8/26/2019 Authority alone won’t get leaders very far

LEADERSHIP | August 20, 2019

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Authority alone won’t get

leaders very far
There’s a difference between having followers and having subordinates, and effective leaders
need followers, whose cooperation is built on trust.

by Adam Kahane

Photograph by foto-ruhrgebiet

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8/26/2019 Authority alone won’t get leaders very far

If you’re in a position of authority — as an o cial, boss, or parent — it’s easy to

convince yourself that you’re a leader. But if the people you’re in charge of didn’t
have to do what you wanted, would they do it anyway? Real leaders have
voluntary followers. And truly voluntary followers trust their leaders.

In my professional work as a facilitator of teams made up of diverse volunteers

from various organizations, none of whom has to do what I or the others want, I
often wrestle with this leadership challenge. Much of what we do takes place
during multiday residential workshops, where most interactions — in sessions
and over meals, coffees, and drinks — are visible to all. As a result, I have a
wonderful laboratory for observing and analyzing the interplay of leadership
and trust.

In one such setting, I recently got a

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The secret to getting extend far without trust, and I
things done
by Adam Kahane
relearned what it takes to build trust
when it’s missing. I was beginning a
Create a workplace health policy project with a team of
where everyone feels
comfortable speaking First Nations leaders from the
up
by Khalil Smith, Chris Weller, province of Manitoba, in Canada. The
David Rock
meeting had just started, and I was
The seven stages of directing it as I usually do: taking
strategic leadership
by Jeffrey Schwartz, Josie charge, giving instructions, keeping
Thomson, Art Kleiner
time — relying on the authority of my
experience and expertise. As I was
making a presentation about the methodology we would be using, George
Muswaggon, a leader of Cross Lake First Nation, spoke up in a clear, calm,
matter-of-fact voice: “I don’t trust you.”

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8/26/2019 Authority alone won’t get leaders very far

I was worried by this challenge to my leadership of the project. I didn’t know

how to respond, and so I continued doggedly with my presentation. At the same
time, I appreciated where George was coming from. For centuries, in Canada
and elsewhere, indigenous people have been colonized, massacred, oppressed,
marginalized, and cheated by white people. Why, indeed, should he trust me, a
white facilitator he’d just met?

After I had nished my presentation, another participant asked George if he

trusted me yet. He replied, “No, but I trust the process.”

At that moment, I knew what to say: “I am not asking you to trust me or the
process right now. I am proposing that we start by taking a next step together,
then see how it goes and decide what to do next.” He agreed, and we went on to
the next item on the agenda. As we continued our work, I remembered advice I’d
been given 30 years earlier by Roger Fisher, author of the negotiating
bible Getting to Yes. He’d told me, “Don’t be trusting; be trustworthy.”

So I tried to earn the trust of the

“
team by shifting the way I was

No matter how powerful leading. I could see that in this

particular context I’d been
they are, when people
excessively con dent in my own
show themselves to be
expertise. So, I became less directive
untrustworthy, through and more exible. I reduced my
something they do inside front-of-the-room role and focused
or outside the team, their on supporting my First Nations
influence vanishes. facilitator colleagues, and I deferred
to them on matters of local protocol
and ceremony. I stopped making

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8/26/2019 Authority alone won’t get leaders very far

presentations and started picking up empty coffee cups.

In the months that followed, the team moved forward, with many twists and
turns, and made progress on its work. George and I got to know and like each
other, and over a meal at a later workshop, I brought up our rst meeting and
the way he’d challenged me. “The history of my people means that we cannot
dole out trust like candy,” he said. “But I observed you and prayed and decided
that you are a good person. This trust is simple and will last.”

Maybe in typical workplace settings, it’s unusual to experience such deep-

rooted wariness or, if it exists, nd anyone forthright enough to articulate it.
But the principle — that people will only freely follow leaders they trust to be
acting for the good of the people they’re leading — still applies. And such trust
depends as much on the context of the work as on the character of the leader.
The Manitoba First Nations team became more willing to follow me, but only on
certain matters and in certain domains; in other matters and domains, they
followed other people, or no one.

People will usually follow those who have the most positional authority and
concomitant control of resources, but also will follow those with other forms of
power, such as eloquence, passion, sincerity, commitment, and charisma. In
the teams I work with, people tend to pay the most attention to and be most
in uenced by those with both types of power. But sometimes people will even
choose to follow less senior individuals if they have inspiring ideas and energy.
No matter how powerful they are, though, when people show themselves to be
untrustworthy, through something they do inside or outside the team, their
in uence vanishes. Others might still pay attention to them, but now only for
transactional purposes. Those “leaders” are no longer really leading.

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8/26/2019 Authority alone won’t get leaders very far

If you want to be a real leader, one with voluntary followers, remember that you
must earn and keep your people’s trust. They will carefully assess your attitude
and actions, in particular whether you look out for others in addition to yourself.
If their assessment is that you are trustworthy, they’ll stick with you.

Topics: leaders, leadership, organizational behavior, organizations, trust

Adam Kahane is a director

of Reos Partners, an
international consultancy
that helps people move
forward on their most
intractable issues. His
most recent book is
Collaborating with the
Enemy: How to Work with
People You Don’t Agree with
or Like or Trust.

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