The Soup is Getting Cold with Sue Dyer - Leadership Expert - Issue 8
How to be a better leader and build high trust, high-performing teams.
Sue Dyer, author and expert on leadership training. Over four decades Sue has worked with leaders to help them create high trust and high-performing teams. Her new book The Trusted Leader: Use The Partnering Approach To Become The Trusted Leader People Want To Follow launches in February. She is based in San Francisco, USA.
Why Read: Ever wondered what type of leader you are? Or could be? Or what type of leader you work for? Everybody leads at some point. Whether it’s an internal zoom meeting, a client project, sales pitch or major company of 300 people, we can all benefit from leadership tips and Sue Dyer offers a simple way to understand the fundamentals of leadership in a no-nonsense way. And in an age when leadership styles are having to change, adapting to new technologies, trends and ways of working, what we can learn from the experts is even more invaluable.
You are an expert on building trusted leadership, your new book covers the partnering approach, can you elaborate?
Well as I define it in the book, The Trusted Leader, it has two components to it.
One is about creating your intentions, where you're really creating a mindset of what it takes to become a trusted leader.
And the second part is about values; so you're creating the culture, by which I mean the norms that people operate in.
A good leader is someone who has followers and following is 100% voluntary, and people only follow you if they trust you. So, the primary job of a leader is to create a high trust environment.
If they don't do that, then they're losing in so many ways, they'll lose in momentum, they lose in wasting resources, they lose through conflict and they're not aligned, I mean there's just a myriad of ways.
How did you get to be an expert in leadership?
I've worked on this for 35 years with 4,000 different project teams in the construction industry. I liked the construction industry because you have a beginning, middle and end to a project - and you know whether you succeed or not.
I intervened on projects to help teams create a high trust culture. Now I am trying to teach leaders to do this for themselves.
I'm a builder’s son actually and spent a lot of time on building sites in my youth.
It was as a living laboratory for me for 35 years. The cool thing about construction is that you have small, medium, and large businesses. There are public and private companies. There are vendors from manufacturers, materials, technology, services, and everything you can think of is encompassed within construction - so it’s very diverse. I found I could implement what works, and what doesn't work until I got models that were very stable.
My life's mission is to share what I’ve learned with all leaders who would be interested, because I really believe that the paradigm for business has to shift, because as we go into this digital age and we're moving into the AI age, we are becoming more and more and more interdependent.
And in an interdependent relationship you can't have adversarial relationships and succeed.
Because you're interdependent – if something is not good for the other person/organisation, then it isn’t good for you. I still see most businesses operate like a zero sum game - where they have to protect themselves. You have to operate differently in this new age. And I think that starts with trusted leadership.
So where do you start when it comes to leadership training?
I have an instrument called the Trusted Leader Profile that measures where you fall along the leadership continuum from ‘feared leader’ to ‘trusted leader.’ There's actually five styles but you will also see your trust level that is a number between one and 15 as to where you are on the continuum, so that then you can work to move along the continuum.
What are the five styles?
Well, there’s a Feared Leader, The Boss and then there is the Capable Manager, and then there is the Good Leader. And then there's the Trusted Leader.
Some leaders have the mindset that they want to be feared. Or feel like that's what they need to be to succeed. You will be surprised how many believe that if “I don't instil fear they won't do what I want.”
Do you think that's a generational thing, or do you think it's something you see across all age groups?
I think it could have some generational aspects to it, but I really see that some industries are more prone to feared leadership – they have different cultures. But I also just see some of it as personality style.
You think a lot of it's built out of insecurity?
Oh, for sure. But fear and trust cannot coexist. So, wherever there's fear you are pushing out trust. What you fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The first thing you've got to do as a leader is to figure out where is the fear. Of course, that starts with yourself, and then you work to replace it with trust. You know it's one of those things that's ongoing; but fear is contagious, and just like fear, trust is contagious too.
I think we are kind of skirting around the topic authenticity, aren't we? There’s a lot of rubbish written about authentic leaders – and it’s a bit of a buzzword – but in general people that show their vulnerability or their fallible sides at times, tend to be trusted, aren’t they, rather than if you're an automated blank canvas?
Well, it's quite hard to build empathy without sharing in some way. You don't know that there's a facade, you don't know the person; that's why I always talk about transparency, being as totally transparent, good, bad or ugly, and deal with it, and then help people to help you deal with it. Transparency creates trust.
“it's quite hard to build empathy without sharing in some way”
From my own personal experience - and I was not in any way a high-ranking manager or working in a corporate hierarchical environment or anything like that - but thinking back - as soon as I started my own business, I felt more myself if that makes sense?
Yes, it makes perfect sense. I think it also shows that norms within an organisation that you might work for are very powerful. And they aren't written down, necessarily, and they aren’t a bunch of stuff on the wall you look at. It's how you operate; it's how you're told you're supposed to act and how you succeed. And people normalise to these things very quickly and they don't even realise it. And those norms determine the outcomes you're going to have. This is why I focus so much on the norms. The leader sets those norms, and then people normalise to them.
