CHAPTER 3
STABILITY

What Is the Commitment to Stability?

In 1943, the behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow published an article titled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which introduced his now-famous theory that humans have a hierarchy of needs. The ideas began in his college and graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where he assisted Professor Harry Harlow in research delving into the behaviors of monkeys. As Harlow and Maslow observed the babies, they noticed that certain needs took precedence over others: thirst over hunger and the need for comfort over the need to explore.

Maslow then applied the same realization to human beings. “A Theory of Human Motivation” asserted that “the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need.” Starting with such basic psychological necessities as food and sleep, followed successively by security, then love and belonging, then the respect of others and personal confidence, and ultimately, self-actualization, he theorized that people pursue the satisfaction of needs in a predictable order. Over the decades his theory has been criticized on two accounts: the hierarchy is in the wrong order, or the needs he identified are based on our motivations or goals rather than on our human nature.

Both Maslow’s theory and its critiques are essential to our thinking about the environment we create as leaders who want to commit to stability. First, we have needs: whether they are based on our goals or our nature, every person we work with lives in pursuit of fulfilling his or her physical, emotional, and spiritual desires. At different stages in our lives, our needs vary in their priority and what comes first. No new parents ever get enough sleep, and yet they will pursue love of a child or their professional goals long before they get adequate rest.

What is absolutely accurate about Maslow’s focus, however, is that our motivations do have an order to them. While they may differ for each individual, as leaders we have to pay attention to the motivations of every individual, both those that are unique to our environment where we lead and what each person needs based on his personality and life circumstances. The commitment to stability is our fierce attention to two factors: the resources our teammates need if we want them to reach their potential in their own lives and for our organizations, and to our behaviors that create the trust that is essential for personal and organizational breakthroughs.

We can’t just pay attention to what needs to get done. The way we lead, both what we provide people to work with in terms of all forms of support—necessities, coaching, and opportunities—and the way we interact with each person to build a culture of trust, has a definitive influence on whether people will follow us anywhere, even into circumstances that threaten our lives, or if they will spend their time ignoring us, writing blog posts about our poor leadership, and making dartboards with our faces on them.

First, the promise of stability focuses on everyone having what they need—not what we think they need. And as each of the commitments are simple, so are the primary ways of fulfilling them. At a fundamental level, when Jack’s not performing, he’s probably hungry. You want to watch a team that’s been grinding for weeks or months on a project come back to life: give them the weekend off. Our attention to such basics as food and rest, all the way to the kind of training and camaraderie people need, allows them to truly focus on what we’re doing together. If we don’t notice what our people need and make sure they have the resources, opportunities, and reasons for what’s being done, they can’t feel grounded enough to focus their whole selves on what needs their attention.

The second, more difficult but just as essential way of fulfilling the commitment to stability, is to build a culture of trust. The words many of us immediately think of when we read trust are soft, warm, and fuzzy, and perhaps our favorite, namby-pamby. We realize what leaders who know how to build trust accomplish in terms of tangible results like profits and organizational growth. Jack Welch is not soft, and yet in his way he created a culture of trust where people were willing to spend their whole careers with him. Zappos’ culture is warmer and fuzzier, but its leaders are just as focused on growing the business.

There always seem to be a handful of leaders in an organization that are able to create an environment where people succeed and don’t leave—an organization where the leaders of the future are born. As leaders we ignore it in many settings because we don’t understand it. We don’t know how to measure trust, when trust is treated as an unquantifiable concept. If we want to fulfill the second commitment, we have to pay attention to the resources and trust in our environments as aggressively as we analyze our bottom line and product development.

Starting Up a Culture of Stability

Leadership experiment Number Three: you start a new company and want the culture to have the kind of stability in which people want to stay. If you could only do one thing during the first year to create stability, what would it be?

Culture is simply the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices of a group or organization. The mistake most leaders beginning a new team or organization make is thinking about culture structurally. We think (imagine an overly earnest leader’s voice here), “I want a flat culture where everyone can contribute and where innovation is a natural product of each person’s unique creative passion.” We’re using some of these same words and intentions in this book; the difference is, we’re making it personal. Leaders can’t mandate culture; we nurture it by paying attention to and caring about the daily experience of everyone on our team.

A culture where people want to invest themselves begins with stability, and stability comes from whatever we need to feel safe. Where clarity is about getting our heads right, stability happens when our bodies feel at ease, even when we’re challenging ourselves in the most intense environments. As a leader, you have something that works for you, that you think would work for most people, that would make a culture stable from the start. What is it?

Here are some categories of needs to explore:

• Food. Want people to feel secure? Feed them. This is our number one answer. Take a group of teenagers away from home on a service trip into a developing country, work them all day, and then hike them through the rain back to camp. What fixes the exhaustion? A warm pot of noodles. Pizza. Fresh fruit dipped in chocolate. Enough said. Please keep reading after you go get a snack. You need stability to learn this material, and so does a new culture.

• Coaching. We often think smart people can go into a new situation and always succeed. Even the most brilliant minds need guidance. Access to a person who can accelerate progress by supporting us as we learn and inspiring us when we’re frustrated: that can be the greatest difference between a culture feeling stable or unstable in uncertain times.

