| When Frank Dale took over as publisher
of Los Angeles Herrald-Examiner, the organization had just ended a ten-year
strike. There was much bitterness and, as he told us. "Everybody that I found
there had lost their curiosity, they'd lost their cutting edge, there was no
interest, they just hung on...I had a real problem." His very first task was to
introduce himself to everybody, to thank them for their loyalty to that point,
and to allow them to express their concerns and frustrations. To questions like
"What makes you think you can make this thing go?" he responded, "I don't know
yet, but in thirty days I’ll come back to you and let you know what I've found."
He recruited a task force of the best people from throughout the Hearst
Corporation to do a crash study, and in thirty days he had a written report on
what needed to be done, which he shared with the staff. He had taken the
all-important first steps to establish mutual trust, without which leadership
would not have been possible. Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together. The accumulation of trust is a measure of the legitimacy of leadership. It cannot be demanded or purchased; it must be earned. Trust is the basic ingredient of all organizations, the lubrication that maintains the organization, and it is as mysterious and difficult a concept as leadership-and as important. One thing we can say for sure about trust is that if trust is to be generated, there must be predictability, the capacity to predict another's behavior. Another way of putting it is to say that organizations without trust would resemble the ambiguous nightmare of Kafka's The Castle, where nothing can be certain and nobody can be relied on or be held responsible. The ability to predict outcomes with s high probability of success generates and maintaining trust. |