February 2026
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 13m
English
Content preview from Whole Leaders, Wild Trust
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CHAPTER 4Whole Leaders, Wild Trust: The Courage to Be Seen. The Risk to Trust Again
You don’t have to be perfect to be trusted, but you do have to be honest about who you are becoming.
Leading would be easy if we were robots. I’m not sure we’d be any better at it, but it sure would be easier. If we were robots, our programming would just tell us what to do and we would do it. We wouldn’t have to fuss with all the feelings of other people, what they think about themselves and what they think of us. We wouldn’t have to be concerned with whether people are motivated or inspired. We would simply be responsible for getting the results we were built to get, and when we didn’t get them, we would just be replaced by a better robot.
Until leaders are robots, it’s not going to be like that. Leaders aren’t machines and neither are the people we lead. And as long as human beings are the leading stewards of the resources and functioning of our world, trust will not be optional. Human beings require trust to function, and more importantly, to thrive. And the universal truth is that to trust each other, we must know each other better.
“A person is a person through other persons… My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” (Tutu 1999, 31)
It’s hard to trust someone whose brokenness has taken over their leadership. Like a cracked bucket can’t carry water, a leader unaware of their own fractures can’t carry the trust of others. This isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress. ...
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