• Friendship. One of the consistent answers among startup leaders in describing how they create a winning culture: they hire their friends. It can work. If we’re going to be spending all our time at work, won’t our culture be more stable if we work with the people we like? Quick critique of the answer: We usually only hear about the group of friends that start a company and then actually stay together. Quick rebuttal: Would you rather work with someone you like or someone you don’t? Strong relationships create stable cultures.

• Similar interests. Another way start-ups create stability is to hire people who like the same things. They ask people questions like, “What is your favorite website?” and “What is your favorite TV show?” If you like star-trek.com and The Simpsons, you’re not necessarily going to hire someone who digs retrocrush.com and anything Hawaii Five-O—the original, not the remake. They hire people who surf because they like to surf or bike or run. Big companies use this technique to create connections, and it can work at the beginning of any enterprise too.

• Praise. How many times have you heard someone say that a boss telling her that she was doing well meant more than her raise? Nothing creates security more quickly than true validation. Imagine making the commitment to telling people on your team what they did well every day. It will immediately be a challenge because validation has to be authentic or it makes us gag. And, it is the cheapest and often most meaningful way to connect with teammates and build a culture: we stay where we know that we matter.

These are just a few examples, but think about how powerful they are in creating the stability that helps people behave like intelligent, emotionally balanced human beings—not the animals all of us become on bad days. The experiment is successful only when you know what will work in your culture. Every culture is unique, just like every person needs different things to feel grounded. What worked in your culture last year may not work now. But our capacity as leaders to commit to stability is unlimited. Praise is free, and food doesn’t have to be complicated. The secret, as with all the commitments, is to pay attention to yourself, then the environment, then what each individual will need to feel stable: that’s what builds a culture where people love to be and can consistently be their best.

Do You Have Stability?

Stability begins when we have what we need and when we trust the people around us and our organization’s direction. Here are four questions to reflect on:

1. Do I have the resources I need to be successful? Being clear on what needs to be done and not having the means to do it is like repeatedly hitting your head against the wall. Don’t do that. Instead, what do you need personally to be your best? If you’re frustrated, your team will be frustrated. We have to know what we need so that we can either find the resources or know we can’t have them and get creative.

2. Do I trust my people? If we don’t trust our people, we don’t engage them in the work that matters. We spend more time working around them than with them. Multitasking research at Stanford University has proved that our brains can only focus on one thing at once. We can’t focus on compensating for teammates and what we need to do as leaders. Ultimately, there is no teamwork without trust.

3. Do my people trust me? If they don’t trust you, there is no environment for them to come to you for help, to really pull apart ideas and make progress. They will constantly say yes and not mean it, and thus begins the cycle of frustration that drives people away. Do you think trust is a soft word? Do you think that driving results is what gets results? Which comes first? Answer: Whom can you push if no one wants to work with you?

4. Do all of us trust our organization? If we don’t trust our organization, we won’t put in the work. We constantly look over our shoulder and cover our own needs, distracting from the focus required to get the job done. While organizations are made of us, culture can often seem as if it takes on a life of its own. Cultures spin out of control when leaders don’t pay attention to the behaviors that connect people to one another and what we’re doing that matters most.

You have to feel stable or you can never create stability for your team. The difference between a culture that provides the resources and trust people need is that they want to work there and they want to stay, and if success is possible with the team, they will do anything they can to make it a reality. History is filled with stories of leaders who tried to create stability; the leaders we want to emulate actually achieved stability under even the most extreme conditions.

The Nimrod

We all watch other leaders. We watch to see how they perform under stress and pressure, and if they are the kind of person who can guide us to where we want to go. The spotlight is always brighter on us when we lead, and the commitment to stability is how we satisfy the needs of those who simply want to make sure that being on our team will be a ride worth taking. Ernest Shackleton’s attention and decision making on an attempt to reach the South Pole in 1908 and 1909 is one of the purest examples of a leader creating stability, especially since his ultimate achievement on that mission was far more important than what he originally set out to do.

When he and his crew landed in Antarctica, their first steps off their ship, the Nimrod, were a broken promise. Shackleton had been third officer on Robert Scott’s Discovery expedition that left England in 1901; on December 31, 1902, in their only attempt to reach the South Pole, they turned back 480 miles from the place no human had ever set foot. Because he was suffering from the effects of scurvy, rather than continuing on with the expedition Shackleton was returned to England in 1903 with a hunger.

The Discovery mission stayed another year, and after being sent home early Shackleton wanted to prove his mettle to himself and to Scott. Scott blamed Shackleton for their failure to reach the pole; Shackleton, feeling rebuffed, wanted to show that he could achieve what the Discovery team had not. As early as 1903, he already had full plans for a return trip to Antarctica, but love and children, a failed run at Parliament, and positions as a journalist and as secretary for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society occupied him until 1907. Then, after four years of Shackleton’s dreaming, the threat of a Polish explorer making an attempt on the pole forced him to make his intentions for a return trip to Antarctica public.

As he raised the funds and finalized his plans, Scott threatened the expedition before it ever left England. Shackleton intended to create headquarters in the same place as the Discovery crew’s; as word spread, he received a letter from Scott. Scott demanded Shackleton respect the McMurdo Sound and the old base as well as the preserve of lands west of 170 degrees as his for future research. Scott was already considering his own return trip, and not wanting to have more stumbling blocks in his own mission, Shackleton reluctantly agreed.

