Transcript: You Can’t Build External Trust on Internal Instability // Rob McKenna, WiLD Leaders

Dr. McKenna: One of the questions that I ask audiences or leaders out of the gate is this: Where in your life are you working harder than you should have to because trust is thin or broken?

Narrator: This is the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow.

Robert: Hello and welcome back to the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. My name is Robert Wachter. I am the Global Marketing Director here at Best Christian Workplaces, and we have a friend and amazing guest with us today, Dr. Rob McKenna. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Rob McKenna.

Dr. McKenna: Thanks Rob. I so appreciate this. I’m excited for this conversation.

Robert: I am too. We’ve got two Rob’s, so I’m going to refer to you as Dr. – how about Dr. McKenna? We’ll keep it simple on the episode today.

Dr. McKenna: Call me whatever you want, Rob.

Robert: Okay. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Got two Rob’s in the room. But all joking aside, Dr. Rob McKenna is the CEO of WiLD Leaders. He’s also on the Best Christian Workplaces’ Board, so he’s a board member. He has been named among the Top 30 Most Influential Industrial and Organizational Psychologists. He’s been featured in Forbes. Really his whole kind of professional work is focused on developing whole intentional leaders and building high trust cultures. We are excited to have him on the Called to Flourish podcast, but Rob, I really want you to talk to us about your new book, and I want to plug the book, but we’re also going to talk about the book this entire episode because it’s so good, so insightful. But your new book, Whole Leaders, Wild Trust: The Courageous Path to Personal, Relational, and Organizational Change, I’m going to let our listeners know that it has reached USA Today’s Best Selling List #9 almost instantly. So, congratulations on the incredible success of your book already, but would you just share with us, you know, why did you write this book?

Dr. McKenna: Okay. I’m so excited for this, Rob, and I – but first of all, I have to do a shoutout to Best Christian Workplaces because you mentioned I’m a board member, and it’s a story that you’ve heard me tell before, but I just have to tell it because as a massive fan and team member on the Board, one of the things that I want the audience to hear because, you know I played in the assessment space for a long time and you know BCW has had just a transformative impact on so many organizations and their cultures, and things like research matter to me, and so I just wanted to say this really quickly is that over the years, because research was a core competency that we had there years ago when Al Lopez reached out to me to do some validation work on the assessments, on the culture assessment and the engagement survey and our team’s been a part of that. I say this because as people think about what the kinds of assessments and systems that they would trust, is that most of the time when organizations would call, I would say, “Hey, are you interested, are you willing to have your assessment be wrong?” because if you’re going to enter into a validation process, there a chance, there’s a very good chance, and it’s probably going to be, maybe 10% of it, is going to need to change to make it valid. A lot of times people would hang up, frankly, and Al was one of the few back then who said, “absolutely”, like I’m willing, we need to make this right, and so I give, not just from a theological or philosophical or ideological standpoint or about what BCW stands for, but from a rigor standpoint, we’ve pushed that thing through the cleaner, you know what I’m saying, to make sure it gets it right. That’s just – thank you for letting me say that. The second thing, Rob, that happened this morning, is the book landed on another Best Seller List, news we got from an organization called Porchlight, which is around number of book sales, and I’m going through, and I’m like, this is great. You need that affirmation for a book, and we got USA Today to happen. That was amazing. We were just hoping to be on the list, quite frankly, you know the top 150. That’s how you get on that last. And then I looked and we got #9. Like Green Eggs and Ham was a couple of spots after it, so I’m like, it was crazy. But I looked through this list I got this morning and I’m scanning through and Whole Leaders, Wild Trust, before I could get to it, I’m going down the list because we were #14 on this list, and guess who was like #11, was Rob Wachter. I was like – so I go, wait, I didn’t even know Rob had that book out! And then I found out, oh--.

Robert: Robert Wachter. It was Robert Wachter.

Dr. McKenna: It was Robert Wachter. I made sure the spelling was the same and everything, so anyway.

Robert: Yeah, so, so.