“fear and trust cannot coexist. So, wherever there's fear you are pushing out trust. What you fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
If you want to have an open, transparent relationship, then the leader must be like that – or it is not going to happen. Leaders are setting the norms, with everything they do, whether you like it or not.
What if you work in a business where the norms are maybe not the best, and you're not a leader. Is there anything you can do to influence those norms?
Absolutely. Trusted leadership is not just for people at the top, it is needed, all the way through the entire organisation or business. Everyone's going to lead a conversation, lead a meeting, lead a group, lead a project, lead an initiative; they're going to lead a negotiation. You need trusted leadership everywhere. And if everyone's working towards that, it just naturally evolves to that.
The second thing that I've learned is that sometimes if the norms that you're trying to create are not harmonious with what the overall organisational norms are, I propose creating what I call a shadow organisation.
This is where you create your own norms and you normalise that amongst your group, and then you interface with the organisation in a manner that meets their needs - but you guys then can create your own norms and achieve extraordinary results within your team.
Then when you achieve extraordinary results, other people start going, ‘what are you doing in that team?’ And then when you get enough pockets of those high trust groups, everything shifts.
And is that easier or harder to do in an age of remote work?
My feeling on remote work is that you must do more structurally to create the cohesion that's required for people to feel like they're a team. And I think it's easy not to do that.
I'm a big believer that proximity has power. So, you've got to create the semblance of what is proximity, in order to build those kinds of relationships and the rapport needed, but without cohesion, you don't have momentum.
What qualities should a good leader have in your opinion?
Well, they probably need to be somewhat competent in what they do but I think it's 80% trust. Being able to develop a trusted atmosphere with 20% competency, works. I've seen this over and over and over because the leaders that we revere, and we think are great, are the ones who have the ability to let their team create things that are extraordinary, and they come to fruition because they're committed to them; the team takes ownership of it.
Those are really the great leaders that we all remember.
Entrepreneurship is very fashionable with Gen Z. As an example, someone I know has become an entrepreneur in residence at a UK university. And when you look on social media there’s a lot about hustle culture and ‘making it’ in business. I know from experience how hard business can be, especially if you do not have experience, or a strong support network around you to help. Do you think they're setting themselves up to fail with the expectations that they're putting on themselves?
I think it depends on what you see, and what you want. Do you want to build a team, or do you want to be a solopreneur, freelancer, or an influencer?
A lot of people just want to be by themselves, not have a boss, and just have some contracts. They really are a solopreneur, and that’s not the same thing as building a team.
If you want to build a team and do that, you have to have a certain mindset for it to be highly successful. Look at it this way. If everybody's thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, you need to be trusted to attract talent to come and work with you - because maybe in previous generations people were content to join a corporation and even in a fear environment they'd stick around because they're scared of losing their jobs. If everyone has an entrepreneurial mindset, that’s just not the case. So today, they have to trust you to want to join you.
“If everybody's thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, you need to be trusted to attract talent to come and work with you.”
And that will be even more true as we become more and more interdependent. Because your interdependency defines what's possible: you can ONLY have Win Win or Lose, Lose. Nothing else is possible.
How do you think AI, automation, all of that stuff will impact decision making in the future?
AI is so interesting to me because it's such a dichotomy from what's needed when people are working together, because AI loves chaos. AI can take all of that chaos and crunch all the numbers and spit something out in a blink of an eye, whereas people, the more there's chaos, the more we get lost. I do think there's more need for true trusted leadership because of that, and there will always be people making the decisions. But you know an argument made for AI is the fact that people are fallible. But AI does not care, does not have a conscious, does not feel.
So we would be better off with a benevolent AI god, making decisions for us while we carry on with our day-to-day lives?
I think that will be something we'll all have to deal with at some point. I also think that as AI grows, the need for collaboration grows because the data doesn't exist just in one place. I've already seen that with a lot of initiatives we've helped to support , we find that this group has this data, that company has this data; we pull the data together in order to have real intelligence. Again, the more we need to share, the more interdependent we become, the greater and greater the need for collaboration – and where you need collaboration you must have trusted leadership.
The Trusted Leader: Use the Partnering Approach to Become the Leader People Want to Follow, launches on February 1, 2022. More at: sudyco.com
Thanks For Reading. See you next month.
About The Soup is Getting Cold
A monthly newsletter featuring exclusive interviews with experts in business, media, marketing and the creative industries, written and published by me, Dale Lovell, each month.
I conceived and launched this newsletter as a fun project in the depths of the UK winter lockdown 2020/21.
In less than a generation the technology we use on a daily basis has transformed our lives. Our working lives are now largely unrecognisable from what they were a generation ago.
And these changes ring ever more true for those working in the creative, publishing and marketing industries: those employed in production, advertising, marketing and media – working at the sharp edge of change, launching and grappling with innovative technology and continued, relentless disruption.
To work in these industries in the 21st century is to be disruptor and disrupted; to be constantly challenged while constantly challenging. I want to highlight that through these interviews.
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