EP014 - How can we create more trust within teams with Jan van der Spoel of Grip on Trust
About the episode
This episode focuses on trust. We don’t understand how trust works in general. Especially when it comes to business. I invited Jan van der Spoel, creator of the 360 Trust Compass and trust consultant, to discuss how organizations and businesses can establish a trustworthy environment. With trust, a company can blossom. Without trust, all can go into the bin. But what are the exact and practical steps to have more trust within our teams?
About the guest
Former designer and copywriter Jan van der Spoel worked for over 20 years as a Creative Director for large organizations such as Philips, Unilever, KNVB, and Danone. The world of corporate communication has changed greatly in that time. When Jan began, it was important to make original personal connections between people. Today, in the field of communication, there is a disproportionate focus on collecting impersonal data, clicks, and likes.
Since 2011, Jan has been studying human behavior. He wanted to understand why people do what they do and what can be done to improve relationships. He found that trust is the most important ingredient for successful relationships and pleasant collaboration, but trust is elusive and can change quickly.
He developed the “360º Trust” model based on his background as a designer. This model brings together the most important aspects of great thinkers. It is a practical toolkit that helps people be more reliable and understand whether they can trust others.
If there is one thing that Jan has learned in recent years, it is that the difference between success and failure starts with attention to human behavior and not with spreadsheets or data.
Jan advises and trains companies and speaks about trust at seminars and conferences. He is the former chairman of the Professional Speakers Association Netherlands. Currently, he is working on his book “360º Trust: A Practical Compass for New Leadership and Enthusiastic Organizations.” It will be published by Vanduuren Management and will be available in 2023.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
We say what we think, what we do what we feel. So that makes us split in our behavior. We say one thing, and we do another thing. And when the distance between what you say and what you do is too large, there's not enough trust. There's low trust. And when what you say and what you do is closely connected, there's high trust.
The quality of collaboration is nowhere described. It has no KPI. It has no description. It's not captured. But the quality of how we work together creates the most important difference between a successful company and a mediocre company.
Only the companies where the leader understands what it is to create a culture of trust will actually have a culture of trust.
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Welcome everyone. Yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we will talk about something that is pretty close to my chest. We will address the challenges with trust. Trust is a fundamental topic for remote first companies, and it is a fundamental practice for remote leaders. Without trust, there is no autonomy. Without autonomy, there is no accountability. To dive deep, I got Jan van der Spoel, a trust consultant from the Netherlands, the creator of the Trust Compass. Jan, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me, Peter.
Awesome. Can you introduce a little bit more about what you do and and what is a trust consultant in general?
My background is kind of a designer and creative director. I've done that work for over 25 years for large and small companies. Companies such as Unilever, Phillips the Football Association here in the Netherlands. And also a lot of SMB companies. And it it's mostly corporate communication challenges. Identity. Who are we, how do we show that to our customers and to our people inside the company. And when you do this you talk about the core fundamentals of communication. And I started, well, as I said, 30 years ago or maybe and when you look at the time 30 years ago... when I started studying, we didn't have computers, home computers. We didn't have internet. We didn't have social media. And if you look at the world of corporate communications now, it's so extremely changed. You cannot even begin to imagine.
Yes.
And a similar change has, not similar, that would be exaggerating, but I have changed as well. I have adapted over time. In the beginning it was all about creativity and making but also always making meaningful connections. Now the creativity is sort of all canned sort of a pre designed because all the designs are already on the internet. You can download a template adjusted, and you Wow you are the creator. So that's my background as a creative director. In 2016, I started working with the customer experience model. And I used the word trust quite often. But more as a given that you want to know trust and you want a customer trust and you want to know customer confidence. And in until 2019, I was preparing a speech about the human behavior. The irrationality of human behavior and to address this specific thing, I use the sentence. And the sentence is, we say what we think, what we do, what we feel. So, and that makes us sort of a split in our behavior. We say one thing, we do another thing. And when the distance between what you say and what you do is too large, there's not enough trust, there's low trust. And when what you say and what you do is really closely connected, there's high trust. And when I came up on this dynamics of, of those three elements, what you say, what you do, and how it makes other people feel because that's the essence of trust then there was a sort of light bulb moment that said, well, I have to dive really deep into what is stressed, how does it work and how can I improve relationships when I know how it works, and that brings me to your next question. The 360 degrees trust compass. Because when this topic of trust surfaced I thought okay, I'll have to buy one or two books of the thought leaders about trust, and then I know how it works and I can apply it. But there are a lot of books about trust. Someone, someone said it. Trust is a common word without a common agreement. And that shows in all the books, because every book you pick up about trust, they have a different perspective, a different view, a different approach. And so it only started to become more confusing for me. So in my background as a designer what you do as a communication designer, as a graphic designer is you structure what is already there. So what's the most important things? What is secondary? What is content? And by building a structure it not only makes sense to you, but also to others. So that's, it's one of the most important parts of being a graphic designer. That's what happens in graphic design all over the place. That's why you have big headlines. That's why you have colored blocks. Your wife is a graphic designer and she does that really good that really creating the flow of communication through design. And that's idea I projected on all the different elements of that I came across on trust. And I made my own model.