Dr. McKenna: I wanted to mess with you, but I know there is a story there.

Robert: It’s actually Dr. Robert Wachter. For the audience, there is a Dr. Robert Wachter who exists. My name is Robert Wachter. I am not that Dr. Robert Wachter, but he has a best selling book, and I do get – it’s so funny when you showed me that list and I saw the book, I’ve been getting emails from people who think I’m that Dr. Robert Wachter.

Dr. McKenna: That guy.

Robert: So I have to tell them, I’m not him. That’s not my book. I’m not a doctor. But I do know what it feels like to get a lot of attention from if I did write a really great book.

Dr. McKenna: You do.

Robert: Everyone, yeah, that’s hilarious, but of course, Rob McKenna, you know about that, right, in Washington state?

Dr. McKenna: Right, locally, Washington state, yeah, but . . . so back to your question. So, I appreciate that off-road moment. I think you asked me like why I wrote this book and why is this important to me. You know, one of the questions that I ask audiences or leaders out of the gate is this is: Where in your life are you working harder than you should have to because trust is thin or broken? Ask that question. Where in your life, or you work, by the way, are you working harder than you should have to because trust is thin or broken? What’s powerful about that is that we don’t answer that question with a leadership theory or some pithy quote from social media. We answer it, most of us answer that question with a faith. With a loss, maybe it’s a teammate, and for some people it’s a spouse, it’s a board member, it’s a friend, and one of the things that I’ve seen over and over again, I’ve experienced myself personally, is that the hardest moments of trust, when they grow and they start to get bigger, can honestly feel like we’re bleeding out emotionally as leaders, and I know that’s harsh language, but I think it’s what it oftentimes feels like. Leaders feel it. Teams feel it. Organizations feel it. I think, I ask this question, like what if we could decrease the trust bleed? And so this book and one of my deeper purposes behind it is that you realize that all of the efforts we’ve done to change cultures and to develop leaders, because that’s been my story around that, have all centered and landed on a foundation of trust that no one, that most leaders or individuals even talk to. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working, you know, in an organization or you’re working in a family and trying to lead that together, is that we all know this, that without trust, like trust is like air. We know we can’t survive without air. We have to have it, but we reach out to grab it and it disappears in our hands. I argue in the book that we don’t do anything without trust. We don’t leave our driveway. We don’t go to the local coffee shop. We don’t drive down the road. We don’t hire a contractor. We don’t go to our favorite fast food restaurant. It’s like our marriages don’t work without trust. It’s what begs for this conversation around. So what is this thing that is the air we breathe? And the way that I say it in the book, you’ve probably heard me say this before, it’s more than a feeling, but it is a feeling. My goal at some point as a walk onto a stage and Boston is playing, for people who know what I’m talking about, so the song actually echoes out that “it’s more than a feeling”, that trust has a chemistry, and so my hope, which we can get into more about that, but my inspiration in this book is that people would feel a call into a movement, to join a movement of saying that trust is foundational, but we’ve treated it too much like it is just a feeling, that it does have a chemistry. So, to inspire people into a way to see and to feel like, yes, that’s what I experienced, that’s what my life feels like, that’s what it feels like in the hardest moments, in the best moments, and then at the same time, this is Rob’s way of writing books, is I wanted to provide a pathway, a blueprint, like what do you do about it? What conversations are necessary? Because I’m the kind of person that not only likes to say, let’s be inspired by the idea, but how do we do this? And so that was the intent of the book and that’s why I’m excited for people to read it, to say like, oh my goodness, I could do something about this thing called trust.