Shackleton had every intention of keeping his word when the Nimrod departed from New Zealand on New Year’s Day in 1908. But when he arrived at Antarctica on January 23, in the ensuing years since the Discovery’s voyage, the inlet on which he hoped to make his base had disappeared from the ravages of the Southern Ocean. After an attempt at another coastal location failed, Shackleton and his crew retreated to the safety of McMurdo Sound. Even though he broke his promise to Scott, it was Shackleton’s first of many acts fostering stability as a leader in the two years that followed—the foundation of a success that with many other leaders might have ended in tragedy, as happened with Scott’s expedition a few years later.

As the unloaded Nimrod sailed for home on February 22, Shackleton and his crew of 14 began organizing their headquarters, which included supplies, ponies, dogs, a prefab 33-by-19-foot hut, and a motorcar. Wanting every possible advantage, Shackleton had creative ideas about the fastest method of reaching the pole, which some people thought were crazy. The motorcar, which helped them unload the ship across the sea ice, would fail on the uneven terrain as they headed toward the pole, but it was Shackleton’s deep thinking about the resources he provided, both the provisions and the spirit he created among his men, that built a trust that in a year would save their lives and set a new record.

The trust building began their first days on land. Once unpacked, instead of settling in for the winter, Shackleton made clear this trip was about doing what no other explorers had achieved. Rather than sitting around with the Antarctic winter darkness about to engulf them, Shackleton ordered an immediate attempt of Mount Erebus, its peak being 12,450 feet. Members of the Discovery expedition had never climbed higher than its foothills. Only two weeks into their work, they achieved the summit, completed experiments, and collected geological samples that had never before touched human hands. After the adventure, the men returned to the camp exhausted, some frostbitten, and all excitedly aware of their purpose on Antarctica.

As Shackleton’s crew then prepared for the six months of winter, his genius in building stability emerged in the provisions he supplied and his simple hut design. While over the years people have criticized his fund-raising and organization, Shackleton created a home for his men in the harshest of environments. The winter months in Antarctica are the spring and summer in the Northern Hemisphere. On the darkest days the sun never rises, and Shackleton knew that if he wanted his team’s minds and bodies to be ready for the research and exploring they had planned for the Antarctic spring, he had to create an environment where everyone was engaged and healthy. The first priority of any leader in a situation where people will face stress and danger: food.

He brought tens of thousands of pounds of beef, fish, milk, beans, grains, canned and bottled vegetables and fruits, enough whiskey and port to last for two years, and three cases of good Champagne for celebrations. They baked fresh breads and cakes, stayed up late singing and storytelling, and Shackleton also included in their provisions 2,570 pounds of bacon. No expedition can ever be marked a failure with over a ton of bacon.

The men also needed privacy and activity. Shackleton took care of both. In the prefabricated hut, rooms were sectioned for two, divided by a canvas cloth. While Shackleton had his own space, there was no separation between ranks. They cooked, ate, and worked together as they planned for their attempts on the South Pole, both magnetic and geographic. In addition to their planning, they brought a printing press with them and by the end of winter they had finished Aurora Australis, a collection of poems, fiction, and original stencils produced by the crew, and the first book published on Antarctica.

Shackleton’s way of treating his team before the expedition is what prepared them for the successes of the expedition; in addition to the firsts of Mount Eramus and their book, the northern party would plant the Union Jack of England in the magnetic South Pole. The southern team, led by Shackleton, also set a new record. But for the four men who made the assault on geographical pole, their journey would take them within hours of their death.

As the time for the main purpose of the Nimrod expedition approached, Shackleton chose a team of four based on the number of ponies that were still alive. Shackleton had favored them instead of dogs, thinking they would hold up better under the strain and weather; only four had survived the winter. They would carry the supplies for the 90-day, 1,719-mile journey to the pole and back. In addition to Frank Wild, with whom he’d been on the Discovery expedition, he brought along Jameson Adams and Eric Marshall, who was a surgeon. Perhaps because he had been passed over for Adams as second in charge, Marshall’s journal is filled with his disgust for Shackleton and his leadership. Yet in the end, it was Shackleton’s valuing the four men’s lives over the pole that would become one of the great moments in the history of leadership.

On October 29, 1908, they departed from the base. Depots had been laid out with provisions to lessen the carried load, and the ponies allowed them a fast pace, at first. They needed 16 miles a day to get to the pole and back in three months, but the first pony died on November 21, another was lost on November 28, and the third on December 1. The pace slowed as two sledges were abandoned, the final pony pulling one supply sledge and the four men the other.

When the fourth pony fell into a crevasse on December 7, the bigger problem than the loss of its carrying power was the food lost down the deep hole. They had planned to eat the pony when its power ran out; Shackleton recalculated their rations and extended the trip to 110 days. Even though they had already passed the distance covered by the Discovery crew by the end of November, on January 4, with less than three weeks of food remaining, he realized they couldn’t make it to the pole and stay alive. The men were already complaining of hunger, thinning and sick. Over the next five days, they sought the revised goal of reaching within 100 miles of the pole, and having left their sleds, they half-ran on January 9 to the new record of 97 miles from the southernmost place on Earth.

