Transformational Leadership and Trust

The shelter environment is a difficult place to retain talent. While there are many things that you can do to entice talent to stay, even if you employ those strategies, you can’t retain talent if that talent doesn’t trust the leaders in their direct reporting structure.

I’ll illustrate this concept with a personal example. I left a high-paying job only a few months before I was to be awarded a six-week paid sabbatical. That job had excellent benefits, a large annual bonus, a lot of great relationships, I was valued by senior leadership, and I found out later that I was on a list of talent targeted for an extra retention bonus. This seems like all the right retention strategies are in place, right? So why did I leave?

My direct manager took credit for my work. My trust in him was broken deeply and profoundly in the span of one, one-hour meeting. Once that trust was broken, I decided to leave. I applied for and was quickly hired into, a great job where I led a leadership development program for emerging leaders in education.

How do you avoid this mistake to build and maintain trust with people on your team? For this, I lean on leadership literature and specifically the concept of transformational leadership initially conceptualized by MacGregor in 1978 in his book chapter in Leading Organizations: Perspectives for a New Era (Hickman, 1998).  Transformational leadership is one of the most well-researched concepts in the organizational leadership literature, and leaders who embody the behaviors related to this framework are often the most successful (Braun, Peus, Weisweiler, & Frey, 2013).  One aspect of that framework is trust. Trust is made up of three factors: ability, benevolence, and integrity (Mayer, et al, 1995).

Crediting your team with their contributions gets to the heart of trust by demonstrating benevolence and integrity – two of the cornerstones of trust.

What can that sound like? Here are some things that I have recently said when folks have complimented our aspects of the SPA program, “Thank you, this is really due to the work of my entire team, specifically due to Yona, Selena, and Brandy’s leadership and dedication to helping everyone learn and grow”; “Yes, I love that too. Thank you. It was initially Yona’s idea that we built on as a team.”

Seems simple, but it does take careful thought and consideration. You can build on others ideas, but don’t claim them as your own (link to eddie’s talk on plagiarism: https://www.shelterdogplay.org/life-drfernandez). Try it, and see how your team responds.

References:

Hickman, G. R. (Ed.). (1998). Leading organizations: Perspectives for a new era. Sage Publications, Inc.

Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20, 709–734, http:

//dx.doi.org/10.2307/258792.

Braun, S., Peus, C., Weisweiler, S., & Frey, D. (2013). Transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and team performance: A multilevel mediation model of trust. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(1), 270-283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.11.006.