Robert: Amazing. Yeah. It’s the lifeblood. It’s the currency of relationships, it’s sounds like what you’re saying. Trust is like the air we breathe, you know. So that’s perfect because what I want to do is spend this time, the rest of our time, talking about the book and going deeper into the book. And so, one of the things that started happening is . . . we’re connected on LinkedIn, different social media channels, and I started seeing the book being promoted on LinkedIn. The first one that I saw, this post came out promoting the book, and there was a quote. And I read the quote and I thought, wow, that is such a good quote, I want to know what this means. I want to go deeper into this. So, I thought we would just share some of the quotes from the book, have you dive deep into, you know what’s going on there, because they’re pretty thought provoking and interesting, and I know there’s a lot of layers and depth to it. So, if that sounds good to you, I’d like to do that. The first one, I think the first one that I saw, and this is, in truth, is kind of focused more on the internal aspect of building character within a leader prior to the outward expression of trust. In other words, it’s an internal thing before it becomes an external thing. So the quote that I saw was this, in your book: “Trust doesn’t grow where people are perfect. It grows where people are honest.” Tell us about that.

Dr. McKenna: Okay. So there is a lot in that, that it is fun to be able to talk to you about, because this concept of perfection is something. I mean, there are a lot of people talking about, you don’t need to be perfect. I think that’s become more common, especially in the last year. But what I think what’s fascinating from a - if I could go theological for just a second - is that this has deep roots in our belief about humankind in relationship to God. This is where I even think about every reference in Scripture to the brokenness of humanity, like that jars of clay, that passage of Scripture in 2 Corinthians where it says we are common clay pots, we are cracked pots, we are vessels that are capable of amazing things, but we are cracked. It’s not like saying that’s what we are is such an important, and even that passage goes on to talk about this, this question between life and death, between redemption and brokenness, that we live in this space of continuing to live in that, and I think it has such important implications for a conversation around trust, and even that quote that you said: “Trust doesn’t grow where people are perfect. It grows where people are honest.” That statement, yeah, it’s a quote, but the reality behind that is that it’s not just about trust. That’s the reality. The reality is that we already are not perfect, so why are we chasing perfection when it’s not real? It’s not real. And so if we’re going to – if we’re actually going to grow trust that lasts, that’s sustaining, that’s sticks, that has an impact, that has been maintained, we have to begin a conversation with our fundamental belief about the human experience, and when we begin there, it’s like, now it’s real. Now it’s real. The reality, for example, that we will let each other down, is so, so critical as the foundation of this. It’s interesting, Rob, if I could geek out on one thing and then come back to this question, is that when we were doing debriefs, and I know BCW is so into this and experts at this as well, so you provide feedback on our trust index. So an organization gets its information on how did you score across 33 drivers of trust, and what was fascinating is you’ll find that a lot of – not a lot - there were some CEOs who would look at the data, even if they were in high high trust environments, and they would say to themselves, like okay. They were trying to find where the – like try to identify the individuals who were breaking the trust, even if it’s a big enough organization, you can see it in their eyes where they’re trying to do that. We did a little bit of a study on – we have a thing called the Wild Trust Quadrant where organizations – it’s a 2 x 2. It’s a simple 2 x 2, and it’s in the book, but it’s where on one axis you have organizational trust and on the other axis you have team trust. So, if you’re high on both, it means that you trust your team members and you also trust your organization and your leaders. If you’re low on team trust, but high on organizational trust, we call that a shell of a trust. It’s like it’s got – it’s a sold outside but internally it’s a little bit messy, like an egg. And then if you’re high on the other category, you’re high on team trust, you trust your team members, the people you’re in the foxhole with, but you’re low on organizational trust. We call that islands of trust, and that occurs quite often, but if you’re low on both so you don’t trust your team members and you don’t trust your organization, we call that the jungle of trust. Here’s my point is this. We looked at organizations that are scoring in the stronghold, so they’re high on both. Are you with me? So they’re high on both. What percentage of employees’ experience is in the jungle in organizations that are in the stronghold? And it’s 42%. Like, it blows you away. And the reason why that’s important from a “let’s get real about trust” is that so many leaders approach trust as if it’s ubiquitous. In other words, if it’s somewhere, it’s everywhere. And that’s not real because we have fractures of trust even within a day. You know what I’m saying? Like we have a little conversation where I’m like, you know you and I are on a team together, and Rob says something, and I’m like, agh! Is he being upfront with me, you know? So that is so fundamental, but really getting back, and then if we take that to the next level, the reason, the point of your question is this, and this came up in my conversation as I got to know Pat Lencioni too. So, we were talking about this. A lot of his work began with the team or the organization and where he has landed now is this realization that it all starts within the one. The trust building process has to begin within me because it’s – that’s where individual and leader development, it has to begin at that foundation of this conversation, of resetting these patterns within me, but then, build this foundation for trust, because the next layer is then we get into relational stuff, right. So if I’m not understanding honestly my brokenness and my redemption, it’s very difficult for me to enter then into a relational context, like a team, and start to build from there unless I’m doing that inner work myself. And it’s not about perfection, but it’s this – this is where vulnerability comes in and this willingness to tell the truth to each other becomes also part of those layers, so.