Which is the compass.
Which is the compass Exactly. I found six principles and every principle consists of four aspects. So that means that you have 24 aspects that influence trust. And the model enables you to ask in a relationship 24 questions about a specific topic. And that gives you the answers that pinpoints where is a lot of trust, where is doubt, things you simply don't know of the other person. And what are is not good. What you know is, you don't trust. And that makes it a very actionable model. And in my humble opinion one of the most actionable models to assess a relationship. That's the first one. But also the ability to look at myself through your eyes. Am I trustworthy? So you can ask 24 questions to yourself to understand, oh, wait a minute. You don't know what my intent is. You don't know what my, my capacities are. You don't know if I have a solid structure that I work with. So all little things that help, help you to get more grip on the relationship. And the last one is you can ask questions about yourself in a specific role, and that's confidence. So that's in a nutshell the workings of the 360 degrees trust compass.
I have so many questions. Let's start from the beginning to reflect what you just said. For example, on the design and the design element. We should talk a little bit more about trust. And this episode is more about how trust works. But I can't help myself someone from the advertising that like reflect back on what you just said, that in like 30 years ago everything revolved around creativity. The old agency models, of course at that time were all revolved around big ideas. Something really great, something really tangible. And I also well kinda like assisted in the whole journey from the big idea to the big process, shall we say. Where, where agencies usually spend time, energy, and resources not on creating great ideas for it, creative people together, but creating great processes that driven growth. You know, everything just became more metric focused and automated due to the technology. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. It's really great that now everything can be measured. But sometimes I do feel that we kind of like fell on the other side of the horse. And we lost the not the human touch, but the human creativity within those predictable, boring templetized creative ideas.
So you, you see quite often that the metric becomes the goal.
Yes.
And the metrics should be sort of a means towards goal.
And the metric defines the ideation process itself. So, so pretty much you are not coming from the hypothesis when you're crafting the creative idea, but you're coming from the end result kind of like reverse engineering back to your idea, which is like really, I dunno, weird thing to do. At least to me. And yeah, I do believe that anyone who's in any kind of branding they have to invest at least a minimum amount of creativity in their design as well. So yeah, as you said, my wife is a designer, so I'm pretty close to that anyway, and also because of my own background. Yeah. And so design has changed and the strategy around the incoherent human brain changed because of the technology. Yes. And we are also talking a lot about remote work, how the technology actually shaped how we are collaborating together. And Yes. But at the end of the day, and that's my main point. At the end of the day, relationships and humans, they didn't change. Sure. So we are still, and because work is all about relationships, to me a company is something like an organization where people gather together to fulfill the same goal and collaborate with each other in a relationship. And that is why, by the way, the one of the most pressing questions that I see within remote work is how to build better relationships, how to build culture, how to build collaboration, and so on and so on and so on. So I do think that it's, it's not changed. So it's still the same. It's still, and it is still based on trust because most of the relationships I think, are based on common values and trust that you do what you do. I do what I do and we are all trust each other to move towards the same goal. Yeah. Which is in this sense because we are talking about work and not personal relationships, but it's the same by the way. I mean, a marriage is kinda like the same in in that sense. I do think that we have a crisis of trust the last, maybe five years that we had a crisis on trust on the media. We have a crisis on trust on the collaborations. We had a crisis on trust, on geological scenarios, political ones. And now we have a crisis of trust in the work. And I read and that could serve to the next question that why we have this crisis, why we experienced this crisis that I read a study and I think it was Microsoft who completed the study. But I'm not sure. Where they measured the performance of the people. And the managers thought that their employees performed lower during a remote setup. Meanwhile, the employees thought that they are performing better. So there was a huge gap between what is considered ideal performance from the manager and from the employee. And I wholeheartedly believe that it is just, well, just an issue of how we approach performance. But in fundamentally, it is an issue of trust. And managers are not trusting their employees, and their employees don't trust that their managers are trusting them. So there is no feedback loop for the trust. So how do you see this? Do you think that that that this crisis is prevalent and how can we resolve this? How can we reinstate it?
