Leaders: Breaking The Bonds of Trust

Avoid These Mistakes To Maintain Leadership Trust 

Every leader makes mistakes. Great leaders readily acknowledge their errors and mistakes. And not just to themselves! They own up and admit slip ups, blunders, incorrect decisions, miscalculations, and poor leadership behavior to their colleagues, peers, and direct reports. Average leaders tend to ignore, brush over, or cover up their occasional mistakes, often in the hopes that nobody has noticed. Believe me, they have!

Here are the types of mistakes that leaders make that break the bonds of trust:

• Showing favoritism to one or more team members.
• Withholding information on purpose to keep others, particularly peers, out of the loop or misinformed.
• Showing up unannounced at a meeting being led by a direct report.
• Taking credit for the work of your team without sharing the credit.
• Giving feedback in anger.
• Gossiping or spreading knowingly false stories about colleagues.
• Demanding someone do something simply because you’re the boss.
• Not recognizing efforts of team members and considering extra efforts to merely be “part of the job requirement.”
• Frequently missing or being late to meetings with team members simply because you’re the (very busy) boss, thus not respecting their time, their workloads, and their commitments to others.
• Not keeping promises and commitments.
• Making vague, general promises and commitments that you know team members perceive as more rock solid, especially when it concerns their career advancement opportunities.

All of these are easy mistakes to make in the hustle and bustle of the day. But while they may seem like minor infractions, each is a trust buster; especially when they become frequent leadership behaviors.

Great leadership is a mixture of vulnerability, humility, self-confidence, forgiveness, ethical judgment, and a personal code upon which to based leadership behaviors and actions.

It takes all this, and more, to consistently hold yourself and others accountable for all leadership behaviors, actions, and decisions.

This article is excerpted from my book Great Leadership Words of Wisdom, which is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats and has over 1000 quotes on leadership from global business leaders, statesmen, athletes, coaches, sages, and philosophers.