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Robert: You’re touching on this. So another quote in the book is this. “It’s impossible to trust someone who doesn’t trust themselves.” Is that quote speaking kind of that internal - I’m going to call it work, but you’re speaking of sort of – what kind of things can a leader do to build that sort of trust themselves? What do you mean by that?

Dr. McKenna: Yeah.

Robert: And like, what are some practical tangible – I think you’ve mentioned some, but is it awareness of my shortcomings and my, you know, my weaknesses and things and being honest in expressing those to others adequately?

Dr. McKenna: Yeah.

Robert: Give me something I can apply.

Dr. McKenna: Yeah. One thing that has been very interesting that I had to begin to think about is this. I’m going to use a couple of words that are thrown around but, is the relationship between formation and optimization? A lot of leadership approaches are about optimization. How do I get the most out of myself? How do I get the most out of my teams, out of my leaders? And so it’s like – and that’s necessary, so don’t hear me slamming optimization. Like any leader, the real story is you have to optimize, right? But when we’re talking about optimization, it is very different than if we were talking about a robot and if we were talking about a human being. Because we’re talking about human beings who have a soul, right. This is a person who inherently matters, and so this is where the other word that I use oftentimes that is understood and more deeply ideological kinds of conversation is the word formation. Like, what does it – what does formation beg me to think about? It begs me to think about a couple of things, like the long haul. It’s a longer haul investment that formation is happening across my lifetime and possibly beyond, that my character is being shaped by these moments, these experiences and these gaining competencies and what psychologists would call efficacy, this belief that I could do something, and what we might call that – and it’s interesting too because I got into this question around value, like most organizations are trying to create value, and what does it mean to create value within a person? And the cool thing, this is where I find this so exciting is that this is where the fundamentals of what we know psychologically and from a business perspective about developing leaders enters that formation conversation because it’s where our efforts to develop leaders and using the best research and the best understanding and expertise that’s out there, it intersects with things that we believe deeply in our faith. So, for example, we all know this, right? If I have – and this gets to that leader development idea – is if I have an understanding, an honest understanding, of my competence and also the lack thereof – do you know what I’m saying? If I have an honest understanding, having an honest conversation around my purpose and the call on my life, and I’m not talking about like words that I’m supposed to say about call, but an honest conversation around where I’m not sure. You know what I mean? And why – the questions around why I’m here. We know that purpose has deep research connections as well as theological connections. If - we know also that if a leader is supported and surrounded, that creates a deeper sense of efficacy, of confidence, of a sense that I could do something if they’re supported, and also getting tough feedback. That means they’re continuing to edit and to learn. If I understand my motivations and not just if I understand my specific motivations, what that does to a human being is instead of telling them they have value, they’re invited to come and see how they already do. And so when that begins to be built, you can see this, right? I come into every hard moment, and it’s just right around the corner, by the way, right, those high-pressure moments are coming. Whether I’m an employee, individual contributor, or a leader, I come into these moments fundamentally more trustworthy because I’ve built – we could go round and round. There’s another fascinating conversation around whether you actually can trust yourself. I don’t know if that’s a thing because trust is an inherently relational thing, but we could – let’s just say that you can become more trustworthy. And this is like when someone – I’m going to get personal – if your spouse questions some things about your integrity or whatever else, it does cause you to question your trustworthiness, which then carries forward, so that’s why seeing it as a formative process where I’m moving in and out and maintaining this sense of my own value, but then I’m coming into conversations and relationships very, very different. There’s a lot there, I know.

