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Katie and Carol talk about Tips 20 and 21 from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership.
Tip #20. Pass up the temptation to quip if it runs the risk of hurting someone’s feelings.
Tip #21. Never underestimate how far trust can get you.
This is a justification for investing time in developing strong relationships. In a model we use at Skirt Strategies, trust is built upon the interpersonal skill of making and keeping agreements. Seems so simple, but when you consider it, many amiss relationships have originated from a communication misfire. One person meant this – the other heard it that way – someone jumped to a conclusion – a negotiated agreement toppled because of a change. Happens all the time. It can be prevented through ongoing, stringent communication that is open and regular.
Consider a relationship you have where trust is critical. Then assess your level of open and regular communication, where expectations are discussed. Could the interaction be strengthened? Do you need more dialog about each other’s expectations?
The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey is a good reference book for this tip.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Hello and welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, the podcast to help you get the support, validation, and skills you need to accomplish your goals and really succeed in a male-dominated world, all without having to give up your incredible female strengths.
Carol: Welcome to another episode of Skirt Strategies podcast. This is Carol.
Katie: This is Katie, covering another tip – actually two tips this installment, two tips from the book Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership. We’re going to cover, get this –
Carol: We’re going to blow your mind.
Katie: For you linear folks, this will really blow your mind. We’re going to cover Tip 21 and then Number 20. It’s a topsy-turvy world.
Carol: It’s crazy.
Katie: Number 21. Read that Carol.
Carol: “Never underestimate how far trust can get you.”
Katie: Which is a statement simply and powerfully about building trust because it gets you so far.
Carol: The power of trust.
Katie: The power of trust. You give people grace, you build long term strategic alliances with them – you are more likely to. You take what they are saying at face value and even when they are inferring something you are more likely to get it because you trust them and you know that they don’t mean something different than what you might be gathering.
Carol: Right. So Number 20, on the flip side is, “Pass up the temptation to quip if it runs the risk of hurting someone’s feelings.”
Katie: If I have trust with you and you quip at me, it’s not going to hurt my feelings as much. So that’s why, tip Number 20, about quipping is tied into understanding the trust. So pass up the temptation to quip if you don’t have that type of relationship with someone.
Carol: I think that’s really important. That takes a lot of EQ.
Katie: Say what “EQ” is.
Carol: Emotional quotient. Or EI. You have to know that this is not the place I should quip because this person doesn’t know me, doesn’t trust me, doesn’t get my sense of humor. So I’ve got to be very careful about how I quip in this situation.
Katie: And have a little self-control.
Carol: Yes. Why should I when you don’t.
Katie: I don’t know because I have extra rules that apply to me, or no rules that apply to me.
Carol: These rules don’t apply to Katie.
Katie: Well what happens when somebody’s humorous, like I am, quipping leads to humor. Or humor sometimes comes from quipping but it can often be at the expense. I’d like to think that in high school I didn’t say things at people’s expense just to get a laugh out of everyone else. I don’t think I was that person.
Carol: If you didn’t know who it was in your high school it was probably you.
Katie: It was a small high school and everyone was very caring and compassionate with one another. I think it was great that way.
I look back on my high school and I don’t dread it. Not very many people from my class I think looked back on it as, “Oh God I hated high school.” I think everyone loved it.
Carol: Yeah, we all did. But, I was in a small school too.
Katie: Yeah so that helps. If you do say something remember that it could be the difference between what is intended and what is perceived. So think about two arrows pointing at each other. One arrow on the left pointed to the right, and one arrow on the right pointing to the left.
The one coming from the left is what someone might be saying, that they are intending.
Carol: Their intent is to be funny. Could be right?
Katie: Person on the right, what they are hearing, from that other person –
Carol: – hurts their feelings –
Katie: Is what is perceived. So if I say something about that dress, because it’s kind of funny –
Carol: The one I have on?
