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There is one more aspect to the importance of trust in the work environment. It is impossible to emphasize this point enough: maintain your objectivity.

Some of the biggest scandals we’ve heard about on the news happened in no small part because a leader trusted someone they shouldn’t have. Otherwise outstanding leaders can unwittingly make the life-altering mistake of trusting someone who is manipulating them for their own purposes. That doesn’t mean that a leader should suspect every seemingly trustworthy person of a malicious intent. What it does mean is fully facing the reality that some people do have ulterior motives or hidden agendas, and they prey on the leader’s general good heartedness to further their own aims. The key to figuring out which person is bringing which motivation to the table, is to use discernment. This brings us back to the key point throughout the awesome leader series: you will never be as powerful and as protected as when you turn over the reins of your life and leadership to the Lord. God will grace you with the spirit of discernment, and as you develop that skill you’ll readily be able to see all but the most elaborate schemes and eventually even those will come to light. Inevitably, no matter the dark corners of someone’s heart or actions, the light will break through and illuminate the truth.

Even if you don’t believe in God, at least don’t be intellectually or emotionally lazy by failing to keep an open mind about what is going on. If you really want to go it alone and figure everything out for yourself because you and God haven’t been on speaking terms for awhile, then do yourself a favor and sharpen your powers of observation and analysis of what is really going on in the work environment you are responsible for. You’ll have some measure of success figuring people out. Resolve not to have any undercurrents of dysfunction, manipulation, or exploitation on your team. Develop the ability to trust your gut instinct about people and situations, especially when it comes to safety issues. As the leader, it is your responsibility to protect the flock – including and especially – from the wolves in sheep’s clothing within.

Blindly trusting anyone is asking to be lied to, manipulated, or exploited. If you hear yourself saying the words “They would never…” you know it’s time to stop and think! What if the unpleasant information you’re hearing is true? Reestablishing your emotional comfort at the expense of the truth reveals you as a weak, ineffective leader with serious issues of your own. Never put your good name on the line by defending someone without first ascertaining the facts for yourself. Depending on the situation, that could be a career ending move. And in today’s litigious climate, you could also bear personal liability or face criminal charges for not properly handling the situation. No friendship is worth the loss of your own livelihood or freedom.

Also keep in mind that just because you worked with someone years ago doesn’t mean you know them now. Unless you have either lived with or spent significant time behind closed doors in a work setting with someone, there are bound to be parts of them that you have never seen. Keep in mind that we’re all human, we all struggle with various things, and unless we’re working intentionally towards becoming better, our weaknesses will inevitably show themselves in the environments in which we spend the most time. It’s easy for people to manufacture an image if the only time it’s tested is on a brief, occasional basis. That is how abusive family members and bosses get away with their nonsense for so long. When in public they pretend to be one way. But the family and the team behind the closed doors knows the real truth. Decide right now that as a leader, you are going to face the ugly fact that sometimes people are not who they pretend to be, sometimes they are mean-spirited (or worse) and  intend harm, and you’ll do whatever it takes to get over any squeamishness you have about conflict, deal with the problems effectively, and protect the team. That. Is. Your. Job.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for God to bless you with discernment so you can see the truth all around you. Love you guys, and believe in you too!!

Welcome back!

Foundational to your success as a leader is your willingness and ability to build trust with your people. First, you must value trust as a fickle commodity that takes diligent effort to earn and is easily shattered by carelessness or ill will. In fact, trust is the only currency that matters. If your people don’t trust you, they won’t talk to you. If they don’t talk to you, you won’t know what’s really going on. A day will come when one of your people makes a mistake, or something bad happens, and you will need to know about it in real time. Your people will not come to you with the news unless you already invested the time and made the effort to build trust with them. If they don’t trust you, you will miss out on important knowledge that can massively blow up in your face later on. Set a goal to build trust with every interaction. This means really listening to your people, especially if they are upset. Don’t take the upset personally. We all have different frustration tolerances and stress thresholds. Don’t get offended, or insulted, or have a weak ego by being too fragile to listen. Don’t retaliate. Hear them out. Work with them to discuss a solution. Don’t try to hurry up and get the conversation over with, or cram your rigid opinion down their throat. They feel how they feel. They think what they think. It is absolutely your job as the leader to be the bigger person and demonstrate respect and caring. It is your job to model problem solving skills, especially under pressure. You’re the one with the authority and the power to solve problems, so man up and get to it!

Your team will be a reflection of you. Do you want them to learn great skills that make the workplace better for everyone, or poor skills that make any tough situation that arises even worse? Remember, your behavior sets the tone and then you get to live with the consequences of that. Why wouldn’t you want good outcomes in every situation you face? You are 100% responsible for being legitimately trustworthy as a person and as a leader.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for you to have fruitful introspection about where you are on the spectrum of trustworthiness.