Robert: There is a lot there. I’m thinking it really is a deep sense of theological, spiritual, psychological, emotional awareness, and you know, clarity on who I am, who God has made me, what’s my purpose, what are my giftings, and then, a constant process of having that mirror held up. You know, we do that through leadership 360 assessments. We do that through our employee engagement surveys. And that is the most humbling. I made a comment the other day that the intrinsic nature of these kinds of tools that we do, that you guys use, and that we at BCW, is intrinsically humbling to a leader because you’re getting constant feedback on the areas where you need to do that internal work and make those adjustments as a leader.

Dr. McKenna: Think about it. Like this, just one – these are other pithy quotes, but they kind of stand because it’s like, we cannot build external trust on internal instability. I say that. It almost makes me sick to my stomach because I’ve been there more recently than I wish, and when I feel that interval instability and I don’t feel that sense of support, not just like whether people like me or not, this is that true and deep sense of support that is – that includes an understanding of myself. I can’t go into any relationship or organization and create stability when I’m standing on unstable ground. I would say this also that the leader who refuses to face themselves, and I wouldn’t just say leader, so if someone doesn’t see themselves as a leader, any person who refuses to face themselves eventually forces everyone else to do that.

Robert: Interesting.

Dr. McKenna: It’s just, it has to happen, you know. It has to happen.

Robert: That’s such an interesting thing that you just said because I had a conversation, I think with a ministry partner recently where it’s like, if we don’t ask for the feedback, right, openly have a two-way, and we’re asking for the feedback, that feedback is going to manifest itself somehow.

Dr. McKenna: Yes.

Robert: Right. If we don’t create that channel, which is a much easier seamless channel, then that feedback is going to manifest in some way, shape, or form, whether it’s gossip, frustration, turnover, whatever, it’s going to come out.

Dr. McKenna: Yeah. It’s going to come out. It’s going to come out. One of the things I say also is that every employee comes to work asking themselves at least three questions internally. Do I matter? Do I matter? Are you telling me the truth? And, do I belong here? And it’s interesting, right, because when - a friend of mine who came on our podcast talks about it this way. He said, he said when the answer to those questions is no, what happens is, what do we do? We spend most of our time trying to look like we matter, trying to look like we’re telling each other the truth, and trying to look like we belong. And then when I go to ask CEOs and I go, what happens if the answer is yes? And you know what everyone says? Almost every time someone in the audience will go, people work. You know what I mean? They just do their jobs because they’re not – they’re not filling that void with all this emotional baggage that they’re having to work around. They just work. They perform.

Robert: Wow. I’m hearing this kind of for the first time as you’re saying it. I’m thinking to myself, I want to go back and listen to this podcast episode again myself because I want to, I want to – we don’t have time, but those three things you just said, can you repeat them? Do I matter?

Dr. McKenna: Do I matter? Are you telling me the truth? Do I belong?

Robert: Yes. And do I belong? That’s what everyone needs to know.

Dr. McKenna: Yeah. And be given permission to answer for themselves. So, I’m not saying everyone belongs everywhere, right. But it’s like, if we don’t invite them into an honest conversation to deserve that for themselves, which is also, by the way, why an organization’s clear mission and purpose matters, because it’s hard to align myself or make decisions about my belonging if the organization isn’t clear about where it’s going. That’s a whole other conversation.

Robert: Yes. Okay. How about we throw another quote?

Dr. McKenna: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Robert: Yeah. This is the problem when you and I start talking, we go everywhere. Here’s one. “Self-protection is the silent assassin of trust.” Self-protection is the silent assassin of trust, right out of the book.

Dr. McKenna: Yeah. Should we just go there?

