Trust consists of three elements occurring at the same time: knowing the positive benefits of a relationship, evaluating any risks in the relationship, and choosing how to interpret the behavior of the other person. In companies, this manifests as knowing that the people you work with can and will help you meet your personal and professional goals more often than they will not, and knowing why they behave the way they do and not taking it personally.

At work, you will have conflict with the people you work with – partially by design. It is the conflict and tension between groups with divergent priorities that encourages creative solutions and some level of balance. However, if interpreted as a negative in our work relationships, this conflict can erode trust quickly. For example, you may feel pressured by your boss to get her pet project completed, and tend to forget that she made sure you got a decent raise in your annual review. All humans tend to fixate on the negative experiences we have, so it takes many more positive ones to build a positive relationship. For most things in our lives, the ratio we need is 3 positives to 1 negative, and 5:1 in our intimate relationships. So, how can we build trust when our brains are prewired to distrust?

As a conscious leader in an organization, you have the responsibility to build those positive interactions – both for yourself, and for others in whom you wish to inspire trust.   In building your own positive experiences, be on the lookout for what others are doing that is positive, strong and good. What unique qualities does that person bring to the organization? In which circumstances does he shine? By consciously looking for the strong aspects of our colleagues, the negatives can be more realistically weighed and do not overshadow the trust we are trying to build.   To inspire others to trust you, work on creating positive experiences with you for every member of the group. This is not equivalent to being their friend, or sugar-coating the truth, or going easy on them. It is about being honest, fair, respectful, and consistent in your words and actions.

Here are Ten Key Actions for building Trust in your organization starting today:

1. Trust first.  Building trust with others is a reciprocal activity.  In order to build trust, you must first extend trust.  Give your team responsibility, assume your peers will do the right things, treat everyone like adults. They will tend to reciprocate.  If you can’t do this, don’t expect others to trust you either.
2. Communicate well and often. Keep your team, your peers, your boss informed about what is going on in the business. What are your current priorities? What has changed in the business, the environment, in your results? Be clear about decisions made and the decision process.  Be upfront about what you do and do not know.  Include the right people in your communication to make sure the messages are shared in the broadest circles practical.  Celebrate team and individual wins as often as possible and communicate them broadly.  Share bad news quickly and keep communicating as plans to manage it develop.
3. Demonstrate a win-win attitude by understanding the needs of the organization and the individuals who work in it, and advocate for getting both sets of needs met.  Look for ways to make the individuals successful, to build on their ideas, to help them shine – while meeting the business goals.
4. Truly appreciate others.   As you are looking at the team, find something wonderful, strong, powerful about each team member, and look for that to show up.  Tell them about it, try to find new ways to leverage that strength in the team.
5. Ask for and listen to feedback – in person.  You don’t have to agree with the feedback, but it is important that you truly understand what others are thinking and how you are perceived.  This means getting eye-to-eye with your group.  Electronic communications cannot completely take the place of meeting in the flesh.  Walk the halls, travel to meet, hold group meetings, retreats and one on ones.  The feedback and relationship-building you get in person will be 10x more powerful than emails and teleconferences.  Trust is built by looking someone in the eye, shaking their hand, and reading their body language when they speak.
6. Set clear expectations.  Make sure every member of your team knows exactly what you expect of them, and what your process looks like.  How often will you review their work?  What level of input are you expecting to have in the final product?  Which decisions are you expecting will be made by the team, and which do you need to make?  What can the team do when they need extra support?  What is the agenda for your meetings and what preparation is expected?
7. Walk the talk.  Trust is built in small positive increments.  Find a small win for the team, commit to it, and deliver.  Do it again and again, with ever-larger commitments.  These positive experiences with you (“she really does what she says she will”,  “We can count on him”, “He has our back”) will build trust quickly.  This is about action.  Can others see you actively making the organization stronger and acting for the good of the whole, not just your own career?  That is the foundation of trust, so get out there and make it happen.
8. Make it right.  When you make a mistake, own it, learn from it, and let others know that you are aware, that you are learning, and that you have a plan to prevent the same mistake from happening again.
9. Hold everyone accountable.  As you take responsibility for your results and your mistakes, ask others to do the same.  Have individuals commit to specific actions in front of their peers, and follow up with the group to verify follow-through.  Ask about what prevented something from getting accomplished with curiosity and have individuals come up with a new commitment, with a plan for overcoming that obstacle next time.
10. Practice tough love.  Accepting people the way they are and appreciating their strengths does not mean that everyone necessarily belongs on the team.  When performance standards are not met, when accountability and trust measures are violated, neither the individual or the organization can prosper, and removing that person from the organization may be the win-win solution you are seeking.  Call them on their lapses, give them a chance to correct it with support, and then decide if they are able to meet the requirements of the job or not.  Hesitation to remove an unproductive or even disruptive team member erodes trust quickly.

