I love this: “All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense and true and false and meaningless in some sense.” I mean, I actually read this twice! It was written by Malaclypse the Younger, the pen name for Gregory Hill, co-author of Principia Discordia, the absurdist cult classic, published in 1965. I found a basic message if you can cut through the hyperbole, of who and how do you “trust”? Do we get the entire story? Do we get the whole truth or are we just getting bits and pieces? Does the label tell the whole story? Do we “green” the truth? When we talk about electric cars, one of our latest environmental hypes, do we consider how and where the electricity to power the car is generated? By what kind of energy? Isn’t the whole truth not just the electric car but the source of energy that powers the car?

Isn’t this what Lester Brown is talking about, the entire truth of the “total” costs of smoking, not just the cost of the cigarette but the cost of the health care associated with an illness caused by the cigarette? Isn’t that the whole truth? His point is that the “real” cost of the cigarette should include the cost of health care that will occur when the smoker gets lung cancer. Perhaps the cigarette manufacturer gets 25% of the revenue of the sale but the balance, 75%, goes into health care. I’m drifting, I know, but my point is the need for truth, not falsehood and meaningless statements. The cynic in me struggles at times to sort through it all. I find it very difficult to replace cynicism with humanism and compassion, which I have always believed are innate characteristics for leadership. You can’t teach this although we try.

I know there are great leaders out there, but how many? And, I honestly don’t think you can study to be a leader. I think you either have it or you don’t. For sure you can improve, but deep down you either have that fire in the belly or you don’t. Integrity and trust are implicit in good leadership. This has nothing to do with management or management style. One immediately senses that leaders engage their workforce with integrity and it is really what differentiates the successful company from the others.

William Deresiewicz gave a lecture to the plebe class of the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009. His title was “Solitude and Leadership: If  You Want Others to Follow, Learn to Be Alone with Your Thoughts.” Here are a few excerpts:

“We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means,” said Deresiewicz. “I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University.  These (top academic) institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite … we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.
“See, things have changed since I went to college in the ‘80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve.  Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, ‘excellent sheep.’

“That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to. You can decide to be a different kind of leader. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army – a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.”

What we don’t have are thinkers, folks who understand the nonsense of true, false and meaningless; who seek the real message, regardless where it leads. Back to the question of “who do you trust?” 

I looked up the definition of trust. There are 11 direct definitions of the noun, trust. The three for this purpose that I found appropriate were:

Reliance on the integrity, justice, etc., of a person or on some quality or attribute of a thing; Confident expectation of something; Belief that someone or something is good and honest and effective.

Today, I think we have a “trust gap.” Dave Johnson, editor of Industrial Safety and Hygiene News, suggests you take a very simple yes/no test to illustrate this. Do you trust: OSHA? Wikipedia? Injury and illness records? Behavioral observation cards? The media? Congress? Bloggers? Your next flight not being cancelled or delayed? Your job security? Corporate sustainability reports? Athletes not on performance-enhancing drugs? Wall Street money-makers? President Obama and his advisors? Third-party audits of voluntary health and safety management systems? Contractors and sub-contractors in a global supply chain? Photographs that haven’t been “Photoshopped”? And so on . . .

Dave’s point: the trust gap is particularly bedeviling for purposes of workplace safety and health. My point, adhering to the dictionary definition, is that good relationships are built on trust. If you trust your manager or CEO or owner, the characteristic permeates throughout the organization, from production to health and safety, to IT, even to temporary employees. If you don’t have trust, and the trust gap is deep and broad, you will have increased absenteeism, high turnover, shrinkage, accidents, quality issues and, in general, employee disengagement.  There’s no question that trust is critical.

So, why does the trust gap exist? Trust has become time and distance. Time, because everything moves so quickly these days. No one has enough time, as if we’re not already virtual, 24/7. And distance, because our communication today limits one-on-one and face-to-face. We have more global multinationals where we use teleconferencing and videoconferencing instead of the good old fashioned conference room meeting. The trust gap is here and it is only the exceptional leader who can cut through the hyperbole and get his message to his people, whether they be on the front lines or on the shop floor.

I liken all of this – trust, leadership, thinking – to a wonderful column Sydney J. Harris wrote years ago titled, “Scoreboard for a
Winner.” Let me close with several:

A winner says, “let’s find out”; a loser says “nobody knows.”

When a winner makes a mistake, he says, “I was wrong”; when a loser makes a mistake he says, “It wasn’t my fault.”

A winner makes commitments; a loser makes promises.

And one of my favorites: A winner listens; a loser just waits until it’s his turn to talk. 

A winner would rather be admired than liked. A loser would rather be liked than admired.

I’ve written about truth and trust, leadership and thinkers, and workplace engagement and safety. The glue that binds them together, I think, is truth, truth in all aspects of our lives. If you want to build trust, make a commitment to slow down and close distances. Instead of sending emails and text messages, get out and walk around. Ask questions and listen. You’d be surprised how quickly you’ll develop trust within the workplace.  Another Letter from the Earth.