Building Mutual Trust: Candor, Clarity, and Curiosity

by Ryan Cornell-d’Echert

In our organizations, how comfortable are people admitting they do not know? How often do we respond with, “Sir, I don’t have that information. I’ll take it as a due-out,” or “Ma’am, we should have thought of that. We’ll find out and follow up.” I believe a subordinate’s ability to honestly answer their leader’s questions is not only a reflection of their personal courage, but a reflection of the psychological safety within that organization.

The fastest way leaders can create an environment of psychological safety is to ask for constructive criticism and respond well to it, says Kim Scott, best-selling author of Radical Candor. When the senior leader asks for criticism and rewards people for honesty, it inspires middle managers to do the same. This creates a climate where not only leaders, but subordinates also own their mistakes and learn from them instead of hiding them. If subordinates feel comfortable giving a leader honest feedback, they will also feel comfortable asking that leader to clarify his intent and expectations from day to day. In a climate of psychological safety, if someone doesn’t know the answer to his or her boss’s questions, they will feel more comfortable admitting it.

I’ve counseled my teams that if they don’t understand my intentions, they should ask for clarification immediately. I would rather have them question my expectations than flail about in uncertainty and produce unsatisfactory results. If I ask an innocuous “I wonder” or “It might be nice if…” statement, my team should feel comfortable asking me if that was a rhetorical question or a real task for them to deliver. In an environment of psychological safety, if leaders do not provide clear expectations, subordinates will feel confident enough to take initiative and ask.

As a leader, your words have greater weight than you may realize. How often do you “think out loud” around your staff? If you catch your team doing something strange, inefficient, or that doesn’t make sense, ask why they’re doing it. It could be that you gave unclear directions, or that your subordinates did not feel safe asking you to clarify your expectations. In that case, try inviting them to ask you for clarity. After providing your intent, you can ask follow-up questions like, “Is that enough guidance, or do you need more?” When leaders are willing to admit that their expectations were unclear, in the future subordinates will be more inclined to ask for clarity. Vulnerability can build mutual trust.

Communicating Clearly and Concisely

Further, good followers should answer their boss’s questions the way they were asked…not as they wish the boss had asked. Sometimes, people are tempted to answer a simple question by explaining the entire history of a problem. Followers, when the boss asks us what time it is, we shouldn’t build him a clock. We don’t need to explain how a clock works. We just need to answer the question. We need to be careful not to get bogged down in unnecessary details. We need to have briefing empathy, especially if we have less of the boss’s time than was originally scheduled.

As others have written, briefing empathy means being considerate of the time, bandwidth, and mood of those receiving the information in our brief. In briefings, sometimes we can make a bigger impact by saying less. We can make it easier for others to listen by not speaking as long. However, there is an art to this. We don’t want to cut so much information that we lose the “so what,” or deprive the leader of whatever he or she needs to make an informed decision. We can find this balance between providing sufficient information and remembering to respect everyone’s time by starting with the bottom line up front.

The “bottom line up front” is: what do I want the boss to know, and what do I want the boss to do? Why is the boss here? Is this briefing to provide information, an update, or to request a decision? These questions can help you focus your talking points to get the boss exactly what she needs to know. The boss will approach the information differently if she knows a decision is about to be asked of her–especially at more senior levels, where her decisions can have huge impacts beyond the organization itself. Prepare your boss instead of overwhelming her with a bunch of data and then putting her on the spot by requesting a decision. Set expectations up front: “Ma’am, this will be a decision briefing,” or “Ma’am, this is for your information and situational awareness.” Communicative clarity reduces the potential for frustration: the leader’s time is not wasted, and subordinates do not spend excessive energy wondering what the boss wants.

Leaders, also, can play a part in helping their subordinates answer questions more effectively by providing clear briefing guidance. Often, the leader is the most experienced person in the room. Leaders should recognize this fact and be patient with learning subordinates, taking the time to let their teams know how they like to be informed and make decisions. If leaders don’t share guidelines for how they want to communicate, subordinates might not answer their questions effectively.

Finally, if subordinates do not know what information the boss wants, or how the boss wants it to be presented, they need to feel comfortable enough to ask. They need to have the psychological safety to be curious.

Curiosity Reinforces Trust: Why Don’t We Ask More?

In addition to building psychological safety by rewarding subordinates for asking questions and giving clear briefing guidance, leaders should encourage their subordinates’ curiosity. Curious people find more purpose and meaning in their work. Curiosity leads to creativity and innovation. If your people trust you to treat honest mistakes as a learning opportunity, they will have the confidence–the psychological safety–to pursue their curiosity. This kind of environment will unleash subordinates’ creative initiative and free them to develop better ways of doing business. They will be more willing to admit they don’t know something, and more motivated to find creative answers to problems.

There are three reasons organizations fail to build the trust and psychological safety that enables curiosity. The first reason is a culture of ego: we’re too proud to admit we don’t know something. Organizations characterized by ego produce low-trust teams where information is withheld and people manipulate facts to preserve their own reputation. By contrast, in a high-trust organization of humble leaders, people are candid, authentic, easily share their personal insights, and feel comfortable asking questions when information or expectations are unclear. 

The second reason organizations fail to build psychological safety is apathy and a failure to support innovative ideas: we aren’t curious, and we don’t care enough to try something new. Whenever someone suggests a new idea, he or she is shut down with dismissive comments like, “We’re not that kind of company” or “We don’t do that here,” eventually stamping the creativity and curiosity out of them. In a low-trust organization, new ideas are openly resisted and stifled. In a high-trust organization, the culture is innovative and creative. 

The third reason organizations fail to build psychological safety is fear: we’re afraid we might be ostracized or viewed as incompetent if others learn of our mistakes. In a low-trust organization, mistakes produce fear and are covered up. In a high-trust organization, mistakes are accepted and encouraged as a way of learning. Leaders, if you want to create psychological safety that destroys fear, consider giving people a little grace when they can’t answer one of your questions. There are always exceptions, but remember they probably have less training and experience than you. Instead of getting annoyed when they can’t answer one of your questions, try viewing it as an opportunity to train and develop your team so they can have the answer next time.

In the book The Speed of Trust, Stephen Covey describes how different behaviors create high or low-trust organizations. His research shows that the healthy behaviors of high-trust organizations are a natural byproduct of work environments with high psychological safety.

Low-Trust Organizations	High-Trust Organizations
People manipulate or distort facts	There is real communication and real collaboration
Getting the credit is very important	People share credit abundantly
People spin the truth to their advantage	People are candid and authentic
Most people play a “blame game,” bad-mouthing others	People are loyal to those who are absent
There are numerous “meetings after the meetings”	There are few “meetings after meetings”
There are many “undiscussables”	Transparency is a practiced value
There are a lot of violated expectations, for which people try to make excuses	There is a high degree of accountability
People pretend bad things aren’t happening or are in denial	People talk straight and confront real issues
The energy level is low	There is a palpable vitality and energy – people can feel the positive momentum

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash