The Dangerous Allure of Trust

Effective Executive magazine just published my latest article - The Dangerous Allure of Trust. It's about why managers should NOT want their direct reports to trust them.

Provocative enough of a title for ya?!

Here how it starts:

"Much has been written and talked about in leadership circles regarding the importance of trust, specifically what managers can do to improve their trustworthiness with their direct reports. Notwithstanding best efforts to achieve that end, many managers are finding themselves no better off than before they engaged in said undertaking. While faulty implementation may adequately describe the majority of cases, it by no means explains them all. They can’t all be doing it wrong, can they?

"More likely than not, there’s a problem with the underlying assumption of the issue; maybe a manager’s trustworthiness is not as important as customarily thought.

"Maybe a manager even wanting to be trusted by his/her staff is a fundamental flaw in modern leadership thinking. That’s not to say that the goal of modern management should be to be distrusted. But the conclusion I have reached from years of executive coaching and leadership consultant experience – and more than two decades as a leader in various organizations – is that when managers strive for trustworthiness, it is professionally immaterial at best and organizationally toxic, at worse ..."

Let me know what you think about the rest of the piece after you read it.