Within the context of Leadership – trust means your actions are:
Predictable, dependable, & repeatable
A Picture of Trust
As I look back on my own career, the consistent complaint is that I “randomize” the team – what they are telling me here is that I am “unpredictable” and no matter how hard I try (and I do) to tell myself that constant unpredictability is really predictable, this has been a struggle and a challenge for me personally and one that I pay a lot of attention to. What works for me is to try to connect through my communications a predictable cluster of goals and methods. Caring about the same things week in week out.
If in January I stated the goal to be raising by 20pts service quality for the consumer – in March, July and September this must be my headline too. And I need to be authentic to sustain this effort. Picking service quality for the consumer would have been totally fake if it did not make my blood boil and rage when I see it drop or ignored.
There is a lot in common here with the themes on focus vs priority – and in parables of great leadership and that is: members of your constituency, your followers must be able to predict accurately your stance. You can’t hope to be everywhere and in every meeting – so you should expect and create opportunities for your leadership to become a thing others can put in their pocket and pull out when they need it – “Stanbridge would say… ” or “I was chatting to Stanbridge about blah and he believes…” . Do watch out for your own ego here – there is a real trap you get far to impressed with yourself here and I’ll write a post about how you need your circle of influence to help you ‘keep it real’
Dependable is a nuance of trust that is deeply important to you followers – when they see a broad email thread for example, they must be able to depend on you paying attention, diverting, burying or what ever action they depend on you to take. In order to achieve this you must regularly talk about what matters to you and as importantly – what does not. For example – I don’t chose to spend all day reading and replying to email, so I have to chose large swathes of email not to read or pay attention to. Most of my team know not to cc me on email if they want it acted on. Either you are having a dialogue with me or you are not.
Fanatics make surprisingly good leaders (well, not so surprising if you apply what I said above)
fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. Churchill
It is a good test to ask yourself
Do my team think I am a
- Good Leader?
- FANATICAL Leader?
if the answer is 2) then you will be able to spot that you are inspiring Missionaries and not Mercenaries (thanks to Martin Walker for that quote!)
I’m suggesting here that you can’t invest heavily enough in developing your authentic, led from within leadership. Go! start now
James Stanbridge's Blog 
Besides, the three qualities mentioned, a good leader is one who trusts others. Trust gets trust.
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Awesome point Jatinder – I totally agree with you and thanks for making this comment! It is often said that trust has to be earned, and I know what folks mean by that – however, I prefer trust to be given as the default.
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Thank you for this personal and relevant thoughts on leadership and trust. I only hesitate to believe that fanaticism is to be encouraged. Leadership depersonalizes at a certain moment: it becomes a systemic power, not egolomanic.
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Koen – perfectly valid hesitation. If you’ll allow, I think you come from a position of theoretical purity, academically I can’t argue with you. My perspective is more from a practitioners vantage where pushing for extremes gets me the results I want which is a shift beyond mediocracy. Added safety for me comes from certainty that the extreme is unlikely to be achieved.
I think it is fair for me to pose the question and to encourage self evaluation along the lines of fanaticism – but I would not want to be misunderstood as promoting that as a style for its own sake. Thanks for your intelligent and valuable feedback.
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