The 4 Most Important Truth-Seeking Processes
“True leadership lies in guiding others to success.” - Bill Owens
What are your thoughts on truth and trust in leadership?
In their book titled The Real-Life MBA, Suzy and Jack Welch boil leadership down to its two essential components—truth and trust.
Based on years of leadership experience, they worked out an organizing principle we can all benefit from using.
It’s called “truth and trust leadership”.
What is truth and trust leadership?
“Truth-and-trust leadership … is an overarching approach – an organizing principle – that drives everything leaders do every day, whether they are in staff meetings, performance evaluations, strategy sessions or budget reviews, or everything else in between."
In order to be a leader, you have to seek truth.
You also have to trust others, and have others seek that trust in you.
Seeking truth in leadership means being open and honest. True leaders never settle for suppositions or unsupported claims. They consistently seek truth in certain key processes.
The 4 Most Important Truth-Seeking Processes
- Strategy process.
Great leaders understand the importance of strategy and how to improve themselves and their business.
They deep-dive into information about their competitors, their market share, and their strengths and weaknesses.
This depth of truth-seeking is as important for non-profit organizations as it is with for-profit businesses.
It’s all about understanding the truth about your organization’s place within the market. Once you capture this truth, you can conduct an honest assessment of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses.
You can look at the real threats you may be facing already, or threats your organization could encounter soon.
Using the truth-seeking process to develop strategy lets you find what Jack and Suzy Welch call your “big, wow-worthy, winning move to change or dominate” your space in the marketplace.
Doing this requires an honest and hard look at your business. This process is all about understanding the truth about where your organization is headed, how much improvement it needs, and the potential threats it could face.
- Performance assessment process.
One of the best ways to gain momentum in an organization is to have an open and honest conversation. This leads to widespread improvement (to learn more about how to gain momentum in an organization, check out this blog post).
People will appreciate being told where they stand and what they can do to improve. A direct review of performance leads to direct results.
That’s because the truth is empowering.
- Budget process.
A lot can be achieved by removing personal agendas from annual budgeting. An open and honest approach achieves better results.
- Communication process.
How you communicate affects everything you do in your organization.
This is why it is crucial to communicate with honesty.
If all of your communications are deeply truthful, you will be recognized as an inspiring leader. This includes making sure that your people know and understand the purpose of your business or organization, and their role in it.
And how does that happen?
It happens by constantly sharing your organization’s vision, purpose, and mission.
Read this blog post for more tips on how to share your vision with your organization.
Show that you care about your people and their work.
Truth and trust leadership is all about showing the people in your organization that you care about them and their work. Here’s how to do that.
- Openly demonstrate excitement about your people and how well your team is doing.
- Make sure that your actions back up your words.
- Build a healthy work culture based on values that promote integrity.
- Be an effective and active listener.
- Love your employees even as they leave the organization.
Trust isn’t something that you achieve once and forget about.
It must be consistently nurtured all of the time. In order to be an effective leader, you need to build and maintain trust and credibility through your words and actions. Here’s how:
- Be consistently authentic.
- Support your people even when they are down.
- Give and celebrate credit where and when it is due. As Coach John Wooden says, “Give all credit away.”
Remember: leadership is an endurance sport. Success happens one day at a time. There is no quick fix—you have to be consistent and learn how to sustain yourself and your organization over years of growth and effort.
Call to action.
To really hone in on your effectiveness as a leader, and to see how truth and trust impact your organization, set time aside this week to:
- Assess how well your organization consistently seeks truth through:
- Its strategic process
- Its performance assessment process
- Its budget process
- Its communication process
- Identify one strategy by which your organization, under your leadership, can enhance its pursuit of trust.
“Leadership should be seen as something we do with other people. Leadership must always be viewed as a relationship between the leader and the led.” - Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
The best is yet to come. It starts with you.
Your friends,
The UpCloseTeam
Want to learn more? Check out our most popular blogs below! And don’t forget to sign up for our weekly blog!
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This article was originally published on April 19, 2017 and has been updated.