Katie: You mean that burlap bag? But see, okay, a little quip –
Carol: And I know your sense of humor and I enjoy yours sense of humor, but other people might not and especially if I had on something resembling a burlap bag, I would be a little hurt.
Katie: I’d be shocked that you wore it but there’s where you can get into trouble. You have to know your audience and you have to know. So one-on-one relationships in leadership are super important.
As a woman leader, you’ve got a certain level of influence that you have on others. You’ve got to be able to know that you have perhaps, especially if you’re a boss if you’re in an organization where you are the boss, you’ve got the upper hand and what you say is broadcast louder. It radiates.
So being careful about what you say is a very good reminder.
Carol: So trust is super important and how do you gain trust?
Katie: You catch somebody falling off of a picnic table which is an exercise I did once with a team. There are trust exercises. I’m not a fan of them. I think they are fun for team building. I did work with a team out in a park, 7 or 8 of them, we want to do low ropes courses.
So I had them do some blindfold stuff, walk the plank, catch each other falling back and they made connections to it around their team trust because with certain individuals there was some collaboration where they held each other up because of trust so they did get something out of it but I would not recommend that that’s how you go about building trust.
Carol: No.
Katie: I have a very clear model for trust. This comes from the Cumberland Group, our associates and friends out of Cincinnati, Ohio. The Cumberland Group put together a trust model which actually, originally I believe came from the Atlanta Consulting Group, and it’s a pyramid of building trust.
If you’re going to build trust, you can’t just go out and do it. You start with something very actionable and doable and that is making and keeping agreements.
Carol: Nice.
Katie: Think about what discipline is involved, communication discipline in making and keeping agreements. You’ve got to be clear. You’ve got to talk about expectations. You’ve got to be willing to maybe renegotiate an agreement if it went awry and the more you have trust with someone the more you’re likely to give them grace around that renegotiation.
Carol: Okay.
Katie: So the answer to your question, go forth with good strong communication, listen to what people are saying, make agreements, and then stick with them. No fuzzy agreements.
Carol: I think that’s so important. People have to know that they can trust your word and that’s where it comes from. If you say one thing and do another, you’ve just given them reason to doubt and that’s forever will be etched in their mind as – there’s a little bit of doubt in that, which in turn makes it harder to trust you, which in turn makes it harder to make agreements with you and you’ve got to be very careful about that.
Katie: When you’ve done something before that was not what you said you were going to do, is it often because you decided I’m going to do something different than I said I was going to do?
Carol: No.
Katie: No, not at all.
Carol: You don’t purposefully not do what you said.
Katie: What might happen, you said you were going to go do something, something changed or you didn’t hear back confirmation from the other person and so you thought it was not really a negotiated agreement, so you go do something different. And now the other person just saw you behaving in a different way than they expected. That’s how it happens. It’s not somebody being malicious.
Carol: It was not intended.
Katie: Right.
Carol: And I’ve got a good example of you and I working together and that is I had promised that I was going to get an animated GIF for our site, which is something on our website and in the meantime I had had a conversation with somebody else who said, “Oh, that wouldn’t look so good,” and I didn’t relate that back to you but I also then didn’t do my task of going out and finding that.
I think I finally did relate it back to you that, “Oh well I didn’t know it we were still doing that,” and it was all in my head, everything that was going on. You thought I had purposefully not done it or was ignoring my task list, as sometimes I do, but in fact I had had this other conversation and I was trying to figure out how to either come back to you with it or how to get it done without –
Katie: Action items are a great example. Last I heard you had an action item. So what am I expecting? An action item to be completed. That happens all the time.
Carol: It does. And then I finally did, I think I circled back with you and said, “Look this my dilemma, and I don’t know if I should have it. Tell me one way or the other.”
Katie: Not before I thought you’d dropped the ball.
Carol: That’s true.
Katie: Who wants that?
Carol: That’s right. Yeah and now you don’t trust me.
Katie: I have enough grace and experience with you that I give you the grace.
