#002 - The Industry of Trust Origin Story

Robert Greiner 0:10

Today we want to talk about the industry of trust podcast and how we got here and why the heck we started this thing. So why don't you give a little bit of an overview? Let's start with the name. And what is the industry of trust? What does it mean? Why do we name it this way?

Tiffany Lenz 0:27

I love the name, Robert. I love the use of the word industry in a different way than it's typically used. And when you look up the definition of it, we often think of it as the, you know, airline industry, travel industry, etc. When you look up the use of the word, it does emphasize work. My experience has been that building trust takes a lot of work, maintaining trust, takes a lot of work. And it's worth every minute of that because of the personal relationships because of the productivity and kind of the business differentiation, force multiplication, it can be I like the name because it plays on the words differently. And it hasn't been used before.

What about you?

Robert Greiner 1:08

It means hard work, right. That's the if you're industrious. And I think that something like trust leadership, the higher you go in your career, the harder work, the more you have to put into building and maintaining trust. And we've all seen situations where, you know, great reputations could take decades to build and can be lost in the matter of hours. The other thing too, is when we think of industry that I remember this quote from Elon Musk, where he basically was talking about manufacturing. And like, Yeah, what we do here at Tesla is really hard steel comes in one end of the factory and model S's come out the other end. And I was thinking, Oh, that's kind of a really interesting quote. And when you think about, there's all these raw materials that have to go through some level of interaction of human interaction of adding value in a business environment that result in created or destroyed trust. And so it is a little bit like a manufacturing process where trust is a sort of byproduct of, of what you do, and it can really multiply your output or can basically make you fail at solving solve problems. I mean, how many teams have you seen that have just absolutely fallen apart, even though they should have succeeded on paper, and what they were doing shouldn't have been that hard to begin with anyway, yet, they failed because of dysfunction, and lack of trust.

Unknown Speaker 2:25

And often people don't dig deep enough to realize that all of that dysfunction stems from a lack of trust, I think we're going to talk about that in one of our podcasts is that being kind of a root cause of many, many bad behaviors and bad outcomes. I do like the analogy you just gave, because it also speaks to an intentionality at every step. One of my favorite quotes is "trust comes in on foot and out on horseback." I think there is such an intentionality when you're dealing with one another or leading a team or building a team to thoughtfully choose the way that you interact or choose your goals Choose what I like to call rules of engagement, all these different ways that we, we Institute interactions for a purpose, they're outcome driven, or they're actions to get you to a critical destination, but they can't all just be about money, that or growth that is the that's the some of the ultimate business outcomes. But there has to be something bigger and deeper that drives people to change behavior. You and I've talked before about this this book, I think we're both reading right now, Atomic Habits. And in that book, James Clear talks about changing behavior, having different kinds of motivators or different kinds of steps, like there's their activities, there are outcomes, but ultimately, there's identity. So if one is trying to change one's identity to be a high functioning team, or a high performing team, or a strong leader, you would, you'd have more drive to take on the right set of behaviors to build the right set of processes in or the right sets of interactions, such as trust, versus if you just are given a list of success criteria from someone or you're given a list of desired outcomes from a set of stakeholders. It's not personal, though, I think so many of the topics that we will cover as they go they just drive right back to this this kind of the basics of having an effective team and we've both kind of chosen as a belief system that trust it is that it's that it's the first step so that everything needs to be constantly pulling it forward and reinforcing it.

Robert Greiner 4:45

Tiffany Lenz 5:48

Mm hmm.

Unknown Speaker 5:49

It also gives you, it gives you something to fall back on, because things will go wrong. I think so much that I learned from my very early days in project management were to understand and just expect in a process have a very low expectation, assume things will go wrong, assume something will break and build protection for that while you build project management processes around that you're always relying on humans to step in, in one way or another and help out and get things over the finish line. And I started to realize very early on that building solid relationships allowed for enough trust between two people that you did have something to fall back on when things went wrong. I think so often, we talk about if things go wrong. And more often than not something goes off the rails somewhere along the way, I think we would do better as leaders just expecting that to be the case. And planning for it well in advance. For me, once I changed that mindset, I actually started seeing all around me the the constant ebb and flow of crisis time, and a time when the machine was running well, or issues with releases versus when things were right on schedule, or wartime and peacetime. And those teams that were prepared, were much better off.

Robert Greiner 7:10

As I think back, I remember getting this advice very early in my leadership career, which was, Hey, if you're not sure what to do, just think about the things you want from your boss, and go and give that to those people. If you want more feedback, the people that work for you that report to you probably want more feedback, if you want more attention, your directs probably want more attention. And I remember situations in my career where I fully trusted and admired and looked up to my leadership, and I would have walked over hot coals for them. If there was a problem, I would have been completely dialed in to solve it. And there were other times where I didn't trust my leadership, they were maybe kind of a jerk, didn't see a lot of future career growth at the organization I was at and i'm i'm really competitive and career oriented. And I like getting stuff done. As I think back I remember saying like, Oh, I'm not going to put in that extra 10% effort here. I just, I don't trust this person, it's not worth it, spend half of my brain cycles trying to find another job. And you know, the points of my career where I was really at my best it was because I was in this really nice trusted relationship with the people around me. And when I was at my worst is when I didn't trust the people around me. And life's way too short to be in situations without where you're not in a trusted team, don't have trust with your boss with the people that report to you. And a lot of that's under your control. That's the nice thing is you can help facilitate the creation of trust at almost any level.