Robert: Go. I don’t know what you’re about to say, but I say, go there. Yeah.

Dr. McKenna: Yeah. It’s again facing that reality of our worldview that we would say – I think you and I would violently agree on this, that, you know, I go back to the garden, you know, and I say, what did Adam and Eve do when they first sinned and the Lord comes looking for them in the garden? They hid. They just hit. That’s what they did. If the story in Scripture is the story of us, what is it that we do when that brokenness shows up, is that we hide. And maybe that’s not the most, the most damaging response, but it’s not a great response. So we veil ourselves and we hide this brokenness that we are fully aware is there, but we have a choice to either be vulnerable and bring it to the surface or we have a choice to hide. As human beings, you and I would agree that what we do is we hide, right, and so – and in its worst, we don’t just hide, but what it actually – what self-protection shows up as in more subtle kinds of ways, like in our daily lives, is things like defensiveness, overcontrol, probably the most damaging one is blame or blame shifting, or silence, like saying nothing. And I don’t think most people think they’re protecting themselves. I don’t think most people think they’re doing that. They think they’re protecting their organization or they’re protecting what’s going on, but this reality is that we have this default tendency as human beings in those moments of brokenness where we will self-protect, and there’s a lot of psychological research to support that as well, and the problem with that is that it is a silent assassin of trust. It just breaks down trust, either slowly, bit by bit, it just chinks away at that foundation until that foundation is gone. That’s why I say a silent assassin of that. And so I think this reality that many of us would talk about is this is why the necessity for vulnerability is there, but we would say at WiLD, like let’s be thoughtful about that vulnerability because by definition vulnerability is the openness to being hurt. So, when we ask a leader to be vulnerable, we are asking them literally to be open to being hurt. And yet, without vulnerability, nothing grows well at scale, so we have to invite vulnerability, but we need to be thoughtful about it because the reality is there are things, Rob, you and I know each other a bit, but there are things I could share with you that are – you would not fully understand with regard to my brokenness, and I believe that’s true of every person, but there are things – but I have to be open, I have to be open to cracking that door, to being a bit more honest, and by the way, anyone who says like, “I have an open-door policy, you can be honest with me”, that is such a lie. Like telling you I have an open-door policy does not create an open-door, right. It’s an actual statement of this is what I’m still trying to figure out, and it’s why I use the term editability so often, is that inviting people and providing a methodology and architecture that invite, that let people get into the shallow end of vulnerable before they go to the end, because if we aren’t willing to be interrupted, how in the world can we establish new patterns within ourselves and between ourselves, and that interrupt-ability is not fun. You know what I mean? Being interrupted is not fun, but we have to do it.

Robert: We do. We do. It’s a little bit like the Lord says, you know, humble yourselves before the mighty hand of God.

Dr. McKenna: Yes!

Robert: You know, I’ve always said, either humble yourself or at some point the Lord will humble us, right. I would much rather humble myself before the Lord than to be humbled by the Lord, if you know what I mean. God has a way of disrupting and editing us in His way if we miss those opportunities to humble ourselves along the way.

Dr. McKenna: Can I go to Scripture real quick, Rob, with that so it’s like . . . ?

Robert: Please. I’d love that.

