right now, how many of you would be sitting here listening to me speak?

And I had to stop doing that ’cause it wasn’t good for my self-esteem. But, because the question becomes, then why are you here? And they’re there because it’s their job or they’ve got something else on the go, or they’re traveling somewhere and they’re listening to the podcast context explains why we go into a doctor’s office and the doctor says, take off your clothes.

And we do. I’ve tried that. In other places it doesn’t work. And if we change the context, we could have the same two people with the exact same dialogue, but move them from a doctor’s office to a gas station restroom. And it goes from credible to creepy in a heartbeat.

Yep.

And so what you’re referring to is the fact that perceptions and values have changed over time.

Norms and expectations have changed over time. And you’re right, a lot of times we’re not even aware of our own context until we start to become thoughtful about it. And one of the exercises I got a of senior executives to do was. I sit down and I want you to think about how the CEO is constrained and each of the VPs is gonna write down how they think.

The CEO is constrained by the context. And then I want the CEO to do the same for the for, for themselves. And at the end, we started going through and having a conversation. What have you written down? What did, what were the takeaways for you? And. It provoked this really interesting conversation because they had different perspectives than the CEO did.

I’ve done the same thing with a captain on a naval vessel when I was doing some training with the military. We have very different understanding is how of how each of us is constrained and making that surfacing, that making people more aware of it is a great way to help reduce uncertainty because.

For me, trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable when you can’t completely predict how someone else is gonna behave. And that definition includes elements of vulnerability and uncertainty. And so in my model, it’s uncertainty times, vulnerability gives us a level of perceived risk, and we each have a threshold of risk that we can tolerate.

If we go beyond that threshold, we don’t trust. If we’re beneath it, then we do. So what that means is that if uncertainty is really high, then vulnerability has to be low to still fit beneath that threshold. And as our relationships get deeper, the uncertainty goes down and the range of vulnerability we can tolerate cts to grow.

And so if we want to build trust, it’s actually fairly simple. It’s where does uncertainty come from and how do we take steps to reduce it? And where does vulnerability come from and how do we take steps to help the other person manage it? And so uncertainty comes from us as individuals, and it comes from the context we’re embedded in, and the better able we are to describe or outline our context, the less uncertainty there is for somebody else, the easier it is for them to trust us.

Interesting. I, so with all of that in mind and I’m interested as to whether the introduction that you gave. Is part partly because of the formula that you have in mind, because you were quite vulnerable in what you gave over about the journey that you’ve had in your life Because it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a, you didn’t gimme a resume.

Put it that way. You gave me a story in which you were quite vulnerable about, having been on death door at one point. And other things that have happened to you throughout your life. Is that a deliberate strategy to build trust or is that just something that’s become a reaction that you know to everything that you’ve done?

So partly I try to live the model. I use it when I raise my sons. I use it when I teach. And I, until you just asked me that question, I hadn’t thought about the reason I tell the story, but part of, you’re right, part of what I do is I make myself vulnerable and that initiates a norm of reciprocity in others.

They feel like if Darryl’s willing to be vulnerable with me, that it’s okay for me to be vulnerable back. And partly I get a lot of practice. I’m legally blind and my guide dog, Drake, and I wander the world trying to make it a better place. I need help often. And I have realized that it doesn’t make me less than that.

That there is the potential for people to take advantage of me. Of my vision and the challenges I have, but I’ve been overwhelmed at how wonderful people are and how willing to help they are. And I’ve had really positive experiences with being vulnerable and it may be part of what makes people comfortable being vulnerable back to me.

It is interesting, isn’t it? Because you are, as you say, you are being forced to, particularly if you are, in a situation outside where you’ve got your D guide dog with you, it’s very obvious what your vulnerability is, right? And wearing that on your sleeve is a difficult thing, but you don’t have a choice and.

It’s interesting though that today people are generally speaking more and more guarded, aren’t they? Yeah. And I find this an interesting dilemma in business and I remember back even to the, I think to the very first episode of this podcast for those that wanna go back, we had a discussion with with Karen at the time and talking about this idea that.

Is outdated notion that it used to be when you rocked up to business that you had to leave your personal life outside the door, and that it was all focused on business until you walk back in. Nowadays that attitude seems to be that you, the recognition that you carry it with you. And particularly if people work from home, but yet the guards are very much up.

