Leading Out Loud: A Guide for Engaging Others in Creating the Future, 3rd Edition

Building Trust—Authenticity

With your competence established through clarity and credentials, you can move toward thinking through and documenting the elements that will establish your trustworthiness. We trust other people when we believe we know who they are at the core and that they authentically have our best interest at heart. The operative word is authentically. If you really don’t care about others, if you have no urge or instinct to acknowledge them as you encourage change, you will not be able to gain their trust, even if you follow verbal conventions. As explained in Chapter Two, we all have a built-in ability to decipher intention, though in some this ability is solely unconscious. People know when you care about them.

Without caring, ...