Dr. McKenna: I’ve also been thinking a lot, and it’s in the book, but I think about patterns. This is where like the fundamentals of psychology and organizational work theory that’s out there connect with our theology because Edgar Shein, who is the – you know he’s one of the greatest thinkers in culture who’s now passed away. He wrote a book called Leadership and Culture. He defined culture as a pattern of basic assumptions that a group has learned as it solved its problems of internal adaptability and external integration and all of these things and he said and then we teach these patterns to new members and that is what he says culture is. It’s a set of patterns that have worked well enough so we lock into them. And it took me straight - when I think about Edgar Shein, I quote him in my book, it’s like, you can’t talk about culture without putting Shein in there somewhere, and then I – and so I do that, and then it led me straight to Romans 12:2. “Do not conform to the patterns of this Lord” is a Scripture that many Christians have memorized, but do we actually think about what that means? It means a willingness to have the patterns of our lives disrupted for the right thing, like you know what I mean? And the patterns of our lives, I think about this every time I go to the gym. I’m like, I see patterns there. I’m like, McKenna, you are such a creature of habit, just in your stupid workout, let alone how I function with my wife, or how I function with you, or how I function with my team. Are we willing to have those patterns interrupted? That’s what development is, right, it’s an interruption to those patterns.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. See, do we have time for one more quote? How about just one more quote? Okay. Because this kind of – I like this one because we’ve been talking a lot about the internal kind of trust from the leader, internal to an external, and the barriers to that, you know the assassins of trust and some of the things that we do to disrupt the trust that we would like to see, but ultimately it does translate into cultural transformation. That’s the goal. And so, here’s a quote from the book that I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on. “Team trust lives and dies by truth.” Team trust, team trust, lives and dies by truth.

Dr. McKenna: Alright. This one is tough and so, it’s tough for me personally because – and anyone that says that truth telling is easy has – needs a different coaching conversation, right, there is a different developmental moment that’s available there. That’s why we had to create an assessment called the Leading Under Pressure Inventory that assesses truth speaker versus peacekeeper. Like there are different ways that people see this, the statement, trust – team trust lives and dies by truth. One of the realities in our research was that at the team level – so we have – we describe – the book is broken down this way. Trust is occurring within three levels: (1) At the personal level, that’s awareness within which we talked about. (2) At the organizational level, we call that conditions around, but there are certain things that we can do as conditions in our organization, like literal structural things that will affect whether or not trust can continue to be built well. (3) At the team level is where there is this interesting in-between point where this level of personal awareness and this structural reality in the organization gets really real because when trust hits the relational ground, if you will, that’s where either it takes traction or it starts to skid. And so at the team level what we found is one of the top drivers, by the way alongside being able to have conflict well and to compose ourselves - I always describe it as fight well, like we’re going to fight, but can we do that well? And organizations that don’t, just don’t do well when it comes to trust building efforts. This reality of telling – of truth telling was one of the top three drivers of trust at the team level, and so this capacity for us to tell each other what is actually happening, and by the way, when I say truth I don’t mean like big T truth, I mean what I believe is really happening. If I can’t be honest with you about that, what do we do? Like we – and by the way, I know you know my wife, and she called me on this the other day. I mean, listen, this is a tough reality, right. Talk about writing a book on trust when you’re married to your 28 year, almost 29 years, you know, and we still like wrestle with this. Like if you ask Jackie if she trusts me, my wife, I hope she would say in a big T way, “yes, I do.” But then she would say, “with what?” You know what I mean? Like, with what? Like, do I trust him with everything? Of course not, you know, because this reality is that we have to be able to – we have to believe that – if you and I, let me just use you, the two of us as examples. If Rob and I are with – the Rob’s are working together, that we are working hard at doing our best to tell the truth to each other, and that’s a difficult proposition. I think the one thing I would say is just I hope that even this book or this conversation invites people into is just the reality, it’s not easy, but we have to do it. Trust is one of the greatest outcomes that lives on the other side, and so increasing that capacity because if we don’t tell each other the truth, we start to answer those three questions I gave you with a no. I don’t believe here that I – that it is a safe place for me to do this. I don’t believe that we’ve created the rules of engagement in our culture where that’s what will occur between us so that that’s not going to happen. I don’t – my team members feel like they’re working around me. This is where one of the most fundamental like litmus tests – it’s really a symptom for a lack of trust is triangulation. So instead of having conversations where we talk to each other in the hard moments, instead we draw a third person into that conversation, you know, and so I think we all know that those quote is just true already, so I just happened to put the quote in there, but it’s like, we know that if we can’t tell each other the truth, it all just starts to crack and the formation of that, that foundation we stand on, begins to crack, little pieces at a time. We start to work around issues. We don’t perform. We don’t even do our jobs anymore because I’m spending most of my emotional energy on back channel invisible kinds of things that are going on. So that’s my – just truth telling is something – that’s why we had to build a whole methodology to help teams tell the truth to each other and to set the foundation for that.

