In my experience, a manager that can be trusted is extremely high on the list of things that every employee desires. In fact, in relationships of any kind, it seems clear that trust is central to growth and, ultimately, success in that relationship.

In the world of sales, for example, Zig Ziglar has always preached that “people buy from people they like and trust.” In their extensive research on the effectiveness of teams, authors Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto make this observation (Teams: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong, 1989):

“The absence of trust diverts the mental concentration and energy of a team away from its performance objective and onto other issues. The resulting loss of focus on the common goal is a critical factor. It wounds the team and often renders it ineffective.”

So what does it take to build trust with your team? Is it any one thing?

In an article entitled “Attributes of a Leader Who Can Be Trusted in Combat” taken from the book Leadership Lessons from West Point, the author shares the key traits that soldiers identified as building trust with their combat leaders:

A leader must be competent.

This seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Who wants to work for a boss who doesn’t have a clue? Interestingly, however, soldiers extended the idea of competence to include interpersonal skills! Soldiers judged the competence of combat leaders based on functional effectiveness and on how effectively they relate to the troops.

A leader must be loyal.

Simply put, if a soldier doesn’t think the combat leader cares as much about the soldier as himself, it creates a significant strain on the trust a soldier has for the leader. When difficult decisions must be made that put a soldier in harm’s way, he/she wants to know intuitively that the leader has their personal welfare in mind.

A leader must have integrity.

There can be no equivocation on the battlefield; the leader must have an ironclad commitment to integrity. Soldiers, however, view integrity to include a number of ideas: “The soldiers wanted their leader to behave morally and to be honest and open in discussing problems.” In other words, combat leaders aren’t judged to have integrity if they are unwilling to accept input from their troops.

A leader must share information.

Transparency in leadership is perhaps one of the most pervasive problems in the workplace. As it turns out, soldiers have the same concerns. They have “… a strong desire and need for their leaders to keep them informed about the current situation and upcoming operations.” It seems clear that no organization is immune to the need for clear and consistent communication, and employees rarely do their best work without a clear understanding of what lies around the next corner.

A leader must create a personal connection with subordinates.

In years past, managers were convinced that you couldn’t “be a boss and be a friend” so they tended to avoid the idea of creating a personal connection with employees. Years of research have destroyed this misconception about management, and soldiers in this article insisted that a personal connection is critical to creating trust for a combat leader. They wanted “…leaders who made the effort to learn about them, listen to their concerns, and understand their basic needs.”

This is great insight from an organization that relies on strong leadership – at multiple levels – to be effective. Do you have the attributes of a leader who can be trusted?

A client recently gave me a book entitled The Essential Wooden: A Lifetime of Lessons on Leaders and Leadership. I am a huge fan of John Wooden (who isn’t?) – as a coach, a teacher, a leader, and a man of character.

In this particular book, Wooden describes an experience very early in his life that had a profound impact on his ideas about leadership. As a young boy growing up in Indiana, Wooden and his father observed a young farmer whipping and cursing a team of horses to get them to pull a wagon loaded with gravel out of a gravel pit. After watching this poor farmer fail to get the team moving – as the horses stomped and frothed at the mouth, recoiling from the beating – Wooden’s father asked if he might help out.

He started by talking gently to the horses and patting their noses. He continued to whisper to them and stroke their noses softly as he took hold of their bridles and bits, and eventually he stepped out in front of the horses and gave a little whistle to get them started while he guided the reins. In short order, the horses pulled the wagon right out of the gravel pit.

“No whip, no temper tantrum, no screaming and swearing by Dad. I’ve never forgotten what I saw him do and how he did it. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of leaders act like that angry young farmer who lost control and resorted to force and intimidation. Their results were often the same, that is, no results.”

Unfortunately, it is not at all uncommon to see managers use anger, fear, and intimidation to get what they want. And they do, of course. These managers get exactly what they want – in the short term. In the long term, the damage is considerable. Morale suffers. Trust disappears. Talented employees quit. Just to name a few of the negative consequences.

A pat on the back is much more effective that kick in the backside. It’s not like this is a revelation! We all know that. The problem is that we are often too lazy to develop people’s potential. We would prefer to get the immediate result – even at the expense of losing the trust and respect of our employees.

Attitude is a subject that comes up quite frequently; sometimes it’s the manager’s attitude that is being discussed and sometimes it is an employee’s attitude that is being cussed….er, discussed. In either case, the bottom line is simple: attitude is everything.

Let’s start from the beginning. We can easily acknowledge that both employees and managers make mistakes. Sometimes they even demonstrate poor judgment. If it happens enough times, either can lose their job as a result. I would add that managers, in particular, must learn to be forthcoming about their errors, and offer up apologies when they fail in some way, or their employees won’t trust them.

However, I’m not talking about “making mistakes”, but rather how someone reacts to mistakes. How you react when you are asked about a mistake. How you act the rest of the day (and tomorrow) after you are confronted about a mistake. When discussing attitude, it really doesn’t matter if we’re talking about you, the manager, or one of your employees. If your attitude is sour, or you frequently become negative, surly, pessimistic, or otherwise hard to get along with on the job, you have got to go. Whether manager or employee, it doesn’t matter – you either change, or you’ve got to go, for the sake of the team.

In the fall of 2006, Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie spoke about his experiences with the notoriously temperamental Terrell Owens, whom he had dismissed from the team:

“I would not do it again,” Lurie said Wednesday in his annual state-of-the-team address. “You look back on it – one year great, the second year a disaster. Nobody should be able to be as disruptive and really cut the energy of the team down.”

“I think we all learned from that.”