When you look at in, in the Western world, how relationships are built? Relationships in companies and how we structure our organizations such as companies. If everything goes correctly. We have the strategy and vision. We have our organizations plan. We have our roles and responsibilities the kind of people we need and the people themselves. And that's about it. So you have all these little steps that make a company. And totally in the end, maybe someone has written a couple of words on behavior and trust. It's, it's not a prereq prerequisite, it's not something that's has some, some kind of kpi or goals or quality. It's hardly there. And that's why how we behave, the quality of collaboration is also nowhere described. It has no kpi. It has no description. It's not captured. But the quality of how we work together, creates the most important difference between a successful company or a mediocre company. So it is really, really weird that we put all the rational, cognitive logical things first and the behavior totally last. And as an afterthought. And even most companies don't have that afterthought. They only have their performance goals, the targets the management KPIs and whatever. And that's why so many companies have so many problems. When you look at some of the numbers, 60% of first time managers fail within 18 months. And a couple of them totally leave their job in the company. Most of them sort of stumble along in what they do, being frustrated and damaged. So that's 60% of all the new managers you have in your organization. Of the mid-career managers, at least 50% suffer from really high anxiety and stress and extremely low engagement. So this is your, this is your engine, right, your mid-career managers , and they don't feel good. They don't feel rewarded, and they're not inspired. So that's number two. And most of them are looking for a new job. And the third part is from, of every woman in a company that makes a promotion, two women leave. So, First time managers, mid-career managers, women, it's really crisis mode all over. But we don't realize that. We don't acknowledge it. We don't notice it and we think this is part of who we are. This is part of being a business. And this is the strange paradigm that we are willing to work in. Some companies have start with their vision and their mission and the strategy, and it's really heartfelt. You think, oh my God, this is a great company to work. What money you look at this is being executed. This nothing left of the heartfelt stuff. So my principle is the after the structure I described just yet why don't you put human emotions and the quality of collaborations first. Why don't we start with this? Why don't we start within our vision, how do we want our people to feel? How do we want, how do we make sure that working together is fun, is an exciting, it's engaging. Because only when you put it in your vision it will become, it will have a place in your strategy and in your organization, and it will affect behavior, but only when you put it first and not totally at the end.
I'm that, I'm that remote leader by the way. That would be super skeptical and I would have this question. Isn't that part of the culture? And isn't that why we have culture experts who are building or helping us to build better work culture, shall we say? And shouldn't we measure it with something indirect? Like for example, employee satisfaction, wellbeing, you know, these kind of stuff. And and if yes, then how can we turn it into a practical approach? So, okay, we get it. It's super important. It's super kinda like robust and it shapes how we work, how the company performs at the end, which is measured by KPIs and any other numbers of course. But if it's so important, how can we do it practically? I need to see my Excel sheet. So because I'm a leader, I want to need to be actionable.
Tell me where in your, in your Excel sheet is trust. Well so before I answer it, because I have an answer for that. Before we answer that question you mentioned, for example, about the trust compass that it has different layers and segments and through our initial conversations, we also discussed for example, I personally talk a lot about transparency. But when I tell others to, you know, come on, make your company more transparent and open. The look I get is hilarious. So it's okay, but it's maybe if I buy that idea, that's okay. How can I do that? It's so vague, it's so broad. It's I have no idea what that is. And my solution was, as yours, segment, what transparency is, dissect it. Put it into, into categories. Little things that, that that make transparency indirectly or creates transparency.