When the team turned around after 73 days, it was the point in which the trust Shackleton had built in the hut over dark winter’s days became essential. The way home was supposed to take 50 days if they were going to make the March 1 deadline for the Nimrod to leave the continent, and that exceeded their already-reduced daily intake by 13 days. Shackleton cut rations twice more from the 110-day estimate, and by January 31, all of them were sick. When Shackleton forced his breakfast biscuit on Wild, Wild wrote in his diary, “BY GOD I shall never forget. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.”

They stretched their food to the very edge of survival, and never could they have gotten so close to the pole without trusting Shackleton. If Shackleton was not ultimately concerned with the lives of his men, they never would have made it home. They followed him to the edge of death because even Marshall trusted him. While Scott’s expedition a few years later reached the pole, he and his men didn’t make it back. The reason, of course, was not only about leadership. Adventuring in Antarctica in the first decades of the twentieth century, all alone, completely at the mercy of the weather, much was beyond a leader’s control.

But the simple fact remains; Shackleton set a record and got his men home. When Marshall collapsed on February 27, Wild and Shackleton, freshly resupplied with food by another teammate at their final depot, made the last push for the Nimrod, arriving on February 28, in time to save every crew member. Like every leader, Shackleton made mistakes. If he had followed the advice of others, he might have made the pole: if he used dogs instead of ponies or if he had skis to cross the ice and snow. But when it mattered most, when the lives of his men were at risk, he chose a record and their lives over his original goal. He pushed them as far as they could go, and he never betrayed their ultimate trust. This trust created the stable environment the men needed to succeed.

Although Shackleton sent word back from New Zealand that he was disappointed, he returned to England as a hero and was knighted by King Edward VII; and perhaps the greatest evidence of his impact as a leader was that the stability he created produced a team of leaders that continued to explore the Antarctic. Shackleton himself spent the rest of his life on explorations, and when he died on board the Quest in 1922, on yet another polar expedition, one of his team was waiting to assume the mantle. Frank Wild, his second, after decades of exploring together, took command of the ship.

Radar and the Alarm

Back to your brain: when our needs aren’t met, we feel it. Even if we can’t identify what’s missing or wrong, we know. The reason: our bodies have radar. Through millennia, we have learned to recognize trouble through our nervous system. Our hair, skin cells, eyes, and nostrils sense the world around us and feed that data through the spinal cord up to the command center in our brains. We know when someone is angry just by the way he wrinkles his nose. We may not know why or whether we’re part of what’s causing his response, but every human being who pays any attention to the world around him can literally smell danger.

When our needs are not met, the sense of trouble begins to pulse through our body; when the trouble is serious enough, it sets off an ancient part of the brain called the alarm. Adrenaline increases the heart rate, which pumps more oxygen through the blood, and we’re ready to fight or flee. And neuroscientists now know, in addition to fight or flight, that there is a third response to fear, anxiety, and stress: we freeze.

Imagine a lion has just plopped himself in front of you. Your body sees and smells him, sending a message to your brain, which triggers the alarm. Our alarm is not positive or negative; rather it is a functional necessity in our survival. In the case of the lion, we want our alarm to go off. To keep us alive—because we don’t really want to die by being eaten as lunch—the alarm in our brain will either tell us to fight, flee, or freeze. Depending on the character of the lion, any of the responses could be the right one.

Alarm problem Number One for leaders: If a teammate’s alarm goes off when there is no lion in the room, her body fills with adrenaline—but there’s no reason to run. This causes her stress response to go off, and if she’s the flight type, she won’t show up to meetings in which you need her. If she fights, she ruins meetings with her anger. If she freezes, she is in the meetings, but she chokes, she can’t respond when you need her, and others notice.

Alarm problem Number Two: When someone’s alarm goes off, it triggers the alarms of the people around him. We know when someone is stressed. When he runs, lashes out, or shuts down, it triggers our own stress response. Suddenly, a meeting breaks into a three-ring circus of panic, although there is no lion in sight. As leaders, we need to know how the environment we are in sets off the alarm of all the members of our team and what they need to put their alarms on sleep or turn them off.

Research is proving that with training, people can learn to control their reactions using the other parts of their brain. Our memories are filled with ideas and experiences that help us refocus on what matters. Leaders who commit to stability have known this intuitively for years. When we create an environment in which people feel secure and have what they need, they can focus on what they need to do.

Paying attention to our teammates’ alarms is the difference between keeping them from panicking and losing hours and days, if not weeks, in their fear response—and helping them feel secure in what they’re doing, even when what they’re doing has risk and truly frightens them. The way to keep their alarms from going off: commit to figuring out what each teammate needs to feel stable on ordinary days and in times of panic.

Recognize Each Teammate’s Fear Response

The three options to the fear response are fight, flight, or freeze. The way to recognize them in your teammate: Next time you see him under stress or in a situation that scares him–it could be anything from an accelerated deadline to having to give a big presentation—which animal does he remind you of? The lion? The rabbit? Or a deer caught in headlights?