Tiffany Lenz 8:34

Yeah, we're we're immediately bouncing back and forth, which I think we'll do we'll do throughout this podcast, between business vernacular and psychological or sociological vernacular. Because what when you're saying trust in the example you just gave, you're also saying you felt safe, you felt like someone had you had your back, or I would even describe it differently in business in a business context, like you were confident of the narratives that were happening around you. So you don't have to spend any cycles, wondering what's being said, wondering what your reputation is, wondering if someone is for you. I think those things are a constant distraction to people. The kind of that the second big place in my career where this this really started to take shape for me was when the first time I was asked to form an executive team, and they were going to be an international team. So it was men, women across seven different countries. And none of us had English as a first language. We had cultural barriers and culture gender barriers, like every every layer you can think of, and I just couldn't come up with a set of goals that would make sense to that group of people that they could all rally around and would resonate deeply with them in in you know, we were building a new business. It was going to take a lot of work. And as I kept analyzing the situation I kept thinking, we're going to run ourselves into the ground. If we, if we make mistakes that are the opposite of the scenario you just shared, where you felt what you had trust, and you felt safe. If we start to do small things like misunderstand one another, leave somebody off an email with a 12 hour time difference, You know, not invite someone, to me, all these small things would start to feel like a churn that would distract from productivity. And that just led me on this, this kind of exploration of digging deep and redoing much more research into how could I get this team to function? Well, well, trust would if they trusted each other, there would be no noise or minimal noise. And that would leave all of their energy for productivity and for the business differentiation. So it's a it's always a journey, you know, people are complicated. So it's always I'm trying out different situations and testing the waters, I think, but the industry of trust so far, without even having those words until recently has been the single kind of flag I'm choosing to fly as something that allows teams to really be effective.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And the thing that I think really sets us apart, and this podcast is, you know, there's already a lot of really great work out there on trust, on leadership, how to build relationships, those kind of things. We're fans of a lot of the same authors, I think what really where we take things to the next level is our ability to take theoretical ideas, concepts, frameworks, and apply them in a practical real world way, and sometimes combine or extend them, or talk about them within a different light. Now that we're in the COVID lockdown, people are much more worried about their physical safety, Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes in a way that we've never talked about it before. But we're able to take that and maybe pair it with if there's a team where that's happening. Patrick Lencioni, his Five Dysfunctions of a team, how do we remove a fear of conflict? Right? How do we make sure that there's enough accountability on the team that people aren't trying to avoid accountability. And so we can take all of those components make something practical out of them. And even in good times, you know, a lot of these books are meant to be so mass appeal that you definitely there's an art to the science of applying it to a given situation and making sure that you're doing things the right way. And so that's what I like so much about the Checklist Manifesto, for instance, where you know, surgeons, some of the smartest, most well paid people in the world, they have these like stupid, simple checklists, like, are you operating on the right leg? And do you end with as many towels as you started with, but what that does is that allows the individual the maximum amount of creative freedom to do their craft, because the rote checklist, the stuff that you can write down is already taken care of. And that gives you more space to solve the hard problems. And so that's what I really like about what we bring to the table is that ability to make this thing practical in a leadership in a business context.

Yeah, I agree. 100%. I think another thing we're able to bring, and in a very vulnerable way, frankly, because we're practicing and and talking about this all at the same time, we are going we are taking it to the place of business results. Do these things actually work? Can you tie together, this set of behaviors that's often thought of as soft and fuzzy to concrete growth, money making business objectives? I believe that you can. And I've seen some of those results already, as I've been practicing this for just about five or six years. And I think there's more to come on that. And to your point of now, we're trying it in different times. We're trying war versus peacetime we're trying, we're gonna explore that in some other sessions, in it even talk about how do you how do you come to a team as a new person when you haven't had the opportunity to build trust with them? Where do you start? I mean, I mean, Lencioni material doesn't cover this one at all. So that that's going to be an interesting discussion will have of what we've seen working and not working and what we've both been applying in our own roles.

Yeah. And I really love what you said there, which is the leadership practice. This is an ongoing, lifelong career long journey, that we're figuring this out as we go. And I think you and I, we've talked about this before, we both have had the benefit of some really exceptional mentors in our lives in our careers, most of which have been face to face, right. Somebody looked at what we were doing and said, Hey, I'm going to invest my time and energy in you. And that was a very synchronous master apprentice model. And it used to be for instance, the only way you could learn to cook from Gordon Ramsay was to work for Gordon Ramsay in one of his kitchens. And if you weren't where he was, that was a problem. Now, he has a master class. He's got YouTube videos. He's got Christmas specials, where he'll teach you how to make a turkey at home and you can learn to cook from Gordon Ramsay, asynchrony, on your own time, most of the time for free, and I think that's a really nice opportunity we have now due to the one being at home all the time, and during the pandemic, and, and to this asynchronous ability of putting a podcast out there to help provide some of that same guidance and wisdom that we had to either one, learn the hard way or two, learn in person.

Yeah, it's so it's I think we're gonna keep testing our own theories. With just different levels of pragmatism. We're already talking about what we're doing today and what we've done in 2020. We have no idea what 2021 has on the books for us yet, if it's any, if his immediate history is any predictor, it will be it'll be a rollercoaster ride. And so we'll be continuing to practice and learn and share.

Definitely, and this is not something where we think we have all the answers. We definitely would love feedback from anyone listening, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. We'd be happy to get into discussion with you. We'd love to hear your perspective things that you're doing that that's work that hasn't worked. We have finite careers, we're finite beings. And so there's definitely there's always more stuff you don't know, then you know, and hopefully this will help us level up over time as well.

I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, same. Anything else you want to cover for our first episode?

Don't think so.

I hope you have a good one and we'll talk soon.

Take care.

Alright, bye.