Transparency is, transparency is a result of other measures.
Yes.
You cannot have transparency as a thing because it's, it's totally confusing. When you say to your manager, you have to be transparent. So what does that mean? Does he have to share everything he does or thinks and do and communicate with everyone all the time? It's impossible. It's still even impossible.
Yes. And the logical mind always works like this. And again, agency life you know, we are an open, open company, open creative agency. The leader of the agency, the creative director or whoever he or she, they they sit in a glass vault office where the room's door is always open or actually removed. So people can always come in and out from the room and everyone can see and hear whatever the leader of the company is doing or chatting. That's a practical approach to reinstate transparency within the company, but it still not creates the transparency itself, but we as leaders or managers or like humans we always want to transcribe the irrational things into something rational or practical. So how can we do that with trust? Trust is also a broad term.
Mm-hmm. Trust is also a result. And again, when you put trust at the front of how you want to structure your organization you can put systems in place and at least the awareness of how it works, how do I, how should I behave to be maximum trustworthy with my colleagues. And if I know this, because everybody does things that breaks trust with others. Being late all the time saying, yes, I'm going to send you something today and you send it next week. Being a little bit chaotic in how you work, sometimes you are demanding you want stuff now because I'm in a hurry and I'm your boss. So making other people intimidated so all small and not so small things that has a result on the relationship. And of 99% of all those, the little things we do we are unaware that it damages the relationship. So the first thing is awareness.
Self-reflection.
Yes. Everything that has to do with behavior and trust is subconscious, and we have to make it conscious. You have to understand how it works. One of the things that are extremely interesting is the biology of trust. When we see someone of our own, someone who looks like us the same, the same ethnicity speaks the same language, the same sex. We trust those people faster and more than we trust people that don't look like us. Different color, different language, different shape or size, different a way of wearing your clothes. And it's not some kind of evil intent. So someone looks different, ah, I'm going to trust you less. No, this is something that sits really, really deep in our brains. It happens to us. And we have to be extremely aware of this because and in a sense I've just read, I read an article about the male dominance in the corporations. Still, that hasn't changed at all. That's the same thing. The male group doesn't regards female as one of their own. So females, women can join the man hub in our companies, but they have to follow the unwritten man rules. They have to laugh at stupid jokes. They have to be very masculine. And then you can make some kind of space for yourself. So you have to be aware of this process. The fact that, that a lot of things about trust and having people in your in group or in your outgroup is totally biology and it happens to you. And so being aware of the dynamics of trust is the first step. And that's my course, that's my training. I teach you the six principles of trust and all the 24 aspects. And there are a couple of really mind blowing elements that I have never thought that this was an issue. And that's why I'm so excited about the model because that every little thing comes along. So yeah if you want to grow a more better relationships and a better collaborative company culture in remote work managers should not sit facing their dashboards all the time and focusing on their targets and what they have to do at the end of the week. But maybe take a substantial part of your time and focus on the people. Hey Peter, how are you today? Everything okay? Because if you don't do that, then nobody's attached anymore. There are no relationships and people go away and if you want to correct that, then you have to have sort of punishment measured all the time. You have to be, this has to be done by today or you will be deducted on your pay. Stupid. So it's either giving the people the attention as respected, valued human beings, or have a really strict punishment system in place. Well, you make the choice.
Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. And sorry to jump in, but one of the key factors that I always see and makes me, well kind of impatient shall we say, is that when remote leader or any, any kind of leader, this is not exactly the remote work, but more prevalent in the remote environment by the way. They always shout about the employees are not accountable. They don't have the accountability, the responsibility for their job. No one really cares. No one wants to put in the ideas. They're disengaged, disaligned non-motivated. They're doing their stuff, their tasks. So they're, you know, crushing through the numbers. But, you know, there is no, and I don't want to use necessary disorder, but there is no innovation. Small scale innovation, small scale ideas. And when I view these scenarios I usually see that they expect accountability without giving the autonomy to their employees on how they do their work. And fundamentally it is all about trust. Trusting them that they got hired for the job because they are experts on their field. I mean, this is why they are there and not others. This is why the leader hired them and not the leader is doing that thing. I've seen so many times when micromanagement happened and the leader jumped into that situation and started to solve the problem, obviously with the leader mindset and the leader schedule. So it means that, you know, I will start to show solve this problem within 10 minutes. I know that you're working on this for like days now but let me show you how I can produce results and obviously those results were all crap. So it's really hard to expect any kind of responsibility from anyone if you don't trust them. How can we resolve this issue? Should we teach leadership to be more well invested in trust or.