The person who fights is like a lion. He can literally roar, puff out his chest, and he wants to confront the issue head on. He gets angry when a meeting or project isn’t going his way, and like the warrior he feels like he is, or wants to be, his brain will fill him with chemical courage to confront fear.

The person who flees is like a rabbit. Imagine a cute little bunny eating grass in your front yard. The moment the bunny perceives you, it may freeze for an instant, but that’s only because it’s hungry. It’s not really freezing, just continuing to scan the environment as it nibbles, having seen you on its radar. The moment the bunny senses true danger, like a shadow that it thinks is a bunny-eating bird, it runs. So will some of your people; the moment they sense conflict, they will go hide in their cars.

The final option that most of us haven’t been trained to notice, in ourselves or in others, is the freeze response to stress and danger. When a deer gets flashed with headlights, it freezes and there is a high probability of its becoming roadkill. When people freeze, it’s like the case of a wild animal that may allow a possible predator to just move on and not attack it. But that doesn’t work in a team meeting, when a customer is screaming, or rumors of a huge change surface. When teammates are incapable of speech or effective action, they need our help.

When we recognize their fear response, instead of letting it trigger our own response we can create some space around the lion until it turns into a human again, soothe the bunny so it won’t run away, or give the frozen deer a little nudge. We each have different strategies for protecting others from angry people, keeping people engaged, and pulling teammates out of their own heads and into what we’re doing now. It’s when we pay attention to the fact that they are afraid that we can prevent ourselves from overreacting and give them the chance to recover.

Free Lunch, No Chores, Unlimited Learning, and Consistent Messages

Organizations have to pay attention to stability as a whole as well. We can help to prevent our alarms from going off by creating an environment where the resources people need are so available, they can always pour themselves into what they want to do. We can’t prevent mistakes and the occasional disaster, but we can explore the risks of the system where we lead and facilitate the fulfillment of needs. From the basics such as the tools we need to do the job to the kind of emotional support, either from us or an outside coach, the resources we provide are the first step to proving we’re trustworthy as leaders and as representatives of our organization or movement. These examples provide the kind of case studies that will inspire you to think about what needs are and aren’t being filled in your organization and what you can do about it.

Free Lunch on Snow Days

At the Hospital for Special Care, in New Britain, Connecticut, patients rebuild their lives after spinal cord and brain injuries. Whether sustained in a car accident, playing sports, or from diseases like Lou Gehrig’s, when a patient is relearning the activities of daily living so he can go back to being fully independent, missing a day of therapy can affect progress. The relationship with the same therapists and doctors has deep impact on the patient’s ability to heal. Think of the anxiety we feel just changing who cuts our hair. Now imagine recovering from a life-threatening condition, and the value of a team of people who the patient knows will care for him.

So the hospital has a policy: on snow days, employees get free lunch. The benefits to the patients are obvious, but think of the benefit to the leader and the organization. Employees know the hospital values the extra effort the staff makes to show up when there is inclement weather. Team leaders don’t have to reorganize schedules; administrators don’t have to make up for lost billable hours. The CEO of the hospital gets the benefit of employees who share the experience of working together under adverse conditions. They will tell the story of snow days for weeks, if not years, and that positive energy will carry on to the patients that week and throughout their recovery. If each lunch costs $10 and the hospital feeds 250 staff members, $2,500 buys a level of morale and quality care that, were it not for free lunch, would cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost service alone.

Take Away the Chores of Life

Oracle provides free dry-cleaning and photo development. EMC has Spinning and yoga classes on its campus. Google and DreamWorks serve free meals. Timberland pays people to volunteer in the community one week per year. Why do companies offer these benefits? When employees don’t have to run errands, drive to the gym, or go out to lunch, people’s alarms don’t go off. Instead of worrying about personal demands, they can spend a few extra minutes listening to a colleague, thinking up the next great idea, or learning to be a better leader.

Taking away the chores of life doesn’t have to cost anything either. Listening is free. If leaders intentionally book time to have conversations with teammates with one purpose—to hear their needs—one of the most damaging behaviors we all love to practice goes away: complaining. Initial studies have already been done about how we waste time at work and which gender complains more; the data reveal we complain the same amount, we just complain for different reasons.

We don’t have a scientific investigation into the damage created by complaining and the time spent venting about everything that’s wrong in the organizations where we work, but we can already safely offer this observation: a lot of time, energy, and money is wasted when people complain. While the listening leader doesn’t suddenly correct all the reasons for the complaints, she shows that what her teammates think matters, so they know their critiques will be heard and valued, and when efforts are made to fix the problems, the stability stops the complaints in the future—some of them anyway.

Unlimited Learning

In 1995, a consortium of noncompeting Fortune 500 companies formed the world’s largest online resource center. With over 500,000 courses, everything from half-hour sessions on how to run an effective meeting to coursework leading to master’s degrees based on curriculum from Stanford University and the London School of Economics, millions of employees from such charter member companies as GM, Motorola, 3M, Pfizer, and UPS could quite literally learn anything they wanted.

Want your teammates to improve? They need to learn. If you force them into a classroom, they won’t. Provide them with multiple options for when and how to learn, tie that to what you want them to do in their work, and suddenly their curiosity is linked to the production you need. The stability created when people have the chance to learn cannot be completely quantified. The value of ideas generated when teammates have the learning resources they need to inspire their brains is infinitely valuable. We can’t force learning, but we can invite people into the experience of learning and provide them with as many arenas as possible to satisfy their curiosity so they will be excited to contribute to what we want to achieve as a team.

