Introduction

Trust. No team or organization can excel over the long haul without it, and for many leaders the path to establishing it is anything but clear. Trust is the willingness to put yourself or your team at risk with the belief that another will follow through with a task, in a role, or with a mission. Expressions of trust that lack an element of risk are merely expressions.

Because you picked up this book, I will make some assumptions about you. You are a leader who cares about the performance and well-being of your people, but you sense that something—maybe gaps in trust or communication—are holding you and your team back. The good news is that you’ve taken a great step toward increasing the cohesion and performance of your team by just reading the introduction to this book. With each successive page, you will learn a bit more about a predictable, repeatable process for building trust within your team—a process that begins with an individual’s desire for commitment from you and ends with his or her trust in you. Once you have finishedthe last page, you will see the process everywhere you turn and in every facet of your life.

I will warn you right now that there are no shortcuts or quick solutions offered herein. As a matter of fact, I will ask you to take risks and move to engage your team in ways others might consider idealistic or unnecessary, but I promise you will be rewarded for your efforts.

Biases: The Barrier to Trust

Whom do you trust, and what made you cross that threshold? Whom don’t you trust, and what keeps you from believing in that person? Very often the decision comes not just from what we see but from the events and experiences stored in the processors in our heads and our hearts. Any relationship begins with an introduction, and that first impression is lasting for reasons that are often hard to understand. Consciously or unconsciously, some facet about that person matches something inside of us—something that was coded in us during adolescence or that we absorbed (or coded in ourselves) along the path of our adult lives. Call them predispositions or intuition if you’d like, but, right or wrong, biases reside in all of us.

Biases are internal layers of protection that help us resist putting our physical, emotional, or financial well-being at risk. How you dress, act, and sound fit an internal mold in another’s mind—a mold cast by a whole host of characters and events, good and bad, in their lives. Whereyou were raised and your culture, dialect, manners, and mannerisms match biases that directly or unconsciously shape how you view others—and how others view you. Biases form the barrier to trust we are up against as leaders.

Breaking the Trust Barrier

The challenging thing about biases is that you may never fully understand what they are in your own mind, much less in the minds of your people. With that as backdrop, there is little use in dwelling on the indicators, or rationales, for biases—we can leave them to people who study behavior. Our job as leaders is to overcome biases by building a portfolio of seamless actions and engagements that inspires our people to write new code—code that will incrementally entice them to close the trust gap.

We will talk a great deal about gaps in this book, but the critical thing to remember is that closing the gaps on trust relies on the whole you. It begins with your commitment to the individuals on your team—your willingness to actively engage and listen to the people you lead—and then your moving on the interests and passions you discover within those engagements to foster loyalty.

The effort you spend building commitment and loyalty will take you to the threshold, but closing beyond the trust barrier relies on pulling your team forward with your integrity and your deeply seated principles (see Breaking Through).

This book steps you through the process of closing gaps by introducing a new system of leadership called drafting. You have seen the aerodynamic phenomenon at workthrough the V formations of migratory birds, a train of speed skaters, stock car racers, and the likes, where the efficiencies and effects of teams are magnified with proximity.

Breaking Through: First Commitment, Then Loyalty, and Finally Trust

My two years on the point of the Thunderbirds offered some incredible insights on trust—and the real effects and power of drafting. It was that experience—and that incredible team—that served as my inspiration for writing this book. Through 26 years of service and two tours of combat duty, I can say without reservation that every team I flew with or served on relied on trust. But as you read through each chapter, you will discover what I did about Thunderbirds: that our mission required a level of trust that few organizations will ever know or enjoy—it really was something else.

Our process for building and sustaining trust is laid out here for you and your team. Read on, take hold of the reins, and break your barriers to trust.