You have to make it very concrete and actionable because when you say to someone in a leadership position, okay, invest in trust. Okay, have a good day.
It's like transparency.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a really hard concept. So how do I do this? And he will think about it for, for couple of minutes and then go back to his production job. So what I make a big distinction between managing and leading. Managing in my view is a verb, is getting stuff done, achieving results, that's one. And leadership is how you behave and when you behave as a leader, people want to follow you if you have some kind of behavior, but nobody follows you. You can really ask yourself am I a leader?
Yes.
So behaving in a way that people want to follow you. That's important. And you said a couple of interesting things earlier. I found that in my view on trust. Trust is mostly a perception. It's how you, what you feel, what you sense in a relationship. That's my main thing in what is trust. So what do I feel with you? What do you feel from me? And that's different. What the way you trust me is different than the way I trust you. And sometimes it's almost the same in the middle. That's good. But that's a coincidence. That's because there are some principles that's trust is the fuzzy feeling in the middle that we are sort of an ultimate friends. And that's trust. That's not my definition of trust. It's a perception of someone's behavior. But in companies, you can give trust and you can give trust. You said it before. By giving people responsibility and they can be responsible for their work. And create some kind of measurements, KPIs around that. Have very good agreements or rules what you expect of someone, because that's very fuzzy in most companies as well. What do you expect from me when, and is it today the same as next week or last month? It shifts because when your manager has the hots everything is wrong. And when she's happy, everything is okay. So the rules, what is attached to this responsibility, have to be very, very clear. And then exactly what you said, leave the professional alone. Let him do his work and to make this a little bit more concrete if he runs into a challenge, he is a professional and he has a problem. He then is challenged to go to his colleagues, Hey, listen, I have this problem. Can you help me help working together? That's number one. The second one is, okay, we can't solve it together. Then you can go to your manager and you can, Hey, can you help me? And then together with your manager, you can chart a path forward. But what you cannot do is not say anything. You have the responsibility. You don't say anything. You have a problem. And at the end of the period that you have to deliver your stuff, you say, oh, I had so many problems. I can't do it. That means that yes, given responsibility, but also the rules and agreements what this, that entails and that combination I am really convinced that makes, makes people much more happy in their job, in their professionality. And it will make the companies much more efficient. Because then managers can actually focus not on the KPIs, but on Hey, how are my people doing? And is there anywhere I can help? And then when somebody says, okay, I have a problem, can you help me? Your help's actually valued instead of hey, he steps in and solves my problem.
This is where, by the way, the company's mission is super important. So I actually teach about that a lot that leaders should create some sort of like a mission plan for, not just for the company, but for like the whole team. And it can be segmented in the sub submissions, of course. And that mission actually describe who's doing what, and most importantly, why and how we are approaching this, meaning that those who are actually doing the job, they are autonomously creating value and only contacting the leadership if they have any kind of problem. Or they managed to do a breakthrough. So they did achieve something and that, you know, something to celebrate or actually, you know, update the mission plan. And, you know, we are there now and we can move a little bit further. But yeah, lots of things happen during the hiring by the way. But let's not touch on that.
Oh, no, no, it's important that when you want to do something about company culture, you have actually one moment that's extremely critical. When the people come into the office. The first day of work.
Yes.
So what do you experience the first day of work? Is it shouting and cursing on the boss? Is it yeah, we have this meeting at 10 o'clock, but everybody shows up at 10 after are we all grumpy, or are we on a high spirit? That's the moment that everybody is an open book. A blank sheet. I have my professionality in my backpack. Tell me how you want me to behave. Very well Sit . And if you don't grab that moment to say, okay, this is who we are. This is your station. This is your computer. This is your login codes. So many times then when people come in and often, oh, oh, you need a desk? Oh why don't you sit over there for a while and then I'll sort something out. Is that like an afterthought?
