Yvon Chouinard greets employees by name, and they light up when they see him, wrote Fortune magazine back in 2007. But the laid back ambience is misleading. Competition to be here is stiff; Patagonia receives more than 900 applications for every job opening. The people who get hired are anything but slackers, and Chouinard is an unrepentant perfectionist. “He has an easygoing persona, and he’s a California guy,” says Casey Sheahan, Patagonia’s 51-year-old CEO. (He got the job in March 2006.) “But he does demand excellence. People in this company would run through walls for him.”
A few years ago, the feedback on one of my clients came back something along the lines of… you don’t build followership. You miss the mark on getting people behind you. You don’t have anyone who would run through a brick wall for you. People don’t dislike working for you, because you’re not a jerk. But there’s no loyalty or commitment. There’s no desire to deliver for you. There’s more of, “Okay, I’ll come in and do my job. If—at the end of the day—someone else came in, I probably wouldn’t miss you a whole lot.”
Be honest. Does any of this sound familiar? If so, what can you do differently, to better motivate others and build loyalty?
Obviously, this is a broad challenge not easily resolved in a short article, but there is this fundamental observation I’d like to share:
Trust is everything
People run through walls for leaders they trust; absent such trust, they will not. In their book, The Trusted Advisor, David Maister, Charles M. Green and Rob Galford put forth this equation that summarizes how you build trust.
The authors suggest that leaders who engender trust establish repeated experiences of links between promises and action, or the repeated experience of expectations fulfilled. In other words, if you tell your sales VP, “Bring in that huge account and I’ll double your bonus this year,” you need to double his or her bonus when that happens.
Much of this equation is self-evident, but I would like to highlight a few points.
Intimacy comes from at least two things. First, you have to “see” other people as fully formed human beings, who have dreams, fears, beliefs and complicated lives; you have to be able to notice when something shifts in another person, and to acknowledge that shift. Second, you have to be genuine and vulnerable enough to be seen by others as a real person, to whom others can relate. If you are “always right” or “always 100% logical,” you won’t be seen that way.
Genuine people have flaws, need help from time to time, and are grateful for that help.
In addition, Self-Orientation is a potential trap. In this equation, the higher your focus on what you need, the less trust you will build. Teams run through walls for leaders who will run through walls for them. Stand up for your team. Empower them. Acknowledge their successes. See their potential, sometimes even more clearly than they do.
Think of it this way: the higher the risk I take for you as my leader, the more important it is for me to fully trust you; that you will have my back if something does not go as planned. No excuses for bad judgment or poor effort, but if you want your team to give it everything they have, you have to be ready to provide air cover or spend some of your political capital when it feels hardest to do so. Those are the leaders that build the kind of loyalty that is so rare these days.