Remember that building trust is not something that happens on a team-building afternoon, or in one meeting or over lunch – although those can be good places to start.  Trust is created in daily habits you cultivate in working with others to build positive interactions and experiences.  Find ways in your daily work to build in good trust habits and set goals for practicing them regularly.

The lack of trust is the definition of fear – fear of harm the other person may do to you, your career, your reputation, your results, your relationships…  Building trust is one of the fundamental elements of the journey to leading fearlessly.

As a very successful CEO, why would someone like Eric Schmidt suggest that he needs a coach and so do you?  I see executives every day who make incredible strides forward toward their goals with the help of an executive coach.  Their work is inspiring, and I am honored to be part of it.  But some of you may still wonder what a coach could do for you and why you should invest in an external coach for yourself.

Thinking about the key reasons that have power for supporting your success and growth, the Top 10 reasons for hiring an external executive coach are:

1. Your coach is there for you, your agenda, your goals.  Your coach cares about your success, as you define it.
2. Your coach helps you get clarity around your goals, get inspired by them and what they mean for you, and maintain focus in your busy world.
3. Your coach looks for your blind spots and helps you see the impact you have from a new perspective and see new alternatives to move you forward.
4. Your coach is a source of ideas, knowledge, tools, cutting-edge thought, and a broad body of experience and perspective that helps you recognize challenges early, and discover new and creative solutions.
5. Your coach helps you grow as a leader by developing your awareness, your thinking, your knowledge base and your vision for what is possible.
6. Your coach will not judge you for what you say or do.  You can be perfectly honest about your fears, doubts and concerns and your weak moments without repercussion.  You can truly get out your feelings, worries and challenges and address them with your coach in a confidential manner.  Your conversations are private so that you can tackle any situation – even those you don’t feel you can share with anyone else.
7. Your coach supports you in being accountable for taking action on your biggest priorities.  When you take on a new habit, behavior, style of communicating or other change to your ingrained habits, your coach is your partner for making new habits stick and addressing obstacles as they arise.
8. Your coach provides disciplined self-reflection on what you are doing and where you are going.  You have structured time to take the larger view on your career, your business, your progress toward your big picture goals – and that is what will truly allow you to grow as a leader.
9. Your coach is your objective external sounding board to help you try out new thoughts, behaviors and ideas in a safe environment and giving you feedback on what is moving you forward and what appears to be holding you back.
10. Your coach is a witness to your success and encourages the discipline of measuring your progress and celebrating your achievements, and building confidence and accountability for your actions and decsions that move you forward in achieving your goals.

What could you achieve this year with a coach?

So what remains to define your journey to a more fulfilling life?  Simply making the changes needed to integrate this process into your life on an ongoing basis.  As your life changes and you achieve key elements of your vision, you may find that your vision begins to expand or change in ways that cause you to incorporate new goals.  As you gain skills and overcome obstacles to your success, you may find entirely new skills suddenly become relevant and perhaps even critical to achieving your goals.

How can you incorporate this change without losing your momentum?  Just as good manufacturing processes include an element of continuous improvement, or Kaizen, you can apply this same concept to your vision and your process of achieving it.  And just like running a business or organization of any kind, you want to plan on some regular reviews and opportunities to review what is going well, and what you might want to change.

What personal practices do you currently have in place?  How could you integrate some review of your personal goals and progress into those practices?  If you journal daily, how would you include some review of your plans into that?  If you review your finances quarterly, what would adding a review of other aspects of your business or life at that time add to your ability to plan for the future?  Are there other mindfulness or planning or visioning practices that would lend themselves well to reviewing your vision, goals and recommitting to them, or making appropriate changes to keep the inspiring and motivating to you?

With a vision, goals, strategies and plans that originate in your personal skills, talents, preferences and values, you will find yourself living a life of greater satisfaction, purpose and energy. This higher level of energy will allow you to achieve so much more than you thought possible in your chosen field, while leaving you abundant energy to share with others and inspire them to find their own source of energy, inspiration and fulfillment.

Want to learn more and get help becoming your truest self?  Learn more about my Mastermind Coaching Groups starting this month and come to the preview call:  http://transcendllc.biz/blog/business-growth-mastermind-group

Partners can be colleagues, family members, friends, or anyone who has an interest in helping you meet your goals and achieve your vision.  When considering who you might enroll as your partner, think about who might share your vision, benefit from you achieving it, or be pursuing a similar vision themselves.

