The Leadership Skill Hiding Between Tasks and Trust

Have you ever been in go-mode when someone else, a colleague or employee, has come up to you wanting to engage in a deeper conversation?

Maybe you were able to switch gears quickly. And maybe you weren’t and came across curt. These pivot moments come up all day, most days, for all founders running their own shop, whether you’re solo or leading a team of 50.

If we don’t pivot effectively for both ourselves and the other person, we risk a chink in the armor of trust. One way to do that is signaling. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we signal what we need and the mindset we are in. Sometimes, I wish we had signals like cars. Our brain would flip the signal to tell the person that, for whatever reason, we need to cut to the chase, not be interrupted at all, or we can luxuriate together in a funny story or recount an epic vacation adventure. Or, let’s be real, can indulge a slow-to-the-point story that eventually gets us to the business matter at hand.

There are ways of signaling through voice and body tone. But to be truly effective, they require the other person to know how to read us and know that they should.

There are ways of saying what we need. But the effectiveness there requires us to be willing and able to say the need in a way that doesn’t cause or exacerbate interpersonal conflict.

Another approach is to first check in with ourselves. As soon as we sense a conflict between the mode we are in and the mode the other person is in, we can pause and ask ourselves, “Am I really needing to be in ‘go-mode’ or am I just used to being in this mode?” Basically, are you stuck in drive with the gas pedal jammed down out of habit, or because you really are under the crunch?

If it’s a habit, then you want to take a reset breath and redirect your focus. Some questions that The Trusted Advisor curated include:

• Who am I thinking about?

• Who am I serving by my present approach?

• I don’t have to prove myself every ten seconds.

We, as founders still leading our firms, need to be effective and efficient with our time and deliverables. And to do that, we also need to downshift into relationship mode. We need to build and maintain trust with the people who work with and around us because they are the ones who ensure we have deliverables to deliver. If people feel we are too busy to meaningfully connect with them, we risk losing that connection. Our subject-matter expertise will only get us so far.

How do you signal to people when you are in efficiency or go-mode, and when you are in relationship mode? Have you thought about it?