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weLEAD Leadership Series

Exclusive interview with

Robert Galford & Anne Seibold Drapeau

Interviewed by Greg Thomas

Robert Galford is the Managing Partner of the Center for Executive Development. He divides his time across teaching on Executive Education programs and working with senior executives at the world's leading companies on the leadership issues. He has taught on the Executive Programs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and most recently Harvard University. Robert is a three-time contributor to the Harvard Business Review, including "When an Executive Defects" (case comment-1997), "Why Can't this HR Department Get Any Respect?" (1998) and "What's He Waiting For?" (1999). Robert is the co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with David Maister and Charles Green), initially published by Free Press/Simon and Schuster in 2000, and subsequently reissued in paperback by Touchstone/Simon and Schuster in 2001. The Trusted Advisor has been on business best-seller lists since the time of its publication.

His educational background includes Liceo Segre, Turin, Italy, a BA in Economics and Italian Literature from Haverford College, an MBA from Harvard Business School and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was an Associate Editor of The Tax Lawyer. Rob lives with his family in Concord, Massachusetts.

Anne Seibold Drapeau is Chief People Officer at Digitas. She is responsible for performance management, learning and development, compensation and benefits, reward and recognition, organizational design and employee communications. Digitas is a marketing and technology professional services firm that helps Fortune 100 clients build profitable, long-term relationships with their customers. Before joining Digitas, she ran New Business Development for FTD. She also spent four years at PepsiCo in a variety of Strategy and General Management roles, including a management of a large field distribution and sales force, where her passion for team dynamics, and studying the characteristics of effective leaders really deepened. She started her career after college in Corporate Finance at JP Morgan.

She received an MBA in from the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth and holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Bucknell University. She lives in Boston with her husband Bob and new baby daughter. Annie and Bob enjoy spending weekends in Vermont skiing, hiking and playing tennis. Annie is a bit of a fitness junkie and loves classical music and pop culture.

1. In your introduction to "The Trusted Leader", you mention that in the course of writing your enriching book, a number of corporate scandals hit the news including Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, WorldCom and others. How do these recent examples reinforce the basic principles of trusted leadership discussed in the book?

Talk about timing! Two years ago, the average American would never have heard of those companies. Now when I go get my hair cut they’re talking about them.

Would trustworthy behavior have headed off these crises? Sure, if it was combined with honesty, good ethics, and a healthy fear of breaking the law. Trust is under attack all the time, but these companies looked the other way.

Some, like Enron, might have seemed like great places to work. People were lulled into a comfort zone by feel-good benefits like appreciation parties and personable executives. These are the people that feel most betrayed. They didn’t just lose their jobs and pensions, their sense of trust took a huge hit.

One of the principles of trusted leadership that we describe in the book is that the speed at which trust is destroyed is always faster than the speed at which it is built, but the process of building trust does accumulate deposits in your company's "trust bank." I think that a lot of those high-profile companies experienced their losses of trust at hyper-speed. I don’t know yet how well they’re doing at building up their “trust banks.”

2. Tell our readers about your web site, http://www.thetrustedleader.com? What kind of information and services can they find there?

We like the way our site lets us be more accessible to our readers. We’re not some remote authors hiding behind a publishing house. We want to hear from our readers, so we make it as easy as possible for them to contact us. Who knows, someone who emails us might end up in the next book!

We actively engage with our readers by allowing them to sign up for our email list on the site. We’re using material that had ended up on “the cutting room floor” to create email briefs every month or so. When readers send us examples of their experiences, we may incorporate them into our briefs as well.

It was also important that our site be more than just a promotional vehicle for the book. It had to actually engage the user, and provide an immediate benefit. We achieved this by turning our Trusted Leader self-assessment into an interactive, web-based test that gives instant results. Site visitors can answer 20 multiple-choice questions about their leadership style and get an immediate score, plus an explanation of what that score really means. It’s been the most popular item on our site, at least that’s what our statistics show. And people are completing the whole test, not bailing out after the first 10 questions.