Yes. No one thinks about why onboarding is super, super critical. And by the way, when you create a mission and document everything around how you work as a company, onboarding is kind of like easy. You just show that to the new people. Here is how we do stuff. This is who can help you these people, this is your team. This is the mission. These are the values that we believe. And I don't know, get the heck out of here and do your job. This why you are here and we trust you because you're an expert on the field. We invested a lot of time and energy and resources on hiring you. So you are trusted here. Yeah. And you can do your stuff.
And give someone a buddy if you have to ask him he can help you. Because quite often there's someone doing the introductions, and then he's gone, and then you sit there for your first week. How do I log in? Where's the coffee? Really simple things.
Yes. And now by the way, we do have a lot of layoffs in the tech industry. We do have a constantly changing work environment. This year I believe it is all about ending the debate on where we work and more focusing on the when we work aspect, a a little bit maybe not this year, but at least the next year. What I'm trying to say is that there is a lot of storming. So my question is, during these insanely challenging times where everything and so many more is expected from leaders or managers to address, how can we keep trust or retain trust within organizations?
Yes, as I've said before you can only influence what you understand. So you have to understand the dynamics of trust. Because now it's only a feeling. And if you ask six people what is trust, you get seven answers and they're all wrong. So you can only influence what you understand. So and that's why I made the book, the 360 degrees Trust Compass is a book. It'll be on the market in Dutch in May and next year in December in English. So you have to understand what builds trust. Secondly, you can implement the technical stuff on how to be a good colleague, a nice coworker. But that comes from that. And well a couple of simple things. Yesterday, I read a blog about from Deloitte and Deloitte said they noticed that a lot of companies install C T R O roles. So Chief Trust officers. So in companies they have this board role of the Chief Trusts officer. And on one hand, I, I think that's good. That's applaudable because someone with all the stuff that's going on is responsible for trust in the organization. But the second idea I have with this is that you take the responsibility to be trustworthy out of the hands and the behavior of the C E O. So it's a delegated thing, just like customer experience. It's a delegated thing. And the CEO doesn't have to be involved, doesn't care. He says customer experience. Oh, you want our customers to have a really nice time dealing with us. Well ship it to marketing do Oh, you want our people in the company to be trustworthy. Yeah. Give it to Jim. .
It's throwing resources on problems. That's like a common leadership practice that everyone is doing that if you have any problems with, for example, marketing, I dunno, hire more people or throw more money in the machine and that's it. Yes. You have problems with trust. Oh, come on, hire a chief trust officer, whatever.
So and what you see quite often is the behavior of the boss, of number one. As a Starting point for the company culture. For instance let me share the story of Volkswagen with their diesel gate scandal. The CEO of Volkswagen was a really, really tough CEO. He was a hardliner and he would tell you if you did wrong. It was a tough man and this is how he ruled. And one of his area managers adapted that. He was also a tough man and he had the responsibility to grow sales in the United States. So he, he went to his engineers and said, okay here's the engine we designed. Make sure it meets all the expectations of the United States market and make it happen. Tough, tough man. Make it happen. The engineers, they figured out after a while of thinking with the engine, it couldn't be done. So the next step was, okay, who's going to our manager and tell, tell who will be, who will be the bad messenger boy. Yeah. Nobody says I will do this. Because, you know, if you go to the malls and you say, okay, this can be done, you're fired. And somebody else is going to repeat the, the domestic, because that's tough managing, that's a tough leader. So they designed a workaround. They designed the system that they investigated. How does this measurement, this pollution measurement system is working well, the car is being put on a system, but where two wheels are rolling. The, the, the, the front wheels are rolling and the exhaust fumes are being measured on the back, so they designed some kind of intelligence in the car that that when only the two wheels were rolling, it would change the output of the exhaust fumes.
Hilarious.
And it worked for 10 years until a consumer organization said, well, let's do these measurements with a driving car. And it all went to shit.
Jesus.
So, and the CEO of Volkswagen stood on a podium and he said, I didn't know.
And he told the truth, of course.
Because when you have a leadership style of fear, the first thing happens. People are not going to tell you negative information and they are going to stop taking initiative.
Yes.