Carol: Right, thank you.
Katie: But that’s what you have a build with someone. And what if I was a jerk and I didn’t want to give anybody any grace? It’s not like, “I can’t rely on you.” Well that’s not necessarily true.
Carol: Right, you don’t know my intent on that.
Katie: I don’t know your intent but it’s easy for some people to jump to those intents really quickly. So that’s trust.
There’s also aspects of trust that help, well let me just give you an example. This won’t seem like it’s trust but it really is.
When I’m out in the world and I’m thinking about a bike path that I ride along and it has isolated parts to it. If somebody rides by me that looks kind of hairy, it’s a man. Maybe he looks borderline homeless or could be dangerous. Or he just looks different than me. Maybe he looks like he has a different background, different age. It’s a man instead of a woman. He’s bigger. I’m smaller. Whatever it might be. I will not generally, this is my natural reaction. I will try to overcome this, I will not generally wave or say, “Hi” or nod sometimes like you do when you pass somebody on a park path. If a woman rides by on her bike and she looks just like me, I wave. I say, “Oh hi. I’m out here too.”
Now think about what I’ve just done discriminatorily.
Carol: You profiled.
Katie: I did. I profiled. Our natural tendency is to be more trusting of people where we have commonality.
Carol: Right.
Katie: When you are working with someone that is like you in many ways that you get or their background is like you or you’ve got some history together that’s having more in common.
Carol: Or you just believe that, because of that background, they are not going to hurt you and it all comes down to our fight or flight fear. You don’t say “Hello” to the man because at some level you have some fear.
Katie: It might be different because I’m a woman and women can’t generally go out into the world with the same mentality that a man does. We can’t.
Carol: Isn’t that interesting and men don’t understand that.
Katie: I just had a conversation with a neighbor, he and I happened to be at the pizza place down the street at the same time and we sat and chatted over lunch and he was updating me on one of his sons. He’s got a 24-year-old son who’s in South America, just going town to town, backpack and a guitar and living the free Bohemian life and kind of just winging it.
And I said to him, “Wouldn’t that be nice if a woman could do that too?” And you can but you have a completely different radar up when you are doing it. And you put yourself at risk. In a foreign country?
So my point being, when you are around, out and about, we kind of have our guard up over who we are going to trust and who we don’t. That commonality comes back to the way we build relationships. Do you have something in common with that person or do you not? If they are very different, you are more likely to mistrust them. That happens all the time at work. It doesn’t mean you do, but there’s a natural instinct to.
Carol: Right.
Katie: Do you have a history with them? Do you have the same goals? Are you both in the shipping department? So you kind of have the same goals? Are you at odds with one another over what you want out of the relationship?
Carol: That’s helps you trust somebody more if you have shared goals, you trust them more than if you don’t.
Katie: Than if you suspect there might be a hidden agenda. So there’s that.
Carol: Very interesting. Yes.
Katie: And there’s a lot that goes around – I have a model around the elements, the seven elements of trust and that’s a couple of them – the history, commonality, the style.
Carol: We have a video on our website about the seven elements of trust and we did some work with our membership, the followers that are actually in our membership, we did some, a whole month worth of work on trust.
Katie: The paid followers.
Carol: And so we might put some of that on the show notes, as well as a link to the video so that you can see all seven of those elements of trust.
Katie: Those, by the way, this is good to know that for our followers, if you ever want any sort of specific training, other than just listening to the podcasts, we do have a lot of these topics packaged and for assignments, which is the format that the paid subscribers get, you can get any one of those months in the past as a standalone and listen to all four podcasts. Sometimes it’s five depending on how long the month was, where it was originally released, and all four one-page assignments.
And they are small, like us, we say, “tiny trainings, big results.” They are small and easily manageable so you can go forward and say, “Hey, I think I want to know more about trust.” So you go to our website and look at the E-courses, the immediate training.
Carol: It’s under Tips and Training on our website. And you can find it all there.
