Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others

Your job is to make sure that all your people are productive, engaged, and working up to their fullest capacity.

7Leadership Is a Conversation, Part 2How to Build Trust and Ownership

In the previous chapter you learned that using the first three Key Principles in your conversations will make your team members feel valued, heard, and involved. The two Key Principles explored in this chapter will enable you to cultivate employees' trust and help them take responsibility for their own success.

Share Thoughts, Feelings, and Rationale (to build trust)

This one is all about trust.

Rhea learned the hard way that trust takes work. When she took over as a director of sales for an engineering firm, she expected to lose a few people right away. It happens, she thought. But a few months into her new job, Aaron, one of her superstar sales guys, decided to join another team within the company. This was a potentially thorny problem, and Rhea knew she would have to plan carefully for his departure. The deals Aaron was working on were complex and had reached a crucial stage. To make matters even more dicey, he had the department's biggest customers. I asked him not to share with his customers that he was leaving, Rhea said. I needed time to find a replacement, and it could take about two months.

One month later, Rhea got an urgent email from Aaron's biggest customer—one she was most worried about alienating—asking what was going to happen with their account now that Aaron was leaving. Rhea ...