Brave Conversations

By Shay Wright

Co-founder of Te Whare Hukahuka

Trust. It’s one of those values that you can’t put a price on. Yet ironically enough, when it comes to business, trust is the ultimate currency.

So how do we make sure that trust is at the core of our company values so that we may reap a better harvest?

Through working with more than 600 indigenous Māori business leaders in New Zealand and 90 enterprises, we have seen first-hand the widespread and cataclysmic consequences of lack of trust in an organisational setting. Lack of trust between leaders, lack of trust in the strategy, of staff, of the Government, of local Councils, of business partners.

Our organisation, Te Whare Hukahuka, exists to help indigenous leaders grow world-class enterprises. Where do you start with a mission like that? We started by engaging with Māori leaders (our target market) to find out what they perceived as their toughest and most widely faced challenges that held them back from achieving their goals. And the greatest challenge that stood out amongst everything else – politics.

Politics, or as I like to call it, ‘nobody trusts anyone around here’ is the symptom of deep mistrust hiding in dark places within organisations, communities and people. It is a can of worms that nobody wants to open. It is the consequence of sweeping issues under the proverbial carpet. Politics occurs when there is a lack of trust, transparency and effective communication.

Far too many times we have seen a lack of trust lead to leadership coups, inability to forge agreement on priorities, dogfights in the board room, losing of million dollar Government contracts, a lack of traction, and staff abandoning a sinking ship or taking personal grievance claims.

The consequences of lack of trust can be crippling.

And yet conversely, Māori organisations that have a culture of trust and practice positive values can create positive ripple effects. Staff buy into it. Partners lean in closer. Community members feel reassured. High trust leadership teams have an auto-correcting behavioural mechanism – quickly and plainly exposing those that are taking actions which erode trust. If trust is a woven mat, each individual makes up the threads – and the strength of the final product rests upon the interlacing of each thread.

Considering how fundamental trust can be to the success of an organisation, and how drastic the consequences can be if no culture of trust exists, the question really becomes “how do you engender a culture of trust in our organisation?”

We need to look at organisational culture change to ensure that trust becomes a core building block and foundational value of an organisation. Culture change does not happen through a couple of discussions or a team retreat. Cultural change requires leadership. It requires discipline. It requires accountability. It takes genuine commitment from the top and consistent effort from all.

In helping grow world-class indigenous organisations, we have seen first-hand how to restore trust in organisations that were previously dogged with politics.

If we consider the approach that seems to have the greatest multiplier effect, it is instituting ‘brave conversations’ – a concept whereby people who feel aggrieved by the actions of another, or who see, feel or sense that an issue exists (whether it be real or perceived, intended or accidental) ask themselves a series of questions to get clear on what the issue is, and then follow a disciplined process to address it with the others involved.

Brave conversations is something that we can apply in our daily lives and in almost any context.

Questions to identify the issue include:

• How did this issue actually make me feel?
• Am I ready to bring this issue up with the person?
• Do I have a solution for how they could address it?

Once there is clarity around what the issue is, the person should approach the person who created the issue and ask to have a brave conversation with them. The key is to start off with praise or commendation, and then focus on the issue (not the agent), with a clear goal to reach a resolution.

Ways that a brave conversation can be initiated include:

“I really like that you have done Y / taken an interest in Y… AND I noticed that…”

• X issue happened and how this made me feel was…
• X issue happened, and the assumption that I have is that… I just want to clarify whether this is the case?
• X issue happened, and what that communicated to me was…
• X issue happened, and what can we do so that we aren’t in this position again?

These framings for having brave conversations may seem simple, but their power should not be underestimated. When we have an organisational culture where we feel that we can address our issues openly, catch it early before it builds up a charge or emotion, and resolve it through an open discussion with a positive outcome in mind, we reduce the level of personal conflict and increase the level of trust in our teams and ultimately in an organisation.

And not only does this process address the specific issues that erode trust – over time it also helps people to move into a space of greater self-awareness – as both the protagonist of a brave conversation, and as the receiver. Organisational transformation does not happen without individuals transforming themselves and evolving into a higher level of awareness. Brave conversations in that regard are a means by which this higher level of awareness can form.

At Te Whare Hukahuka, we believe in trust so much that our governance and leadership programme focuses 20% of the content around teaching brave communications and other ways to ensure a high trust environment is embedded in the roots of the organisations that we work with. Time and time again we have seen this lead to a focus on shared ‘vision and values’ over ‘past and politics’, and the concept of “We go” over “Ego”. In a world where trust is low, having a trusted organisation and a high-trust work culture means you’ll have a bank full of the ultimate currency – in good times and bad.

NOTES

Recently I read that integrity does not depend on your morals or ethics. Integrity is whether you honour your word or not. Plain and simple. And it turns out that whether you honour your word or not is a huge part of trust. Leaders that we hold a lot of trust in often regard integrity as a necessary standing condition rather than as a virtue. They believe it must exist regardless, rather than something that would be a nice quality for them to have.

Michael C Jensen, an American economist at the Harvard Business School, working in the area of financial economics, mentioned, “For many people, virtue is valued only to the degree that it engenders the admiration of others, and as such it is easily sacrificed especially when it would not be noticed or can be rationalized. Sacrificing integrity as a virtue seems no different than sacrificing courteousness, or new sinks in the men’s room.”

We engender integrity when we honour our word, even if we fail to keep our word. We can distinguish the two – honouring our word is finding a way to ensure the outcome that we signed up to is achieved, while failing to keep our word means that the outcome we signed up to never materialises.

But a word of caution. Trust begins with us. Integrity and holding trust is based on habits, and it starts with the daily promises that we keep with ourselves. If we tell ourselves that we will go to the gym, and then we don’t, or that we will send that important email, and then we don’t; we begin to erode our own personal sense of integrity and the trust in ourselves, and this forms a bad habit whereby it becomes easier to excuse ourselves for breaking our own trust. So trust begins with us. And it is only once we have mastered it at a personal level are we likely to see those around us embody it.