Welcome back! Good leadership is an active choice. Awesome leadership takes total commitment. Anyone can suck at leadership, and many people do. Don’t be the whiny tyrant who perches on their leadership chair and bellows about how magnificent they are. That reduces you to a caricature of yourself. A version of who you are that can be taken about as seriously as a cartoon. You have not ascended to some lofty station that makes you better than anyone else. You haven’t arrived. You hold one position in one organization for one period of time. Your “leadership” might well be considered a joke in a different organization. The nonsense you are allowed to get away with at one place would get you fired at another. So before you coronate yourself ruler of the universe, remember that a vast legion of leaders has come before you, and even more will come after. This is just a moment in time, so it would be wise for you to keep the magnitude of your self-appointed grandeur in perspective. Make the choice to be a leader who serves rather than trying to force others to serve you. That one decision alone puts you on the path to greatness.

So how do we go about making the commitment to awesomeness? We ground ourselves in the most fundamental bedrock possible: we embrace that we are not God and stop trying to play Him in other people’s lives. Everything else after that is just details and skills we can learn.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for your growth and wisdom!

Toxic Workplaces Prayer

Toxic Workplaces Strategies for Moving Forward

Toxic Workplaces Minimize the Impact

Toxic Workplaces Where to Find Help

Toxic Workplace Your Impact on the Problem

Welcome back!

So far we’ve been talking about getting our own selves in order so that we don’t do damage to others and we give ourselves the best possible chances of success. We are arriving at the heart of this teaching series. Here’s the deal. Even if you’re a marvelously functional and mature adult, who does a remarkable job for your organization and is an upstanding member of your community, but you do not know how to properly take care of your team, you’ll create an epic failure for yourself. You’ll impose completely unnecessary hardship on every person under your command. So how do we get leadership right? By becoming awesome! Not by loafing our way through an endless series of handsome paychecks, or settling for mediocrity, or giving the status quo a place to flourish. We become awesome by being far above average impact players, a new generation of leadership who jabs a stick in the spokes of the out-of-control-bike of toxic workplaces and throws them over the handlebars to enact change. If you didn’t get into leadership with a clear intention to transform lives, organizations, and bottom line results, and you have no desire in your heart to achieve those outcomes now, then please do us all a favor and resign your post. There are too many ill-equipped people with characters that are completely unworthy of leadership seriously holding their organizations back from soaring success because they are in the way.

Specifically, becoming awesome means three things: interpersonal excellence, strategically developing others, and the art of consequences. Strap it up, and let’s get going!

Until next time, I’m praying that those of you who are hungry to be your best will have fun growing every day, and those of you stinking up leadership chairs will somehow find your way into an entirely different line of work!

Welcome back!

We’ve been talking about the perils of mistreating a team. Today we’re going to continue that conversation. When you mistreat people, it mangles your reputation. Detailed information about your misbehavior spreads far and wide. Losing your reputation will limit your future opportunities. Your current reality will erode out from under you like quicksand. People will stop trying to work with you. You’ll also miss out on important information and then situations you would have had an early warning about will erupt in your face. People will smile and nod but then quietly seek ways to correct whatever problem you are causing or allowing (or both). You will give people a common enemy to coalesce around. Productivity will shift from the mission of the organization to the goal of bringing you to justice. You can only mess with people for so long before they give up on you and fight back. Mess with the wrong person, who is braver than you, healthier than you, has more stamina than you, or especially if they are a person of faith under the protection of God, and you’ll find yourself in a world of hurt in a hurry. Worse yet, do something that hurts or threatens their family’s well-being, and you’ll have a street fight on your hands. Do the right thing and treat people well. Don’t make anyone succeed in spite of you. Gift them with succeeding because of you.

A special note for leaders who have surrounded themselves with people who are as dysfunctional, corrupt, or mean-spirited as they are in an attempt to build a human shield to hide behind. You may be wallowing in denial and seeking allies wherever and however you can find them, but the fact is, even that self-serving maneuver is readily transparent. Even people who are attached to you because of whatever illicit means you hooked them in with, will have no problem joining up with your adversaries if you treat them badly enough. Relationships based on using each other never last. Eventually, everyone will join forces on a quest to put a stop to the hurt you are causing. When that happens, you’ll find yourself on the outside looking in. Even if you survive the controversy, your power will forever be diminished and you will never be fully trusted again. In a classic case of reaping what you chose to sow, the damage you caused other people will finally be visited upon your own doorstep. When the suffering quite rightly switches from the team to you, misery becomes your new normal while everyone else will be celebrating your fall. Your team is talking about your nonsense in their living rooms, around the Thanksgiving table, in church, while playing sports, and everywhere else they go. You can’t stop it. All you can do is change it by doing right by people, and giving them reasons to speak well of you. That’s your social reality as a leader. Either people are singing your praises and raising your social capital, or you are handing them the ammunition that will eventually bring your reign of tyranny to a screeching halt.

Until next time, think about this question and be brutally honest in your answer to yourself: what is it like for each member of your team to work for you? Not just what you want to believe because it’s what your buddies tell you to stroke your ego, but what it’s like for every single person to be under your command.

I’m praying for your wisdom and positive action!