The E-mail They Never Will Forget

In addition to food and the basics of life, all of us need to feel secure where we work. The problem in the twenty-first century is that no organization is ultimately stable. Changing markets and the intense competition of a global economy aren’t going to slow down. So as leaders, while our organizations may not be stable, we have to be. In everything we do, even as sales and balance sheets wobble, we have to be consistent.

The easiest way to do this is to be the same person you were before the changes. One of the clear ways to know if a leader creates stability is in observing how we communicate changes. For instance, when Zappos was sold to Amazon, Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh answered every question in a letter to employees, including the revelation that because the companies would continue to be run separately, employees would not get an Amazon discount, and Amazon employees could have the Zappos discount only if “they bake us cookies and deliver them in person.” That’s the same kind of personality—serious about the business, but with a playful twist—that is Zappos’ culture. Hsieh’s consistency created stability for his team in a time when they would naturally freak out.

A year after Amazon bought Zappos, it bought Woot.com, the retail site that began selling just one deeply discounted item a day. What you’re about to read is not the way a publicly traded CEO would communicate with his team after a purchase or sale. This, however, is exactly the way CEO Matt Rutledge has always communicated. Reading a few excerpts from his letter, ask yourself how you communicate with your team now, and what kind of e-mail you would need to send in a time of insecurity to lead people through the change.

I know I say this every time I find a picture of an adorable kitten, but please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire e-mail. Today is a big day in Woot history. This morning, I woke up to find Jeff Bezos the Mighty had seized our magic sword. Using the Arthurian model as a corporate structure was something our CFO had warned against from the very beginning, but now that’s water under the bridge. What is important is that our company is on the verge of becoming a part of the Amazon.com dynasty. And our plans for Grail.Woot are on indefinite hold . . .

We plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot—with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture.

Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.

If Rutledge had suddenly gotten serious, his people wouldn’t have trusted him. If his people then got worried and serious, the organization would have lost the “snark”; what made the company valuable, which came from the culture’s way of working together as much as the service the company provided, could have disappeared.

The way we write about change, mistakes, and good news either creates trust in who we are and what we’re paying attention to, or we as leaders look like detached automatons with selfish agendas. There is no secret to this kind of communication except knowing that your people need to feel connected to you in times of uncertainty. Be the same person you’ve been that made them want to work with you in good times: when things are falling apart or changing in a way that could feel unstable, they need a few paragraphs from that same guy or gal.

General Mills

As we transition into the second half of this chapter about building a culture of trust, we wanted to highlight a corporation that goes over the top to provide for the needs of its people and creates a working environment where employees get the experience they sign up for. It doesn’t matter which list you go to ranking the best places to work—Fortune, Working Mother, Computerworld, Glassdoor.com—you’re likely to find General Mills.

When these lists are released, blogs fill up with critiques about which companies are really organizations where people want to stay and develop careers, and there inevitably are accusations of false advertising. We chose to highlight General Mills because it is the kind of company where the majority of employees actually agree with the press. Full disclosure: we do not work for General Mills, we have not worked for General Mills, and we do not have friends who will benefit from this case study.

General Mills has spent decades creating a culture where its employees have stability, both the resources they need for their lives and the career development experiences for managers and the culture as a whole. We’re not presenting it as the perfect business. In fact, before we explore what it does, let’s start with the kind of complaints we’ve heard. The company known for Cheerios, Green Giant, and Haagen-Dazs grew slowly in 2010, with sales, up 1 percent in the final quarter of 2010 and earnings per share that were a penny less per share a year earlier.

General Mills is big, with net sales around $16 billion and 33,000 employees, so it’s structure is hierarchical and traditional. Because it hires many of its employees right out of college or graduate school, promotion pools stay full, and career growth can be slow. Employees hired from the outside can have trouble fitting into the culture of teams that have risen through the company together. The company could easily be labeled insular, with a 3-percent voluntary turnover rate among its employees in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, home of its corporate headquarters, and 2 percent nationally—where averages across industries can be as much as 10 times higher.

Every complaint we just presented (that promotions are slow and the culture is insular) is also a reason why General Mills is the kind of stable company where people build careers. General Mills was 155 on the Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest companies in 2010, up from 193 in 2009, and it was the third largest food products company behind Pepsi and Kraft. Being the world’s sixth largest food company, General Mills’ size and famous brands make it the kind of consistent performer—its average growth rate from 1999 to 2009 based on earnings per share was 8.4 percent—where every employee gets to participate in a top-of-class business.

General Mills provides the kind of resources that many companies advertise, and extras that make it possible for teammates to stay for the long term—on-site day care for infants, concierge service, oil changes on site, sabbatical time—and employees use these services. It covers $10,000 of expenses if an employee wants to adopt a child. The company’s 18 employee networks create the inclusivity and camaraderie needed in a big company. Perhaps most important, in a world where employees often feel like their companies don’t care, General Mills’ flextime policies make it possible to take care of family emergencies and needs, and taking the time off will not affect a person’s career.

