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Leadership Strategies: Telling the Truth

Guest post by: Sylvia Lafair

Article Overview: Being a new leader naturally brings some anxiety and tension and of course, you want to be the perfect leader. This article gives some guidelines for creating a trusting relationship with the folks you're leading, whether you're a new leader or seasoned-expert leader.

Leadership Strategies: Telling the Truth

I was facilitating a team building off-site at a large corporation. The newly promoted director was nervous and wanted her team to come to the plate swinging for home runs. She was a great cheerleader who had not yet become a manager/coach.

The eleven direct reports were guarded in their responses as they sized up their new boss. She was chatty and lots of fun. However, those are not the primary qualities an employee is looking for when they are learning to trust a new boss in a new situation.

The two day program was top heavy with lists of "how we will work together" posted around the room on colored sticky notes. Everyone was politically correct and I must admit the thought of being there for another one and a half days was deadly.

At the break I took the newly minted leader into a side room and asked what was in the way of asking more questions rather than continue her monologue. While we had talked about the give and take of a meeting like this many times before the actual program what happened with her is not unusual. When stress goes up old behaviors, those that are more familiar, take precedence.

She did begin to ask more questions. However, they were dead ender "Yes or No" ones that kept everyone safe behind walls of non committal answers. Here is what she forgot in the anxiety of her new position:

• Open ended question lead to dialogue
• Dialogue is a way to get to know each other
• Trust can only occur when it is safe enough to tell the truth
• Truth sentences are short, not run on sentences
• Telling the truth is not spilling your guts
• It is best to talk in "I" sentences and begin with yourself
• Truth and conflict are comrades not adversaries

By the next day she had been able to bring all the above principles into play. The crème de la crème was when she finally was able to tell the group how anxious she was about making any mistakes in the new leadership role and how she had been like a "Stepford Leader" the day before, just mouthing what she thought they wanted to hear while her heart was beating out of her chest.

It was her short, real, and open truth statement that began to make this group of eleven gel into a team. Remember, truth begets truth and is the major route to developing a trusting workplace environment.

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Article Tags: anxiety, leadership strategies, telling the truth, tension, trusting relationship



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