The purpose of partnering is to find continuing support from someone who truly wants you to achieve your goals and is able to provide help to you when you need it.  In a coaching relationship, you can count on your coach to be supportive of whatever vision you are creating, and unbiased about what goals you choose, or how you choose to get there.  A professional certified coach is one of the best ways to achieve this level of partnership, but if coaching is not for you, you can find other types of partnership that help you grow and learn on your journey to your vision.

Some things a partner can bring to you include resources, ideas, a brainstorming partner, encouragement, accountability and feedback.  If you are both working toward similar goals, you can trade success stories, celebrate together as you reach milestones, and pull each other up when you get discouraged in any particular area.

If you can’t find an obvious partner in your immediate circle, you may want to focus on a specific goal and look for others who are acquiring a similar skill or habit.  For example, if you have an important goal that includes developing stronger public speaking skills, your local Toastmasters may be a resource both in developing that skill, but also in finding partners in your journey to reach that goal.

Depending upon your goal, you may find local networking groups, existing support groups, and alumni or educational groups where others share your goal and are actively sharing their successes, strategies and struggles, and these groups can be the source of great power in keeping you on course

Who will you choose to partner with in your journey?  Which partners might be right for each of your goals?

Of course tangible goals like losing weight, or eating better can be measured on a scale, or by tracking your meals and looking back to see how you did.  But what about other goals you might have like losing your temper less often, or listening better?  Because these goals are measured by how others perceive you and your behavior, you may need to develop a system for getting regular feedback and understanding how much progress you are making, and what else you might need to consider.

In the work environment, you may already be getting feedback from peers, a boss, investors, and at home you may have a partner, children or other family members who observe you first hand.  Instead of relying on existing feedback mechanism, it can be very helpful to ask these observers about what they see you doing and how that has changed.  What appears to be working, and what remains to be improved?  If your goal is a great working relationship with your team, ask them how they would characterize your working relationship with them now and how that has changed since you began implementing your strategies.

Let others know what you are working on, and ask them to help you by letting you know how you are doing on that.  By being vulnerable and human, and letting others know you are aware of areas you could do better, you are likely to be seen in a more sympathetic light even when you do not make progress, or when you backslide.

Feedback is critical when you are seeking a result that involves other people and their perception of your behavior and how it impacts your relationship with them.  You may think you have dramatically improved your listening skills, but if no one else can see a difference, you may still have a long way to go, and detailed feedback from a trusted source can be the difference between making a quantum leap toward your goals and meandering along and perhaps missing the mark and ultimately slowing your progress toward your vision.

Perhaps the most familiar advisor for many executives is the mentor.  A mentor is an invaluable resource at any stage of your career and provides advice, counsel and resources to show an executive how to achieve success in the way that the mentor did it.  The mentor shares the strategies that worked for them at a similar stage in their career to help the executive achieve similar results.  The mentor is usually 2-3 levels further on in their career than the executive and has a “been there done that” approach to helping the executive think through the options in front of them.  They can provide a model for how progress can be made – and the executive gets a roadmap for following in the mentor’s footsteps.

A coach, on the other hand, is not necessarily someone who has taken the exact career path the coaching client is pursuing, but helps the executive develop their own path to whatever destination they are seeking.  While a coach may provide resources, models and ways of reframing a situation, the coach does not provide “the solution” for how to handle a situation, but helps the executive consider many alternatives for moving forward.  The coach is not there to tell the executive how to do their job better, but rather to provide an outside perspective to help the executive consider more broadly the impact of their actions and a wide range of possible alternatives to arrive at more powerful solutions that fit the executive and the situation.

Think about great athletes and their coaches.  The coach is often a fan of the game, a student of the game, but usually not a superstar player themselves.  Like a great sports coach, an executive coach is not necessarily a better player than you at your game, but the coach can provide feedback and insight to help you fulfill your potential and reveal your inner greatness.

When you are navigating the waters of a culture, club or structure where there is a more senior person whose footsteps you want to to travel, a mentor can be a great fit and a huge help in making the right connections, playing the politics and getting seen in the right places.  However, for the executive who is creating a new game or forging a new path due to changing markets, customers, organization or technologies, a coach can guide the executive to get very clear on the goal, develop strategies that leverage their unique strengths and talents, plan and implement every day, and clear away barriers as they arise.

The coaching relationship is a unique one that can open the eyes of an executive to new possibilities and catapult them to greatness of their own making.

Even outside of coaching relationships, you can build an accountability partnership with people who share your goal.  If your team at work decided that you will all eliminate complaining, you can hold one another accountable and help each other notice when you spiral into a negative cycle.  Just knowing that one other person is going to be asking you about your progress can help you stay on track with your intended actions.