There’s, AI I think is making things more and more. Polished and putting more and more barriers up and trying to separate that. And so that, allowing that vulnerability, it’s becoming challenging. It is.

Yeah. And you’re bang on. So you, your instincts are so good around this stuff. You’re doing a magnificent job, by the way.

Thank you. When I think about, trust is at some of the lowest levels we’ve ever measured. If we think about it using the model I described before, our vulnerability certainly hasn’t gone down. We feel just as vulnerable as we used to, or maybe a little more but our uncertainty is bouncing all over the place, right?

We’ve seen pandemics, we’ve seen. Changes in norms and values. We see technological changes at an increasing pace. We see political instability and conflict around the world. These massive fluctuations and uncertainty make us incredibly uncomfortable, and so the ask, asking you to be just a little more vulnerable to me by trusting me is harder than it’s ever been.

And this is part of the, I’ve started working on a project called the Aspiring Men’s Program because the statistics for young men right now are horrific. They make up 80% of the suicide rate. They’re trending down in terms of educational outcomes, mental health outcomes, addiction. They’re really in a time of crisis and they are struggling to be vulnerable in a profound way.

They are the hardest group to reach because they don’t ask for help and they don’t send signals. They are reluctant to accept help. They isolate. And so you’re right, it’s becoming harder and harder for us to be. Vulnerable with one another because it feels like we’re raw and already over overexposed.

And it’s, we live in a society where there’s an expectation of performance and I know it’s actually interesting that around me in the last year 2, 3, 4, even. Reasonably close friends that have. Found themselves lost out of work. That they’ve lost their, they’ve lost their position and mostly it’s been through no fault of their own.

It’s a, restructuring situation, whatever’s happening in different businesses and things. And I was actually thinking about this the other day, that’s, that is so vulnerable to tell people about that because there’s an expectation that you’ll always be employed and you’ll always be aspiring at a high level and you’ll keep going up and up.

And that’s not always the case. And but even that for, I think particularly for men, is actually a it’s very, it’s very vulnerable because there’s an expectation, particularly not just around performance, but around, financial side of things,

right? Yeah. It’s a real challenge for men.

And when I was teaching in Luxembourg and one of my students, I think he was from Russia, he was definitely from Eastern Europe. He said, any man who makes himself vulnerable isn’t a real man. And so there’s this very strong mindset around you gotta be perfect. You can’t make mistakes. And you don’t ever admit that you’re struggling or need help.

And I challenged that idea, right? I said, look I’m teaching here. I’m making myself vulnerable all the time. I’m sharing stories about myself, imperfections about myself. Are you suggesting I’m not a real man? And he went, I said, ’cause we could go outside and have a f. Fairly serious discussion about that.

He was like no. I said, okay. Because I think it’s actually a sign of strength to be able to be vulnerable, to ask for help. And I was working with a group of senior executives and we were talking about benevolence, which is one of the levers we can pull, right? So from the individual perspective, we’ve talked about context, but from the individual perspective, there’s three levers.

I can pull to make you think I’m trustworthy. One is benevolence, which is the belief you have got your best interest at heart. Two is integrity. Do I follow through on my commitments and do my actions line up with my values? And three is ability. Do I have the confidence to do what I say I’m gonna do?

And so I’m getting them to tell stories about times when they’ve helped someone when they’ve been benevolent. And there’s six of them in the room. And they go around and they tell these powerful stories and they’re all smiling, and the mood is just buzzing, right? You can just feel the intensity. And I said, this is fantastic.

Now if you could just explain to me why you’re so effing selfish. And they go, what? What are you talking about? I said, even years later, you describe how powerful a moment it was for you to help somebody. To show up when they needed you. And you feel the positive energy that in this exact moment, but you never let anyone have that experience with you.

You never ask for help. You never admit you don’t know something. You never reach out.

Interesting. It’s I can immediately thinking of many situations where I think I’ve seen that. I think we all can. Yeah. And what fascinates me about vulnerability is that saying before that the walls are up so often, and I mentioned to you before we came on air and those listening to the program are very aware that my primary business is podcast done for you.

Great. And so podcasting is very much about, building trust with your audience and vulnerability is a key part of that. And it comes into telling stories because it’s a learning curve. It’s showing that you’ve learned. I think it’s one of the differences between a podcast and a webinar. Webinar is very much a, these are my learnings.