Because it's not being applauded. People do things out of fear. And those are based, the basic values from the dimension of psychological safety, one of the six principles of trust. So there you are, you have your company and you have this, the chief trust officer officer sitting in the nice letter chairs and your CEO in hardliner, the bully one. He said, make it happen. What do you do? You waive your guidelines. And we measured company employee satisfaction and la la la. The company culture is still one of fear and anger.
Yes.
So only the companies that where the leader understand what it is. To create a culture of trust, will actually have a culture of trust. Why do they need to change? So one of the key well concepts that I'm trying to solve with my own professional, and by the way, personal life as well is that what makes people change, what makes people tick. And my initial thought and also experience from a personal and professional background as well, is that people do make kinda like radical shifts. Let's say this hardliner CEO suddenly becomes trustworthy, open and supportive transparent leader, because that's like the north star that we are trying to get there, right? So someone who is less of a delegator and director, more like a facilitator and supporter. Less like a kinda like a bully, more like a mentor like psychological characteristics less like a an assertive, aggressive, impulsive style personality. More like calm, relaxed empathetic character. So that's where we are trying to get there when we talk about leadership. But when do we change when do we first obviously you probably will tell that self-reflection is the first step, right? So the leaders should accept and realize that they are doing something bad or not trustworthy or whatever it is. And then they can adapt to the change. But what I always seen in my personal and also professional life, people do get self-reflective only when there is shit in the fan. So when they see something is fundamentally wrong and bad happening during a crisis then they make the switch, then they adjust, then they adopt. Whether it'll be even more bully more stronger grip or something else. So what do you think, do you think, maybe that's the fundamental question that I'm trying to ask. Do you think that people can change without experiencing any kind of crisis around them that they need to adapt?
Haha. Yeah. Well you need some kind of aha moment, sort, sort of a light bulb moment. Mm-hmm. I have a couple of of, of examples here. First of all, Bob Chapman. Bob Chapman is a CEO of a very large organization in the brewery articles. Or at least it started that way. It was a so regular company. He took it over from his dad. It was always struggling and he made it grow. And by a couple of smart moves, they were in the clear money wise. And at a certain point he was, he was sitting at in a wedding the wedding of a good friend of his, the daughter of a friend of his. And the father of the daughter said to the groom, I hope you take good care of my daughter. And Bob Chapman, who was sitting in the church witnessing the wedding, he had this moment, oh my God, all the people in my company are someone's daughter and someone's son, and their parents want me to be to good to them, to look after them. And that was really such a defining moment for him. He went to work with it and he founded the truly human leadership foundation and he has built his company 10 times as big. It's really a multi-billion dollar company, and he has never fired anyone anymore. Because he said, you don't need that. You can see people, and this is something I, I forgot to tell, but this is extremely important. Stop calling people resources. People are not resources. You have all the resources in the world, but people are not resources. People are not numbers in your chart. People have a totally different dimension, and as soon as you do that, the first thing will start to change because the words you use. We have agents, we have resources, we have objectives or not operationals how do you say it?
We have the HR department which says human resources. And this is exactly, this is one of the key causes why I always trying to rephrase HR and HR relationships into more like people first or people or something. Something people related.
Yeah. But, but there's a second snag in the HR department. The HR department is not for the employees. Yes. The HR department is to assist management for the administrative and operational procedures. Yes. So when you have a problem, you can go to hr, but they're not in your side of the deal. They're on the other side of the table.
That's why people usually, like, never ever, ever, ever, ever trust the, the HR department running and anyone from HR for a very good reason.
So don't call people resources. See them as human beings and make it your responsibility. Make their welfare your responsibility that will change you everything in your organization. That's what happened with Bob Chapman. Another very cool example was from I forgot his name for just for a second. It was an investment company and the owner was walking around in the evening and he saw a book on the desk of one of his employees. And it was the management guide for the guide from being a management manager in McDonald's. And he said, oh, well this is funny. So he asked her about it the next day. So why do you have that book? She said, well, yes, I'm starting to be a manager at McDonald's assume. And he said, why? He said, well, because I don't have enough money to make ends meet. I need another job. And he was really shocked when that happened. And he said, so what would you need to be in the clear? And he talked with a lot of people in his company and he decided to give everyone in the company $75,000 paycheck every year. Mm-hmm.
