Thoughts Unlocked – How Stress Breaks Trust

* Website

Timestamps:
00:01:16 – When stress starts replacing trust
00:03:55 – The role of trust in team dynamics
00:07:39 – The benefit of questions over assumptions
00:10:59 – How to foster curiosity and safety in teams
00:12:48 – Cultivating trust through curiosity

Skot Waldron (00:05)
I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually enjoy working together. I know, who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales trainings, off sites for major pharmaceutical companies, and industry associations.

A thousand of attendees who have read my sessions. With 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable. 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare, maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Welcome back to Thoughts Unlocked. I was working with an executive recently who said this, and I can’t stop thinking about it. She said, “I’m exhausted, Skot, but it’s not actually the work that’s exhausting me. It’s not the work that’s exhausting me. It was everything around the work, the constant emails.” Have you all had those recently? The conflicting directions, the misalignment of teams, these departments blaming each other for stuff, people copying clients before talking internally about stuff.

She was feeling like everyone was trying to protect themselves instead of really solving problems. And I thought to myself, that’s what happens when stress starts replacing trust. When stress starts replacing trust. when organizations come under a lot of pressure, a lot of fire, fire, fire, pressure, fire, whatever it’s called. What is that? What am I starting to say? They don’t become just these magical communicators.

That pressure, that stress, it simply magnifies whatever already exists inside your culture. It just reveals it. Because what it’s really easy to be a great communicator when everything’s great. It’s really hard when there’s a lot of stress. If trust is really strong, people pull together. It’s awesome. If trust is weak, then the people fall apart. The pressure, I don’t think, creates the culture. It doesn’t. Pressure doesn’t create your culture. You create the culture long before the pressure gets there. Well, you should be creating it long before the pressure gets there. And all it does is actually reveal what’s already been created.

So, think about the last time your team got really busy. Did the communication improve? Maybe, maybe not. Did people actually become more patient? Probably not, maybe they did. Did assumptions around what was going on with each other increase? I will bet they did because stress has this incredibly good ability to speed up the stories, we tell ourselves while also shrinking the time and the intentionality and the curiosity and the generosity that we offer or should offer each other. And that’s all the dangerous part about this.

The one thing I hear all the time is we have a communication problem. When I get employee engagement surveys back and I get the results, and people are always like, we have communication issue here. And I think, wow, that’s a big term. That’s very umbrella, you know. But I don’t think communication is usually the real problem. I think people just slap a communication label on it because communication embodies everything. I think communication is often the symptom of what the real problem is.

Trust is, I think, the main issue underneath all of it. When trust is high, people ask questions. They clarify. They admit mistakes. They pick up the phone. But when trust is low, everything becomes documentation. The CC line gets a lot longer. All of a sudden, we have like 5 or 6 people on the CC line. Reply all becomes what we do here. People start copying their managers, then they copy directors, and sometimes they even copy the client to cover their own butt. Not because all the communication got better. We’re just being more thorough. We’re just keeping people in the loop. It’s because self-protection got a lot stronger. People start looking for themselves.

Somewhere along the way, the goal shifted from solving the problem to proving that, ain’t my fault, right? Not to fixing the problem, but just to cover their own butt. That that’s not communication, y’all. That is survival. That is survival. Stephen Covey said one time in The Speed of Trust. He said, when trust goes down, speeds go down and cost goes up. When trust goes down, what goes up? Speed and cost. Speed and cost, those go up. No, I’m sorry. I messed up that whole quote. I’m sorry. When trust goes down, speed also goes down and cost goes up. That that’s what it is. Okay. Speed goes down, trust goes down, cost goes up. You got me? You follow? I mean I spent like 5 minutes trying to correct my quote there.

I’ve watched that happen over and over again. One missing conversation turns into 12 emails. One unclear expectation becomes three follow-up meetings. One misunderstanding creates weeks of frustration. Not because people are all bad at their job. People aren’t bad at their jobs, right? All the time. Now, some people are bad at their jobs. Let’s be real. Trust becomes really expensive in those times.

There’s a concept in social psychology called the fundamental attribution error. And I’ve talked about this before. It’s our tendency to explain other people’s behavior by their character, while explaining our own behavior by our circumstances or our intentions. When I miss a deadline, it’s because I had too much on my plate. When you miss a deadline, it’s because you’re irresponsible. When I’m short with someone, it’s because I’m under a lot of pressure right now. But when you’re short, you’re just rude.