This is what you’ve gotta do come by from me. Whereas a podcast is. Get to know me, let me share some things, let me share some how I’ve gone on this journey and these different things along the way. And I think that’s what makes a truly great podcast is when that is open and you hear that all the time.

Whether it’s a celebrity based podcast where you’ve got actors telling about auditions and things that happen early on in their career, et cetera to. A business. I’ve a podcast I’ve got with a particular client that I’m thinking of and was talking about, his early days of teaching and how things went wrong, in a particular episode that he talked about.

And I think that sort of vulnerability is rarer than what you, than what people think that these barriers are up. And yet we want people to do business with us. We want them to trust us. How do you actually get that message through that vulnerability is so important. Yeah. And this is

part of the challenge.

My podcast is called The Imperfect Cafe. And it’s around leadership. And I agree with you. We’re trying to build trust with our audience so that we can engage with them so that we hopefully have impact. We have a positive impact on their lives. And. When I talk to people about pulling these levers, the ability lever tends to be our favorite lever.

And so we’ll say, I have these much, this much experience, these credentials, this position in the world. But if I really wanted to know what good look I’d actually include you in the conversation. And

yeah,

something I normally do is I’ll say, I wanna be the best guest you’ve ever had, or one of the best guests you’ve ever had.

How do I do that? And so if I asked you that you’d say you’d help my listeners be better off than they are today before they’ve listened to the podcast. You’d be. Engaging and genuine. And you think about my audience, not just yourself.

Absolutely. And so I’m trying to be the best I can be for your audience. And one of the interesting challenges that you face is you’re helping people with vastly different audiences. And so you should be having conversations. ’cause in a perfect world, you and I would actually talk to some of your listeners and say, what’s compelling for you?

How do I speak in a way that helps make your life better, that makes you want to listen to this podcast that makes it change your life in a positive way.

It’s, and it’s really interesting you say that and you. May not be able to see what is behind me. And there’s a sign that says and for those that are listening and not watching as well, it’s worthwhile pointing out. There’s a sign behind me that says, being the voice of brilliance. Brilliance is something that I talk very much about in, in podcast Done for You.

That’s what we are seeking to do, is to allow other people’s brilliance to be heard. It’s part of what we’re doing on this program is allowing our guest brilliance to be heard and brilliance can be mistaken for perfection. But it’s not right. Brilliance comes from stories and vulnerability as much as anything else.

And I think, if I certainly, in, in ticking the boxes for what makes a great guest for this program, there’s two probably critical elements and the one we most commonly talk about is giving those little one percenters that will make a difference to people listening that can act on things and improve their life, their business as a result of some ideas that have come across on the program.

But just giving those ideas on their own without context and story is useless because why would you trust that person? Why would you believe them? When you hear the story around it and you understand the thought and the processes that have gone into it, and the insights that have happened along the way, then the trust factor increases and the desire.

Therefore to enact on some of those things and potentially also then to want to engage directly with the guest increases.

Yeah,

I’m definitely hoping that people are going to tune in and listen to your podcast as well, and we’ll make sure we include some links to that in the in the show notes.

Yeah, that’d be brilliant. Part of my mission is to get the signal through the noise. Because, ’cause when I talk to real people and I show them the model, they go, this just feels obvious. It feels like common sense. Like how is, how’d you get a PhD? And when I talk to trust experts, they go, nobody else on the planet is talking about it this way.

This is so practical and applied. You’re talking about, I have 10 levers in my model. We all have the ability to build trust. Some are just better than others. Those who aren’t very good have a lever that they pull. Usually it’s the ability lever. Those who are better have multiple levers, and those who are really good have multiple levers and they know when to pull which one.

So you and I just role modeled the ability lever. Trying to pull that and having a discussion about what good looks like for you, what good looks like for your audience so they can have a conversation. Because a lot of times leaders, I’ll tell them benevolence, integrity and ability, and they’ll go, I do those things.

Yep.

And I’ll say, says who? Because if it’s me telling you I’ve got your best interest at heart, it doesn’t land nearly as well as you believing it.

Yep.

And for you to believe it, I have to include you in the conversation

And it’s so interesting with all of that because one of the things that I talk about. And again, this is not what this conversation tool will be about podcasting, but I think it’s an important thing point to make here is that the best podcasts are a conversation where the people that are listening feel like you are talking to them,

right?