Let’s back up quickly just to make sure one of those benefits really stuck in your mind: General Mills values life balance. It wants its employees to be able to stay for the long term. It builds trust by really living its policies, such as the $10,000 to help families struggling to have kids adopt a child. A critic could say it’s a cheap publicity stunt, because most families won’t use it. But if you’re a General Mills’ employee, and you want a family, it’s the kind of gift that not only takes care of a deep need, it’s backed up by a culture where you can bring your baby to work and take care of her while still developing your career. In the global recession that started in 2008, General Mills hasn’t cut back on any of its programs.

The way the company develops the talent of its employees is just as intentional and supportive. New hires are mostly pulled right out of school; General Mills has a model that takes employees in departments such as marketing, finance, and IT through rotations of different parts of the business, so not only do they gain a deeper understanding of the company, they become valuable to other companies if General Mills is ultimately not the right fit for them.

Every department has a career path for developing employees, and each employee gets his or her own development plan. While of course managers vary in their effectiveness of developing the plans, the emphasis is exactly the kind of support every leader needs to offer if we want teammates to care about their work and know how to improve what they do. General Mills is a talent academy from which other companies happily hire their people.

General Mills is not the model of how you should create stability in your organization; it’s an example of a company taking advantage of its business strengths to create stability for every teammate. The company couldn’t provide the right culture for someone who wants fast growth. It probably wouldn’t be the right environment for a person who wants speed-of-light innovation. But it is the perfect environment for employees who want a balanced life, and the question for every organization is, “How do we create stability for each employee based on our unique business so that talented people want to stay in our culture?”

Why Trust Is Essential for Stability

Trust happens when three conditions are met: mutual vulnerability, fulfilled expectations, and freedom.

Vulnerability may be the hardest experience for us to welcome into our lives as leaders. First clarification: vulnerable doesn’t mean weak; it means open: open to what other people think, open about our mistakes, and, most important, open to what we don’t know. To be a leader, we think, is to be in control. We cannot control the weather, changes in the global economy, or even what our people do. At the same time, our teams and our organizations are in our hands. What we can control is the environment we establish and whether it produces a culture where people want to work together. When mutual vulnerability is achieved, when both parties know they need each other and we value that need as leaders, trust begins.

It can just as quickly be shut down by expectations not being met. Leaders who say what they’re going to do and fulfill those expectations—and admit when they can’t and tell their people why—are trusted. We know they will make our lives better. We’re not saying that meeting expectations falls entirely on the leader. When our ultimate goal is to create a team of leaders where everyone can lead part of what we’re trying to accomplish, every teammate distinguishes himself by keeping the clear promises he makes. As leaders, however, we have to meet the expectations we set, or others can’t or won’t.

Openness and met expectations still won’t build trust, however, without the third core experience: freedom. If we don’t give people freedom, they can’t amaze us. There is nothing worse than the leader who needs us, shows us how to have an impact, and then as we pour our guts into the work, she keeps micromanaging how we work. She checks in too often, frequently asking how it’s going. It’s worse than the leader who never checks in, because the leader who tries to control us makes us feel unsafe.

With clarity about what a person is doing and why, leaders need to provide each teammate the freedom to operate according to his natural way of working and living or he will pay attention to the interruptions rather than what he needs and wants to do. When we commit to create an environment where we meet expectations, value team members individually, and promote their freedom to achieve in the way that is most meaningful for them, our teammates will trust us. That trust becomes a powerful, contagious attitude with which we produce extraordinary results because we trust our efforts lead somewhere important.

How to Create a Culture of Trust

We can’t force trust. We can’t make someone trust us even if we want to. We earn it. When a team trusts a leader, it is because they have no doubt that the leader can take them where they want to go. Measuring trust is actually quite simple: pay attention to deadlines and meetings. When people get their work done when they say they will and they show up to meetings when they need to be there, there is trust between people and the direction of the organization. For teammates who don’t trust that we have their best interest at the top of our minds or think that our organization is not going to be the best for their future, their work slows and either they don’t show up to meetings, or if they do, they don’t contribute.

Here are some of the most important ways to build trust that we hope will inspire you to engage your teammates with or discover your own methods for creating the connections that people crave.

Start with a Development Plan

As we talked about with Jack, a development plan is a series of objectives and goals with the actions clearly laid out, both what he’ll do and how we’ll support him, to help a person achieve. Let’s go deeper into how to create a development plan your people will take seriously, so this way of building trust will become a natural habit in how you lead.

First, the planning doesn’t start on paper. Remember the first two meetings described in Chapter 1 (the five-minute, then the hour-long)? That’s your starting point. We have to be clear about what the other person wants and why. To emphasize it one more time, if we don’t know the person, if we don’t seek to truly understand her, we’re just managing her work. To lead, we have to make what we do take her where she wants to go as well.

Second, in a conversation—not on paper or through e-mails—we have a dialogue about the organizational goals that we need to accomplish. In a movement or volunteer organization, we have these conversations to rally the troops and find out the ways to connect each person to the goal in a way that will keep him or her inspired. In corporate America, the goals are typically pushed down from the top. We need to hit a certain level of production, sales, or widgets per hour. Our job is to make these goals applicable to each teammate.