I think I heard about that guy. Everyone including himself and everybody around, all the advisors around the company, said oh my God, now you're going to go broke. You can ever pay for this. But the company did better than ever because everybody was dedicated for the job. Nobody wanted to leave anymore. Everybody was so inspired and excited that they were being seen as valued human beings. They could study, they could have meaningful and valuable time off because when you have no money, you can have time off but you sit in your crappy little home staring at the blank wall. I mean, that's not really invigorating. And the people in the company were so great grateful to him that they, Andrew Price was his name. Andrew Price. Yes. Yeah. They gave him a Tesla car. So those are two, two examples of people that simply render a company. I have this moment, oh, wait a minute. I have this order all the way reverse. When I start with looking at my people, having the idea that I'm not going to fire them, but do whatever it takes to help have them successful. And I take the consequences of the business performance and deal with that. But they didn't have to deal with that because be putting your people first made the companies much more successful than they were.
It would be really inspiring to see that other leaders would feel that way. Let them help them let them help them, how people can find you.
But they can find me to my website that's grip on trust.com. And, and, and what I do is I have a couple of things. I am a trust consultant, so I can come into your company and look at the dynamics and the culture. What's going on, what is your problem? Is there only in a small team real issue going on that you say, okay, there's no trust in this group. Can you make some kind of analysis and see how we can take this forward. So that's one thing that's consultancy. The next thing the training. So actually helping you understand what are the dynamics of trust. And an interesting example, I just closed the training a couple of weeks ago and for a very young, very new management team. And one of the interesting things is in power, getting power is that when you get power for the first time, your empathy and your moral values lower.
Yes. I've seen that many times. Yes. Especially for the first time, by the way.
Yes. But I think that it's that every sort time it happens, you have a different relationship with the people that fall under you. So I think it has The fact that builds on its on itself. That's by the way, the, the Power Paradox from Dr. Kelner, it's a very interesting study. And I told him that the guy in the training. And I told him that, and I showed him that it worked that way. And he was really, he was really shocked. And it happened that way because he sort of felt it. You feel it, but it is something that happens to you. It's in your instinctive brain, and you don't realize that. But when you do realize it, I believe that you automatically look differently to relationships.
Yes. How can, what, what can I get out from those? What can I extort from those because I'm in a power situation. And suddenly you stop being, as empathetic as you were before without the power. And you suddenly do minor things that hurts the perception of your trust with others. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can get that. Especially for those who have the power for the first time in their life. Yeah. Mainly those who are, you know, like handling power or any kind of like authority for like longer period of time that can de decline. And they can go back to their... yeah.
Because it happens in your brain. It changes you without you realizing it. And that's why this is so important that you have to realize all these little things that influence the quality of your relationship. And when you know it, you take it from the unconscious, the subconscious to the conscious. And when you know these little things and you can really ad adjust your behaviors accordingly. So this is I do the consultancy, I do the training. And what's more well that's about it. And I do the training in all kinds of dimensions. You, you want. So it's one-on-one or in a group training of eight to 12 people in company training. And I've also designed very interesting training. It's a high intensity retreat. And what we do, we go to Aruba, one of the Dutch Caribbean islands for a week, and we have the full training in one week for two people. And it's, that is really great because in the mornings you can do all your communication, your emails. And in the afternoon we do the training and the late afternoon you're free to do hiking, swimming, whatever. And in one week I take you through the whole course and you, when you get back to the golden dreary Europe, you will know how trust works, how to be a, a trusted leader, and how you can implement all those little things to create a people first company. As of now there are no other trainers of the grip on trust 360 degree trust training. But that we will work on that in the coming year.
Oh, you are franchising that would be great certified. That would be great. And your book is coming out?
Yeah. In May. It's now for the first run at the publishers. So she will, she will take out her red pencil and destroy everything I wrote and then I'll have to take another stab at it. Then it goes to the editor and she or he will make it smooth and fitting on. And then it goes to a designer or, that would be interesting.
Love it. Congratulations on all of these things and I wish you the very, very best to do even more and more and more and more trust trainings for leaders because I think they are in a desperate need to learn more about that. So thank you for coming. It was really inspiring to have you here.
It was my pleasure. And I'm looking forward to to the results.