And that is what the key is. Is that, I’ve worked in radio for a long time. I’ve built large audiences in radio and the key thing that I learned very early on in the piece was you don’t think about the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people that might be listening. It just has to be one person that is sitting there going, they’re talking to me.

And if that’s the case, then you are building, as you said, you’re building trust.

Yeah, and I try to role model the model, so I try to show benevolence, right? There’s nothing I’m holding back. There’s no, buy this for 10 easy lessons or here’s the secret. I’m telling you everything that comes to mind.

When I wrote the book, I wrote it so that if I go away, what I know doesn’t, and I. I’m trying to help your audience be better prepared to have conversations about trust than they were before they listened.

I find it fascinating when you read a lot of content that’s posted online, and particularly now with the advent of ai.

It’s tries to talk in some respects, to an emotion. You need this very rarely. Are there stories that are built into the component and very rarely are there vulnerable stories that are built into it.

And that’s where I think the difference is. It’s fascinating. Even when you look at some of the well-known entrepreneurs the.

The big people over the years that and pick any number of different ones from a, Richard Branson onwards. There is a degree of vulnerability with what they give over as well. And I think that we lose that because everyone’s striving for the perfection and forget that a perfection’s not achievable.

But b, that it’s. It’s the journey which entices people along the way. That’s what’s fascinating about speaking to those people.

Yeah, and every leader I talked to, I ask them, are you the same leader now? You were five years ago? And they all say, no. I’ve learned and grown and developed. And I’ll say, are you gonna be the same leader five years from now?

No I hope not. So that means you’re gonna let go of some of the things that got you here, some of the things you’re good at, and step into the things that would make you great as you evolve. And anytime you try something new, you make mistakes. And so how do we prepare the people around us for the fact that we’re gonna stumble?

And I tell ’em they should be thinking about having a conversation with those they lead and saying we’re all gonna be learning and adapting and evolving because the world’s moving too fast for us to stand still. And on that journey, we’re all gonna make mistakes, including me. I will stumble and I may fall.

When I do that, my expectation is that you’re gonna be standing beside me, helping me back up, helping me learn from that experience. ’cause that’s exactly what I’m gonna be doing for you. Sure.

It’s, that idea is so simple, but yet. It seems like a, there’s a, there are many brick walls in between it for the majority of people. Yeah. And I imagine that when you’ve gone into businesses small to large, that it’s those walls being up, which is usually the cause of the problem.

Yeah. It’s often the inability to accept responsibility for our own mistakes.

Or to tolerate the mistakes of others. I’ve heard so many senior leaders say, if I make one mistake, I’m done. And that can’t be true because we all make mistakes on a regular basis. And so what I try to convince leaders to do is to actually talk about the fact that. They haven’t been perfect the whole time they’ve been around, but they’ve made mistakes and when they were in other roles that there was a learning curve that was involved.

It helps humanize them because if we wander around with this mindset that I have to be perfect, it means we need everyone else to be perfect too. And that leads to micromanaging and squelching of innovation and adaptation. It means that people become incredibly cautious. And one of my favorite papers is by one of my advisors, SIM Kin, and it, the concept is the gains of small losses.

And in that paper he says that if your people are pushing to the limit of their abilities, they should be making mistakes. And if they aren’t, it’s a sign that they’re being cautious, too conservative.

It’s there are, when you talk about businesses at that level, it’s amazing to me how many times you have A-A-C-E-O that commissions some research and when the research comes back that says. They might be the problem, how quickly they quash that and move to other areas because they can’t possibly be the problem and they’re not allowed to be the problem because they’re the CEO or the business owner.

And it just, that’s not what, it’s just not what they’re looking for as the answer, right?

Yeah. Or resistance to getting that kind of information in the first place. Because I’ve been involved in situations where we’ve said we could measure trust levels. And senior executives are quick to say, you could do that for middle management, but not for us.

And this gets us to one of the challenges that we face. Trust has incredible value. We’ve seen that it leads to world breaking performance leads to incredible outcomes if it’s high enough. Within teams and organizations, it leads to higher returns to shareholders, higher retention rates, all these things.

