The Power of Transparent Leadership in Building Trust

Too many leaders have fragile egos that make them think they’re the smartest person in the room. Or believe they have to be the smartest person in the room, and they’re afraid of being found out.

But if you want to build trust as a leader, it starts with admitting you’re not the smartest person in the room.

You never want to be the smartest person in the room. If you are, you’re in the wrong room.

Your objective is to find the smartest people you can, and that means they need to be smarter than you. When you’re the leader, you’re the one being judged on your results, wins, and losses. If you hire people who aren’t as smart as you, they’re not going to be as accomplished as you need them to be, and your results will be lower, your wins fewer, and your losses greater.

If you’re so threatened by people being smarter than you, then you’re going to have bigger problems.

If anything, it’s ideal that you show other people that you’re not the smartest person in the room and that you value their input.

How Leaders Can Earn Trust

You earn trust by asking for other people’s opinions or experiences. If you have an engineering question, ask your senior engineer. Ask your junior engineer. Ask the people who actually know their job better than you do for the answers to the problems you’re facing, even if they’re not directly involved with the problem.

And if you don’t find the solution within your team, ask the same advice from your vendors or even your customers. You are bound to — hopefully — have vendors and customers smarter than you.

For example, when I was in charge of Duoline, one of our large oil company customers wanted a fiberglass liner woven in a specific way. We tried it, but we found we couldn’t shift the completed liner off the mandrel — it was stuck fast, and there was no way of getting it off.

It was a customer who gave us the solution. They asked us what angle we were winding the fiberglass at, and we said, “45 degrees.”

The customer told us that the removal was based on the coefficient of expansion and extraction. He said that we could easily remove it if the mandrel would cool and shrink quicker than the liner did.

So we changed the angle of the mandrel by five degrees so they were wound at 50. Lo and behold, the liners slid right off, as quick as you please.

The funny thing is, we would have eventually found the solution, but we would likely have spent three years doing it.

The point is, we were not too proud to take advice from a mere customer. Just because someone is a customer doesn’t mean they know less than you. If anything, they’re already pretty smart because they knew to buy from you, right?

Never be afraid to take advice from anyone, and never assume you know more than everyone else. If we’d had that attitude, we’d probably still be pulling that first liner off the mandrel and wondering how we were going to complete that order.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now, I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: Tama66 (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)