During his first year in Philadelphia, Owens helped the Eagles reach their first Super Bowl since the 1980 season. But he was a major disruption throughout last season. The Eagles endured a dismal, injury-plagued 6-10 season, and Owens’ tenure in Philadelphia ended bitterly.

He signed on with the Dallas Cowboys, one of the Eagles’ main rivals in the NFC East.

“If you don’t have the chemistry, the talent and the help, with high-character people, you’re not going to survive those downturns in the middle of the season,” Lurie said.

A great player. A disaster for the team. Without question, even a great employee can be a significant disruption to the company if he or she has a bad attitude. It is not uncommon to find employees with loads of talent that create incredible turmoil within an organization with their negativity and self-centered behavior.

• They blame others instead of accepting responsibility.

• They sulk and complain.
• They make other employees “walk on eggshells”, who, in turn, try desperately to lighten the mood.
• They criticize everyone – customers, managers, employees, vendors.
• They don’t apologize for failure – there is always a “reason” why they failed, and it wasn’t their fault.

The old adage says, “One rotten apple will spoil the whole barrel.” You better believe it. I don’t care how good the employee is, if they make everyone else miserable, you will eventually pay a huge price for keeping them on board. Unfortunately, many managers are unwilling to confront “problem” employees and, as a result, the whole team (company, department, etc.) suffers.

Wise up. Learn from Jeff Lurie’s experience and make character a critical and necessary requirement for working on your team. If you allow an employee with a bad attitude to stay on your team, it sends a message loud and clear to the rest of your employees.

I’m not sure you will like what it says.

The term “Drive-by Manager” is one that I have applied to the manager who routinely leaves the scene of an accident – one created by the manager.

“Hit and run” applied to the workplace.

The stories I have heard about “bad bosses” would be amusing if they weren’t so damaging to the people affected. It is sometimes difficult for me to believe that managers actually treat their employees the way they do.

A friend was telling me about his wife’s experience with a prototype Drive-by Manager. After working for several years for a great manager, she found herself with a different boss because the great manager was promoted. The change in management style was dramatic, and over the course of time was extremely damaging – to her AND to the company because she quit.

Another Drive-by Casualty. This is the typical scenario that repeats itself over and over in the workplace: employees join companies, but they quit managers.

This particular Drive-by Manager specialized in criticism. Hyper-criticism, actually. You know the type – employees never do anything right, and on the rare occasions they do, there is usually little, if any, acknowledgment of their work. An additional symptom that often accompanies the the hyper-critical manager is a lack of self-awareness. These managers are always blaming someone else (usually employees); it is always someone else’s fault.

When my friend’s wife announced her resignation to the Drive-by Manager, he eventually told some of the other employees that the reason this tenured and highly productive employee quit was because she disliked another employee in the office.

Uh huh.

At least two lessons here: 1) Self-awareness is a critical component to effective management and leadership. What are your weaknesses? If you tend towards criticism and offering little encouragement or recognition, you need to have the courage to address your shortcomings in these areas if you REALLY want to be a better manager. 2) Most employees will never confront the hyper-critical boss. There are a lot of reasons for this – including the fear of further criticism – but most employees will simply start to disengage and look for employment elsewhere. Such was the case with my friend’s wife; she simply announced her resignation and did not offer the real reason for leaving. If you have an employee leave unexpectedly, look very closely in the mirror.

Are you the Drive-by Manager that created the accident?

It seems that character matters in the workplace seem to show up in the negative, not the positive. In other words, character is rarely addressed until something bad in the workplace happens to prompt the conversation.

For example, following Enron and WorldCom, ethics and the public trust became the central issue of the day. New regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley had to be formulated to control this vile behavior. Those authors and consultants who had been on the “character” bandwagon for quite some time – John Di Frances, for instance (Reclaiming the Ethical High Ground: Developing Organizations of Character) – were suddenly thrust front and center into the consciousness of the workplace.

Yes, it seems that character matters after all.

When large corporations violate the trust of shareholders, it casts a pall over all business, and it is usually extremely expensive. Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom (see Marshall Ramsey’s cartoon above and check out his Blog) cost investors $175 billion in the most expensive accounting scam in the history of the universe. Let that number sink in a little. That is $580 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. In fact, if you met 1,000 different people every day and collected $580 from each one, it would take you over 14 1/2 years to reach every person in the country.

The impact of WorldCom (and Enron, and others) was extraordinary. Many, many people watched their financial futures disappear into thin air. Despite the magnitude of this character breach, a more compelling question may be what is the impact of “character”, exactly, on the small businessperson or the average manager?

Let’s talk about one area in particular as it relates to managers – employee turnover. It is fairly easy to calculate the financial impact of employee turnover on the company. A typical estimate of the cost of turnover is 100% of annual salary. For a company with 100 employees and 15% turnover, this cost would be $309,000 annually if the average pay was only $10.00 per hour. If you are losing employees due to the impact of a manager whose actions a lacking in character, that is a direct hit to the company that could likely be avoided.

But what is meant by “character”? Character embodies a number of personal traits, but for a manager it certainly would include things like integrity, fairness, consistency, doing what you say you will do (which extends to truthfulness, responsibility, and dependability), and self-control. Each of these character traits will have a direct impact on an employee and ultimately lead to trust and engagement, or a lack of trust and disengagement.

According to the Gallup Organization research, 71% of employees are either disengaged or actively disengaged. In practical terms, that means 7-out-of-10 employees could not care less about your company’s objectives and, worse, according to Gallup 5 of those 7 employees are actively undermining your company in some way.

It sure would be a shame if your disgruntled employees were leaving your company to work for your competitor – particularly if a manager with a lack of character was the culprit.