Our brains, they naturally tell stories. And those stories become labels. That person’s rude. That person’s lazy. That person’s irresponsible. That person doesn’t care, etc. That’s why one of my favorite leadership principles is this one. People don’t need the benefit of the doubt. They need the benefit of the question. You like that? People don’t need the benefit of the doubt. They need the benefit of the question. Think about that. The benefit of the doubt assumes you have an answer. It assumes it closes the story loop that we all want to close and we don’t have to ask questions because I already know the answer, supposedly.

The benefit of the question stays curious. Instead of saying, why would they do that? Ask, huh, so help me understand what happened here. Instead of, hey man, you really dropped the ball in this one, you could ask. So, tell me what got in the way of this thing getting across the finish line. And instead of just assuming they don’t care, why don’t we ask them, please help me understand like kind of what I’m missing here? And not like, hey, I you failed. What am I missing? Am I missing something? Like, that’s going to create a little bit of defensiveness there. No, in a caring way.

uriosity. Are you really being curious? Those are the kind of questions that I want you to ask to increase accountability. Yes, those ain’t you don’t have to be a jerk to be a hold people accountable. You can be a good person and be curious and still want to raise up the idea of accountability. It improves the diagnosis because with a better diagnosis, you’re going to find better solutions. A horrible diagnosis leads to horrible treatment of the problem. Okay? Think about being sick. If you have a wrong diagnosis, a doctor, somebody else is going to issue the wrong medication. It’s not going to help you. Let’s figure out better diagnosis to create better solutions.

One of the easiest ways, really, to rebuild trust is to assume confusion before assuming incompetence. Wow. Confusion. That would mean I would have to admit that maybe I was the issue. Maybe I’ll have to admit that I wasn’t clear in my instruction. I’ll have to admit that I’ve layered on too many things and put too many things on their plate. I wish more leaders lived by that sentence. Assume confusion before assuming incompetence. I mean, a lot of people are confused by unclear expectations. Broken systems, competing priorities, or just simply people trying to do the best they can with an incomplete information that they have.

When leaders jump straight into judgment, they create fear, they create shame, they create guilt. And that doesn’t do anybody any good. It actually creates the reverse of what you want. When I shame somebody, Amy Cuddy does some research, Harvard professor, on shame and talks about the idea that when we shame somebody, they actually retreat because they’re looking for safety. Shame is a threat response. There’s a threat response to shame. And so, what they do is they retract for safety and then they disengage even more.

When we begin with curiosity, we create a learning opportunity. So, here’s an exercise I want you to use with your teams when something goes wrong in a meeting. I don’t want you to be like, okay, who’s responsible? What happened? Start with this question: What made this problem possible? Wow. What? What made this problem possible? Watch what happens.

The conversation will immediately shift from blame to systems. Because if we can get away from tagging everything on a person and a character issue and talk about systems and friction, then we move from personalities to the process, from actually defending ourselves to improving what happened. And that’s where I believe healthy cultures live.

Another thing I really encouraged with teams is to stop hiding behind your emails, y’all. Stop hiding behind your emails. Email is great for information and documentation. It’s terrible for repairing relationships. I mean, if the conversation has emotion attached to it for crying out loud, pick up the phone, walk down the hallway, jump on a video call if you’re remote. I get it.

Tone doesn’t travel well through Outlook. It doesn’t, y’all. Y’all have experiences. It doesn’t travel well through a text message, even though you put that little emoji at the end of like, you know, of a smiley emo, whatever it is, like the emoji doesn’t fix it all. Trust doesn’t translate well through email or through text message either.

This all starts with us leaders. If we gossip, our teams will gossip. If we blame, our teams will blame. If we ask better questions, our teams will what? They will ask better questions. Culture will spread through modeling long before it spreads through policy. It’ll spread through modeling. Model the behavior you want to see in your people. Don’t enforce another policy. People become what they experience in the culture. They become what they see you do.

So, here’s my challenge again for you this week, not just for your team, but for you. The next time someone frustrates you, because you know it’s going to happen, catch yourself. Before you finish the story, before you decide they’re careless or they’re difficult or they’re disengaged or they’re controlling, or. I want you to pause. I want you to replace your assumption with a question. What else could be true? Because curiosity is one of the greatest trust-building tools you will have as a leader.

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Thoughts Unlocked. This week, instead of asking, how do we fix all this communication, these communication problems, I want you to really think about how do we create curiosity?

Trust, it grows when people feel safe asking better questions. It grows when people feel safe asking better questions. They need the benefit of the question, not the benefit of the doubt.

So, until next time, stay curious, lead with questions before conclusions, and keep unlocking what’s possible.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay on Unlocked.