Who Is This Really For?

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Who Is This Really For?

Philip Knox   |   pgkconsultancy.com

Some years ago I set out to change how a group of front-line teams worked. They sat in separate offices, kept to their own patches, and passed problems across walls instead of solving them together. I wanted the walls down. Open-plan working, hot-desking, people close enough to overhear each other’s problems and start picking them up. The point of it was service. If the people doing the work sat together, the people we served would feel the difference.

I was confident it was the right call. What I hadn’t reckoned on was a different question forming around it, quieter and more personal than whether it would improve service. Why is he really doing this? In some quarters the answer that circulated was straightforward enough. He’s doing it for himself. It’ll look good on him. This is about promotion.

It stung, because it sat so far from how I saw my own motives. I knew exactly why I was doing it. That, I have since come to understand, was the whole problem. I had privileged access to my own intentions and assumed everyone else could see them just as plainly.

There is a model that explains precisely what was happening, and I wish I had understood it twenty years earlier than I did. It comes from The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford, and it sets trust out as a piece of arithmetic:

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) ÷ Self-Orientation

Credibility is about your words and your expertise. Reliability is about whether you do what you say you will. Intimacy is about whether people feel safe around you. Those three sit above the line. Beneath them all sits self-orientation, the question people ask without ever putting it into words: who is this actually for?

This is where it caught me. I would have marked myself well on the top line. Credible enough, reliable enough, and I knew those teams well. But you do not get to mark your own paper. The denominator is calculated by other people, and self-orientation is their reading of who you are really serving. They were not weighing my competence. They were weighing my motive. And once “he is doing this for promotion” takes hold, everything good above the line is divided by it.

This is the term leaders consistently underweight, and I understand why. It is the one you cannot see in yourself. You know your own reasons, so you pour your energy into the parts you can control, into being credible and being reliable, and you assume your motive will speak for itself. It rarely does. Leadership identity lives in the heads of others. So does the verdict on your intent, assembled from everything you say, do, reward and tolerate, and handed back to you as a story about what you are in it for.

It took me the best part of twenty years to understand my own leadership, and self-orientation was the last piece to fall into place. You cannot argue your way out of a self-orientation problem. Standing up to insist your intentions are pure tends to confirm the suspicion rather than settle it. The denominator moves only through evidence, and it moves slowly. Who takes the credit when the change works. Who carries the cost when it is hard. Whether you would make the same call if it did nothing at all for your own standing. People watch for those things and draw their conclusions.

Looking back, the reform itself was sound. What I would do differently is the groundwork on motive. I would spend less breath selling the benefits and far more making the change belong to the teams rather than to me. Involve them in the design. Let it become theirs. That takes nothing from the vision. It simply answers the real question before anyone has to ask it.

If you are early in your leadership, this is the part I would press on you. You will pour most of yourself into credibility and reliability, because they are visible and they feel like progress. Give real attention to the part you cannot see. Every decision you take answers a question people rarely say aloud: who is this for? Answer it well, and consistently, and you earn the benefit of the doubt. Answer it badly and the finest strategy you will ever devise is divided down to nothing.

Trust is the sum other people are doing about your motives. Your own account of them never enters the calculation.