Making the Tough Decisions – Part 5, Trust, the Fuel needed to Succeed

When leaders make tough decisions the chances of their success goes up proportionately to the amount of trust they’ve established by those effected by their decisions.  Think about it this way – if, as we talked about in Part 3 & 4, courage is the ignition that starts the process of making tough decisions, trust then is the fuel that brings those tough decisions to a positive conclusion.   We need trust to assure tough decisions do not fall apart, so they move as fast as tough decisions need to, and because in almost every decision we need the support and help of others to make our tough decisions become reality.

So how to you build the kind of trust needed to make tough decisions? First, as discussed in Part 4, we need to have a track record of making decisions consistent with our personal and organizational core values and beliefs (which also requires people knowing what these are).  When we have this track record people know what to expect from us when difficult situations arise.  This happens because core values and beliefs help us become consistent and predictable in our behaviors and in our decisions.  And when we’re consistent and predictable people are never surprised at the tough calls we make.  Ironically, from my experience, many times people have anticipated my tough decisions long before I’ve made them and have even wondered – what took Perry so long?  This kind of consistency and predictability builds enormous trust even when your decision isn’t popular.

Second, we build trust through transparency, honesty and forthrightness in all our decisions, whether tough ones or not.  When people believe a leader is disclosing as much information as possible in a timely fashion with no secrets being tucked away,  trust goes up even when decisions are hard.  And once again, if we have a track record of transparency, just like a track record of decisions made on values and beliefs, then people will go along with us even if they don’t like or agree with the decision.  In Part 6 we’ll tackle the sticky situation when the law and ethics require us to withhold information from others we used in our decision-making process.

Finally one last benefit to having pocket full of trust stored up –  is it provides a leader with some margin (which we almost always need when making hard decisions) if the decision we’ve made wasn’t 100% the right one or we made and implemented it in a less than perfect way.