Katie: So much to do. I’m a big advocate that little things like this is what leads to bigger changes and being more aware, and so trust is one of those things if you look at it as, “I either mistrust you,” or “I trust you.” It’s not really that black and white. I think you need to lead into a relationship where you build trust.
Carol: Right.
Katie: Do you think that people start relationships automatically trusting or they go in not trusting and you have to earn it?
Carol: I would say that as humans we probably go in trusting? Do you have the answer? Are we conjecturing here? I would say that we – I do, I go into relationships trusting and then it takes somebody not being trustworthy in order for me to back off from that.
Katie: I do to. I’ve worked with people before that were the other way around. That you had to really lay yourself out to earn trust. You had to prove it, where being on the other end of that kind of made me feel like, “Why are you assuming that I’m not going to do this? I said I was going to do it and I’m going to do it whereas he assumes that I wasn’t.”
Carol: Now you’re hanging over me like I’m not going to do it.
Katie: It was making me feel a little grubby. Grimy, and grubby.
Carol: It makes me feel like they are kind of sleazy.
Katie: I kind of thought he was. And he proved himself in other ways but I wouldn’t that that would correlate between trusting people right off the bat and not, I think it has a lot of things to do with our history and the sort of people you are exposed to.
Carol: If you grew up not having trustworthy people in your life, then why would you be trusting?
Katie: Right. If you had a small stent and a therapist in a prison, you probably saw the bad side of the world and you are a little bit more hypocritical.
So this goes back to actual trust model that we started with, which is making and keeping agreements being a very actionable, communication skill, and one that sometimes – not sometimes but often, takes discipline. If I hear you say an agreement, like I’ll go make that electronic button, you and I were fuzzy about it. You didn’t say when you’d have it delivered. You didn’t say whether you were going to go ahead and contract somebody to make it or whether you were just going to look into it. It was not a clear agreement. Which is one to have reasons I didn’t jump down your throat because I thought you didn’t say that you would have it by last Friday.
Carol: But I also didn’t tell you that I was putting it off in my mind because of something else so – so it was good for you to bring that back because it was an expectation that we had set. So you were bringing it back to see where we were at on that expectation and I communicated with you back where we were at. Now we probably need to figure out what we are going to do about that. We’ll do that offline, how’s that?
Katie: That’s good. The original communication could have been forced into something less fuzzy.
Carol: We could have said, “Have this by next Friday.”
Katie: Where’s it going to go and as soon as you get it, how are you going to get it to me and am I going to go ahead and incorporate it into the website? That could be very specific.
Now the benefit of that, there’s a small caveat – there’s a great benefit in making sure that you are clear that way, because if it had been a conversation around who will do what by when, what’s going to happen to it, how much are you going to spend, are you going to get it back to me by this time, what am going to do with it? And if we’d had that, how hard would it be to have broken that?
Carol: Oh yeah.
Katie: See in your mind if what had happened was you heard some other information, what happens in our lives, things change, so in our heads we want to renegotiate, we think the expectation changed, so over in your world where you were investigating it, you found out it wasn’t exactly what would be the best fit for us.
Carol: Right.
Katie: You would have remembered that you and I had this conversation that was specific and you would have felt much more obligated to come back and tell me.
Carol: Because I would have had the seven days on my calendar countdown to Katie.
Katie: Exactly. So another benefit of making and keeping agreements and making it really clear, any one person in the relationship can force it to be clearer.
Carol: Especially if there’s any question.
Katie: By just asking more questions.
Carol: Well I think that’s a great conversation on trust. Remember, do pass up the temptation to quip if you run the risk of hurting someone’s feelings.
Katie: Oh shut up.
Carol: And never underestimate how far trust can get you.
Katie: Never.
(Music plays)
That’s it for this episode of the Skirt Strategies podcast. Thank you for joining us and please be sure to leave a question or comment at Skirtstrategies.com. Remember that success comes when you lead using your natural female strengths.
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