Robert: Yeah. And it’s not just – it’s not just a singular individual courage to tell the truth. There needs to be courage to tell the truth, but it also is important, you talk about the organizational structure. Is this an organizational structure that invites that truth in or has it been so top down, which sometimes we see in the church sector, is a – there’s a spiritual respect for a spiritual leader, so that dynamic can sometimes create a situation where folks don’t want to be courageous and honest and truth telling in a team meeting because of that respect, which we do want to have respect for leaders and things like that, but even the business, the business sector, there’s courage at the individual level – correct me if I’m wrong – but also, what is the dynamics in the culture that’s been created that allows for that conversation to happen in a safe way, in a way that I don’t feel like I’m putting myself out there on a limb where, you know it’s going to have repercussions on me because I’m simply saying, I don’t think that idea is going to work the way it looks right now, and I need to be able to communicate that within a structure and in an environment that allows that kind of conversation.

Dr. McKenna: I would say things like the truth, when we’re telling the truth it shortens the distance between the problem and the solution. It shortens the distance and when we shorten that distance all kinds of positive outcomes that we’re looking for begin to occur more quickly. This is why Stephen Covey called his book The Speed of Trust. Like he would say like you should not build your organization faster than you’re building trust. Like don’t establish those goals. You should move at the speed of trust building and typically we move towards the outcomes and then we put trust in as an afterthought. The high-trust teams, what they do is, they confront reality faster. Let me say that again. High-trust teams confront reality faster and it shortens that cycle, so it’s no – it’s no – it’s just, it makes sense because Covey said that you can measure trust. I say that over and over again in my book, that you can measure trust, but we came at it from different angles, so when I got to know Steven, he said in his book – go read that book, by the way, it’s a brilliant piece of work published in 2006, and he said, if you can measure decreasing cost and increasing speed, so you’re doing things faster, but it’s costing less, then you can measure trust. So he was measuring trust from the outcome side. And what I asked him, I said, Stephen, “What’s the future? Like what is next?” And he said, and this felt so good, Rob. You can imagine for me, coming from a guy that I just respect, he goes, “What you guys are doing” because what we need to do is understand the inputs, the drivers, if we measure those on the other side, imagine the triangulation on these outcomes and the drivers, now we’re like – now we’re cooking with gas, is the way I say that. Yeah.

Robert: Awesome. Well, we could go on and on and on, but I will just say to our audience and our listeners, Whole Leaders, Wild Trust, I assume everywhere books are sold, go and get yourself a copy. Get a copy for you and your team and read that book because it will be transformational to you as a leader and also to how you lead your organization. How can people find out about you, Dr. Rob McKenna? How can they go learn more about you so they can connect with you if they want to go a little deeper in this process?

Dr. McKenna: Our organization is WiLD Leaders, which stands for whole and intentional leader development. If they go to wildleaders.org, they will find everything they can if they want to begin to measure trust and then begin building with intentionality, that’s the place I would go is wildleaders.org. If you want to learn more about me personally, it’s just drrobmckenna.com. Those are the two places they can to us quickly.

Robert: Well, thank you. I appreciate having you on. It’s great to catch up with you, and I’ve been challenged by this conversation and so much to think about. I am going to go back and listen to this episode myself again and take some notes and to go a little bit deeper. So, I want to thank you for your time, Dr. Rob McKenna. Congratulations on the incredible success of your book. You just released it and it’s doing so well. To all of our listeners, I encourage you to forward, share this episode with any friends, colleagues, anybody you think would benefit from the content from the book that is available to you, or this conversation, so like, share, subscribe, and let’s get this out there to the ears of more leaders and more organizations. So, until next time, we look forward to seeing you back on the Called to Flourish podcast. God bless you, Dr. Rob McKenna. God bless you, everyone else. See you next time.