Yet it’s at some of the lowest levels we’ve ever measured. The biggest gap we tend to find is between how much CEOs believe they’re trusted senior executives, and how much they actually are. And so there’s this delusion, 95% of us believe we’re more trustworthy than average, and that’s not just statistically impossible.

It’s problematic. Yeah. Because it means that if something came up between you and I, we would both think be thinking it’s the other person’s fault. Yep. It means we’re not able to resolve those conversations or challenges that we run into. And I talk to people about the locus of control challenge, an internal versus an external locus of control.

And for your listeners, an internal looks of control means you’re master of your own destiny. You make things happen in the world you’re an actor. External looks of control means you’re buffeted by the winds of fate. Things happen to you. Yep. And so when I used to teach undergrads, I’d say to them, I’d explain that and I’d say, who here has an internal of control?

And all the hands would go up stirring site, and I’d say, this is awesome. This means that if you fail the class or do poorly, it’s not because I didn’t teach it properly. The test was too hard. It’s all you baby. And they’d all go, oh, wait a minute. I said, that’s right. We tend to have an internal lo of control and we’re successful and an external locus of control when we fail.

And my sons were heavily involved in sports. They never lost a game where the ref didn’t suck. And this is one of the challenges we have with learning, right? Because what we should be doing is looking at those situations when we’re successful and saying, what role did the environment play? So that I can look for environments like that in the future to improve my chances of being successful.

And when we fail, we should be looking at our own behavior and saying, what are some of the things I could have done differently? How could I learn?

I, it’s a fascinating analogy. I think for what you’ve just described is actually sport and football in particular, and it doesn’t matter which kind of football code you follow, we’ve all heard this.

The team has lost, they blame the, there’s a, particularly the fans, I wouldn’t say necessarily the coaches, but the fans often blame the referee. Sometimes the coaches do as well. Yep. If this had have been ruled this way, then we would’ve won the game and. But I think actually the truly great coaches might question some decisions, but still say that there’s so much that we can take out of the game.

It wasn’t that one, two second moment where the ref blew the whistle. That actually changed the fate of the game because there were, there were x number of minutes of other times that things happened that the game could have been won. And that’s the difference isn’t it as well in business It is that you can focus on those little things, but it is actually going back to being more vulnerable and looking at what were the other things that went wrong.

It wasn’t just that moment.

And we can also see the forwards blame the defense for not getting the ball to them or everyone blaming the goalie. ’cause he only stopped 30 of the 35 shots that came at him. And we could see that happen within organizations, right? Where we blame it on sales or marketing or operations or distribution.

We create these us and them scenarios when it should be we, and we should be creating an environment where if there are problems we need to solve them.

I think it’s. So important to not only be vulnerable as we’ve talked about here, but also to be willing to give in a way that makes an impact.

Yeah.

I think that’s such an important thing that often businesses hold back say we’re the leader. I hate that. Determined because so many businesses say that we are the leader.

I don’t know how you justify that. Who’s actually given that particular honor ’cause I’ve never seen it in a particular space. Therefore, you must trust us and we will do stuff for you without actually giving anything over, right? Because if you can’t be a little bit impactful with what you deliver, and you’ve given plenty of insights today in this in this conversation of what things people can do and the impact that they can make, then you can’t possibly expect to build.

Trust as well. And it’s one of the things I like doing and I often do this in business as well, and we’ve had a person behind this on the program in the past. It’s a terrific organization called B one G one, and it’s very easy to show when you have. Interactions with people, how you can make an impact somewhere else in the world as well as a result of simply having a conversation.

And I and that’s a positive impact through a charity. And it can happen from a few cents to hundreds of dollars, whatever it, whatever you choose to do. And I think impact for business. Doesn’t have to be necessarily just about what you do. ’cause that can sometimes be difficult to pull off, right?

But you can make an impact in some way, shape, or form to build that level of trust.

And as a leader, I tend to think that one of the strongest levers we can pull is the benevolence lever, right? So benevolence integrity and ability are the three sort of individual levers, and that’s where most of the trust literature sits.

A ability is a moving target. What made a great leader 10 years ago is probably not the same thing that makes them great today. And integrity is getting harder and harder to maintain because norms and values are shifting and the world is moving so fast, it’s hard to make long-term commitments, but we can always have each other’s best interests at heart.

