By Maryann Kerr
An excerpt from Tarnished: Let’s rethink, reimagine and cocreate a new social impact sector.
In every workplace, there is an effort underway by leaders to earn the trust of stakeholders. Trust is the foundation of relationships, and relationships are everything. But what comes first? In his book, Learning in Relationship, Ronald R. Short suggests “we need to risk before we can trust — not the other way around.” Patrick Lencioni calls this vulnerability-based trust. It is a fundamental shift from the way in which we’ve been conditioned to believe that trust is something we earn. Instead, it is something we lose.
When we take the risk of being imperfect, not having all the answers and admitting to our mistakes, we open the door to building trust. We make space for others to ask for help, seek guidance and do their best work. And we open the door to abuse. When we take the risk to be vulnerable, it can come at a significant price, particularly if you are in a workplace where your social capital or positional leadership does not protect you. Like leadership itself, many books are available on the topic of trust, which is deeply rooted in how we were raised, cultural differences, relationships with family and friends, and the impact trust has played in our early lives at home, school and work.
Our personal unique relationship to the concept of trust creates a tendency towards or away from it. This is why it is critically important as leaders to do the internal work that allows us to be self-aware and identify when trust is helping or hindering our relationships.
To start from a place of trust is a human characteristic shared by most. Sadly, our desire to believe the best of others does not always serve us well. As Malcolm Gladwell says in Talking to Strangers, “To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative — to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception — is worse.”
Making the team feel like a crew
Trust is indeed at the very core of our relationships and many of our organizational operating models. Michael Prosserman in his book Building Unity, Leading a Nonprofit from Spark to Succession, describes the culture that was nurtured throughout the organization, “When people asked me why our culture was so strong, I pointed to our unflinching almost dangerous, levels of trust: Trust that put staff and artists in the driver’s seat. Trust that gave people the space to fail. Trust that made the team feel like a crew.”
In their article on achieving racial equity at work in Forbes Women, Julia Coffman and Maria Gordian write, “Let’s look at the basics that we all need to thrive at work: belonging, support, and trust. We stay at companies in which we feel we belong and where we can be our authentic selves.” This has certainly been true in my own career.
As the new Executive Director for a health promotion organization, I found myself on my third day on a call with our National Executive Director. He called to influence the vote my President would take at a conference in a few weeks and suggested that if I could get the Board President to vote in a particular way, he would ensure funding would be made available for a position he knew we wanted to hire. I was flabbergasted. Is this how business was done here? I told the caller that I had no real grasp on the issue at hand and did not appreciate that he thought my Board President’s vote was “for sale.”
When “benefit of the doubt” is your default position
It was the beginning of a rocky relationship with a key stakeholder in the organization. Despite my best efforts and a strong belief in the “benefit of the doubt” principle, I was never fully able to trust his intentions. The benefit of the doubt principle is my default position: always give the other person the benefit of the doubt even if at first they don’t appear to deserve it. After the third strike with this tenured leader, who had been with the organization more than 20 years, I finally stopped, and it was a rocky relationship until the day, two years later, that I resigned.
In another role, within the first week as the Chief Philanthropy Officer at an educational institution, the most senior member of my team told me not to trust my supervisor. It took a year to realize he was right, but I still chose to base my relationship with the supervisor on our interactions and make my own decisions. It turned out that this supervisor was indeed a bully and a narcissist who used grand gestures, charm and outright lies to get their way, with traumatic results for me and my family.
I believe you deserve to be trusted, until you don’t. Had I listened to my associate and been more politically astute, I might have understood that he was trying to help, not hinder. Unfortunately, the organization was filled with people who worked in fear of being fired, others who upheld shoddy systems because they and their families personally benefitted, and “losers” like me, who try to call it as they see it, in this case, calling out my boss for being a bully.
Listen carefully to where power is held, used and misused
The most difficult workplace relationships I’ve encountered, those that caused me and the organizations I worked for the most harm, happened because I chose to believe in the inherent goodness of others. There are, of course, unintended consequences; when I trusted and should not have, others were harmed — my family, staff teams, and donors with whom I’d developed relationships on behalf of the organization. As a leader, we need to find a balance between our natural tendency to trust and the workplace challenges we face. We can avoid becoming part of a toxic system if we listen carefully to the political landscape and understand where power is held, used and misused.
Guest contributions represent the personal opinions and insights of the authors and may not reflect the views or opinions of Foundation Magazine.
Maryann Kerr is Chief Happiness Officer, CEO and principal consultant with the Medalist Group. Maryann is a governance, leadership and culture specialist, has worked in the social profit sector for 34 years and helped raise over $110M. She is an associate consultant with Global Philanthropic Canada. Maryann is a sector leader with a passion for her social justice, feminism, and continuous learning.
Maryann’s first book was published by Civil Sector Press in 2021: Tarnished: Let’s rethink, reimagine and co-create a new social impact sector. Maryann earned her CFRE in 1997 and her master’s in organizational leadership in 2016. She is currently exploring opportunities for a Ph.D. or perhaps a second book.
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