3. In one particular chapter you discuss the "enemies of trust." What do you believe is the greatest enemy and why?

I think the greatest of the enemies are those that fall into the category of “situations not remedied or addressed,” in which trust-sensitive areas are known to everyone, and people just dance around them and don’t deal with them.

4. In your opinion, is the lack of being trustworthy a character issue? Are business schools placing enough emphasis on the importance of ethics?

It’s tempting to tie trustworthiness to character in rigorous terms, but there’s one big distinction. Someone who has caused a loss of trust shouldn’t immediately be labeled as a bad person. He may have done a bad thing, but if he is perceived as a bad person, there’s little chance of rebuilding the lost trust. It’s the same with parenting – “you’re a bad boy” and “you did a bad thing” have totally different implications.

Most business schools deal with ethics, but this doesn’t mean that they are addressing issues of organizational trust. You can be ethical and follow all the rules, but still manage in a way that doesn’t encourage people to trust you.

Business schools also need to teach people that trust isn’t just a nice thing to have when you’re done learning about formulas and scorecards. Trust affects the bottom line. Studies have shown that companies with committed employees outperform others by 200 percent. That should get every MBA student’s attention. It means we have to get people to put trust out there in very specific terms, and not just as something we take for granted or stash in a values statement.

5. Is there a linkage between effective and free-flowing communication and trust?

You’re not going to trust someone who doesn’t tell you what’s going on. Managers who leave it up to their employees’ imaginations have employees who imagine the worst. It’s human nature.

It’s amazing how easy it is, really, to foster trust. Short emails, regular meetings, employee newsletters – whatever people are used to in that organization’s culture. And it goes both ways, too. People have to feel that they can be heard, that they can express what’s on their minds. That’s why leaders like P&G’s Alan Lafley, who walk around the halls talking to people, holding open doors have employees who say they’ll walk across hot coals for them. Who’s going to be able to mobilize the troops if there’s a crisis? The guy whose employees will walk across hot coals, or the ones who are whispering over the walls of their cubicles?

6. Do you see any connection with the principles you outline in "The Trusted Leader" and Servant-Leadership as originally engendered by Robert Greenleaf?

There are some logical connections between trusted leadership and Greenleaf’s concepts of servant-leadership. As he defined it, servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment. These are all qualities one would expect to find in a trusted leader. At the same time, one can be a trusted leader and not fall strictly into the definition of servant-leader.

7. In chapter 13 you discuss the subject of rebuilding lost trust. Many consultants believe that once trust is lost it is virtually impossible to re-establish. Can you comment on this and perhaps give us an example of lost trust that was "restored"?

It certainly is a lot easier to find examples of lost trust than it is examples of trust that was restored. When a manager wants to repair trust, we recommend the REPAIR model. This stands for:

R ecognize

E xamine

P lace

A cknowledge

I dentify

R aise

R eflect

R epeat

We explain this further in the book.

Simply recognizing and acknowledging the loss of trust is a huge hurdle. Too many managers bury their heads in the sand, hoping the problems will go away. Well, they don’t. They fester and we hear about them all the time.

Managers should recognize that they may need some help, and that that’s okay. No one can be perfect at everything. They may need their own set of trusted advisors to help them navigate resistance and align their actions. Trusted leaders have to be trusting leaders.

One well-known executive who didn’t run away from a huge lost-trust mess was Lou Gerstner, who took the reins at IBM at a time when IBM had really lost its way in the marketplace, and with its employees. While he was a seasoned corporate executive, he had not grown up in the world of technology, nor in the world of IBM. Nonetheless, there was a building, or a rebuilding of trust that was really quite remarkable.

Thanks Robert & Anne for helping us to better understand the qualities of a trusted leader!

To read a weLEAD book review of The Trusted Leader, please click here!

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