We can always try to look out for each other. And, there’s a number of ways we can do that. Again, I was teaching in Luxembourg. I was sitting with a group of students. I said to them, I said to one of them, tell me a relationship that matters to you. One, that’s important. He said, one girlfriend.

I said, great, and what matters to her? And he said, her family. I think her family’s the most important thing. I said, tonight, you’re gonna go home. You’re gonna have a conversation with your girlfriend. You’re gonna say in class today, the professor was asking us about a relationship that really mattered, and I thought about you.

That’s step one. You’re showing her that you’re thinking about her and that she matters to you. I said, and then you’re gonna say to her, he asked me what was most important to you? And I said, family. Is that right? Step two, you’re thinking about what matters to her, but you’re open to her input. You are open to being wrong if you didn’t get it right.

Said when she says, yes, my family’s really important to me, then you engage in step three, which is saying, because your family matters so much to you, I’m gonna assume that it matters to you that I get along well with them too. And so I’m gonna start spending more time trying to build a stronger relationship with your family.

I’m gonna have dinners with them. I’m gonna have conversations with them. I’m gonna share more parts of my life with them because it matters to you. And that’s showing her benevolence and being transparent about it. He showed up the next day in class with a huge grin on his face. He said, I’m allowed to talk to you whenever I want.

And it’s about being transparent when we’re trying to show benevolence to one another. And I’d like to give your audience a brief framework that they can use to try this out

place.

Say that you were listening to the Biz Bytes podcast. ’cause that’s good for all of us. And that you heard somebody talking about trust and they said benevolence was really important.

And really, that’s just a fancy word. That means having someone’s back or having their best interest at heart. And then you’re gonna say, I think I do that, but it doesn’t always seem to land that way. Have you ever experienced that? 99% of people are gonna say, oh God, yes. You’re gonna get curious about that.

What did they do? What did they try? How did it not work out the way they intended? Then you’re gonna narrow the funnel and you’re gonna say, have you ever had a time when somebody really had your back really looked out for you? What did they do? What did it feel like? And they’re gonna get a smile on their face as they’re thinking about a moment when someone really looked out for them.

You’re priming them for the next stage of the conversation. You’re getting hints about what benevolence actually looks like to them. What, what matters to them. Then you’re gonna narrow the funnel further and you’re gonna say, what is success for you? How do I help you get there? What would it look like if I had your best interest at heart?

Now you’ve created an opportunity for transparency because later on when you follow up and try to act in their best interest, you can say to them, you remember when you told me that this is what good looked like for you? What success was for you? This is me trying to help you get there.

I love that. Thank you so much for that. And everything else in the discussion, I feel as though we could talk for hours and hours on this topic. Just want to wrap things up with one final question that I like to ask all of my guests who come on the program. What’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish they were, they knew in advance they were going to have?

So when people hear that we’re gonna do trust training, they often think about hot calls and blindfolds and falling off of things. Trust building is a skill that we can all get better at and. I wish I didn’t have to take quite as long explaining that to them, making it clear to them, because we need to be more intentional about building trust now than we’ve ever had to be in the past.

Our relationships tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep, and we’re losing the ability to build deeper, more resilient relationships. So I wish that people could realize right from the start that this is a skill that they can invest time and energy and to get better at.

I love that. And I will go on the back of that and say, I think that extends as well to when people are starting or building personal relationships in terms of just interactions on a direct messaging service, on a LinkedIn for example. Don’t go straight out and start selling your stuff. Build a relationship.

Find something that makes you vulnerable or an interest with people so that. When it gets to the point of curiosity about what you do, there’s already a trust factor that’s built in there. You really have to know that every time someone sends a message that says, oh, thank you for connecting, here’s all the stuff I do buy from me, right?

It just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t, and I tend to respond by saying, you could really use some trust training. Buy from me.

Yeah, I love it. And just in and I do wanna mention as well for everyone listening in that there’s a couple of things that you can get in touch with Daryl on. Firstly, as we mentioned, is the Imperfect Cafe, the podcast, and also there’s the book Building Trust, exceptional Leadership In an Uncertain World.

You can learn lots more from there. Darryl, I thank you for being so vulnerable, so generous, and for. Showing us all how trust can be built, and I look forward to having future discussions with you.

I’d love to stay connected and thank you for having me.

To everyone listening in, thank you so much for being a part of the program this time, and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

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