In an organization, there is no skill more important than “walking the talk”, or living by the principles that you publicly espouse.  If you have ever seen a management team say they “value diversity” and never change the gender/race/nationality of their own team, you know what I’m talking about.  Another great example in corporate America is companies who say “people are our greatest asset” and then allow poor people management skills to persist and even promote the individuals with the poorest people skills – because they bring in revenue results.  At what cost?

The cost for a management team not “walking the talk” is in losing credibility and trust.  This is often when the corporate mission begins to be seen as a “slogan of the week” to be hung on the wall and ignored, just like the last one was.

The cost to you as an individual in not “walking the talk” and honoring your commitments to yourself is that you begin to lose trust and faith in your own ability to follow through.  The impact of this is greatest on your confidence, your self-image and your faith that you can overcome obstacles.  An accountability relationship of some kind can help you stay on track, and also help you catch yourself quickly when you begin to fall short of your action plan, and make adjustments to the plan, or to your habits and thoughts to ultimately bring you success.

As we mature, we even forget who we really are and begin to believe that the shell of beliefs and habits we have built is really “us”.   We make excuses for ourselves and others, thinking “well, that’s just the way I am”, instead of committing to live in our own true image.

An analogy I found that rings true to me relates to the weather (posted on Michael Neill’s Genius Catalyst blog):

• If you are a victim of the weather, then sunshine is far preferable to rain.
• If you are the weather, which weather you are most comfortable with will be a function of the weather you are most familiar with being.
• If you are the sky, it really doesn’t matter what the weather is.  It will change according to the day and the season, and you will carry on, regardless.

When we are acting like someone we “should” be, we are pretending to be the victim of the weather, when we are actually the sky.  The first step is to understand that you are playing the victim, or at best the weather in your own life, with your mood and reactions driven by what is happening.  Step outside of that “should” perspective and know that you are the sky, and that the passing weather is an interesting experience to be observed and learned from, but no more defines you than a raincloud defines the sky.

From this bigger, more powerful perspective, what greatness inside yourself are you willing to reach out and commit to being?  When you make a commitment, great things begin to happen.  Step up and start creating your own success.

For one man, his commitment is to be TBOLITNFL (his story here).  Post your own commitment and step into your greatness.

There are always multiple strategies for achieving any goal, and these can be as personal as the goals themselves.  If you want to reduce the amount of soda you drink, you might think about when you drink it now, what triggers you to drink it, and what alternatives you might create for yourself.  Not having it at home could help someone who primarily drink soda at home, but if you drink it mostly at work from the vending machine while on a break with colleagues, your strategy would probably be very different.

If you are trying to replace an old habit, whether it be interrupting others in conversation or asking multiple questions at once before you get answers, you will want to find new behaviors to replace them with.  You might work on shutting off the internal dialogue that has you preparing what you want to say by listening to the other person and building a mental image of what they are saying and taking a breath in the silence before you say anything.  You might have a mantra before you speak of “one question”… and practice not speaking until you had the question you really wanted to ask.

A strategy is simply a decision about how to use resources to solve a problem.  It is a choice about what you will do and what you will not do in order to achieve a goal.  When you have given a strategy a good chance to succeed and find it ineffective, it’s time to come up with a new strategy.  Remember, experimenting is how we learn.  Failures are opportunities to examine what happened with a critical eye and design a new solution that may work better.

What strategies will you come up with to reach your goals?  How can you learn about strategies that have worked for others and might be useful to you?  How will you leverage your innate strengths and values to make your strategies right for you?

How can you discover your values?  One way is to look at  list of values and try to select those that speak to you, and then keep shortening the list until you are down to the most important 5 and prioritizing those.  You can also look at moments in your life when you felt most fulfilled, satisfied and full of purpose and ask yourself which values were being honored.  Conversely, when you think of times you were angry, you can ask yourself which values were being violated.

I noticed this myself when I found myself getting angry over trying to change an airline ticket to go home about 12 hours earlier than planned, and being asked to pay more than 3x what the original ticket had cost for the pleasure of doing so.  When I looked closely at my reaction I realized that I have a strong value around fairness, and this situation just felt inherently unfair, and that was the basis for my anger.

Keep a list of your values and once you have the top five, try sorting them in order of importance.  Which one must you honor above all others?  Which one would keep you from being happy were it violated?  Once you have a top value, which one would come next?  And so forth.

These Values help you quickly assess opportunities, people, projects and environments which will serve you and those which will conflict with your core values.  Here’s one list of possible values, but you may find others fit more closely for you – feel free to add your own words and explore what feels right for you.