We make organizational goals relevant to each teammate by creating two or three personal goals for each individual’s work. These are the things he wants to do better or differently. The goals need to be specific and things that each of you can create a measure of success for. Think of the objectives as what you want to do (“I want to be a better public speaker”) and the goal as how you are going to do it (“I will lead a team meeting once a month”). The key to this exercise is to be challenging, yet realistic. Do not choose goals that you cannot achieve within the given time frame.

The reason: back to those devices buzzing in our pockets. If we want people to stay engaged, the work they do has to satisfy their yearning to be valuable. If we can’t make that happen, they have a social network at their fingertips that will pull them toward another place: to work, to use their talent, or to offer their volunteer time. “Engagement” is being talked about in HR circles as if it were something a computer program can solve. It simply isn’t that complicated: every leader has to make everything we do help our people get closer to what they want. That is the most stable ground we can create for any person.

Once we have goals and a time frame, then comes the tough part of self-assessing what we’re good at and how we could be better. Once you believe the goals are achievable, and that they apply to what it is you’re trying to accomplish together, then you’re ready to put it on paper, capturing:

• What you want to do (objective)

• How you are going to do it (goal)

• What you need to be successful (resources)

• How you will both know it’s working (measurement)

• When you will review to ensure it’s working, or alter plans (time frame)

Up until now you’ve had informal, guided discovery through conversation. This is the time to get very structured and document the criteria above, as it will come into play during your regular interactions to measure progress. It is in measuring our progress that we keep people motivated, whether we’re trying to keep our neighborhood safe or raise profits.

The development plan is the foundation of our relationship going forward, both what we reference when things aren’t going well and the road map we look at to verify that we’ve reached goals worth celebrating. Trust falls apart in organizations when we have conversations and then over time, our memories change. We think we asked someone to do something and made clear how we want it done, and then it doesn’t happen. The development plan is the collective memory that keeps every teammate clear and stable as we achieve together.

Offer Regular Updates

If we want teammates to trust us, we have to keep them in the loop. There are few things that cause insecurity quicker than not having information. Here is the simplest mistake made by leaders, executive teams, and boards everywhere: they go behind closed doors and then come out without providing the conclusions from their discussions and how it will affect what will happen next. Of course, leaders need to have private conversations. Of course, executive teams and boards need to keep some plans and strategies to themselves when the information is proprietary or talking openly about what’s going to happen could incite panic or cause the initiative to fail.

And, as human beings, we are driven by the gratification that what we do is working. As leaders, as we said in Chapter 1, we are each teammate’s personal GPS system. As the systems in our vehicles rely on coordinates to determine where we are and where we want to go, we have to provide our people with constant updates so they can stay on the right path. That doesn’t mean they need to have every piece of information in our heads; it necessitates that they have the information they need to trust that we’re not going to surprise them and sink their ship.

A classic example that throws most leaders: layoffs. When there is going to be a change in the organization, it will cause anxiety. The anxiety is inevitable. Go behind closed doors and come out without talking to people about what they need to do to be part of the team, and everyone will panic. Whether at a weekly one-on-one or a companywide meeting where people can ask questions, we have to keep people connected to what’s happening so they can be valuable participants. Regular updates about the information people need to be their best is an easy way to create the trust essential for stability; or conversely, we sabotage our leadership by not providing enough information.

Practice Tactical Drills

Creating the development plan is a wonderful first step. Keeping people updated builds trust, because no one wonders if his situation is going to change suddenly. Practicing the skills needed to elevate what you do is the key to making development stick. For example, let’s take a look at how simple acts of practice and repetition created one of the most recognized leaders in sports history. Whether or not you are a fan of American football, chances are you know what the Super Bowl is. The trophy for football’s biggest game is named for a man who used tactical drills of the simplest plays to win championships.

Vince Lombardi’s playbook was one-third the size of other teams when he coached the Green Bay Packers to victory in the first Super Bowl. Lombardi created the stability needed by practicing maneuvers to make fewer plays pay off. His signature play, the “power sweep,” was the envy of every team in the NFL. He started and finished every single practice running the power sweep. When a reporter asked him about the play, he said,

You think there’s anything special about this sweep? Well, there isn’t. It’s as basic a play as there can be in football. We simply do it over and over and over. There can never be enough emphasis on repetition. I want my players to be able to run this sweep in their sleep. If we call the sweep twenty times, I’ll expect it to work twenty times . . . not eighteen, not nineteen. We do it often enough in practice so that no excuse can exist for screwing it up.

There are specific behaviors and activities that we need our teammates to be able to execute every time.

Like Shackleton’s team climbing Mount Erebus before they even tried to reach the South Pole, we have to identify the specific behaviors that need to be practiced until they become natural. Too often we send our people to a two-day course and expect them to become experts on a product, vastly improve their behaviors, or become effective leaders and managers. The skills we identify as essential in what each teammate does have to be practiced in our regular interactions.

We have to open and close meetings with drills like Lombardi’s, or put practice time for key behaviors into every person’s regular schedule. We have to do it, because if we, the leaders, don’t promote practicing, as our organizations are understaffed and schedules are packed, our people won’t practice. They may even want to, but it just won’t rise to the top of their priorities.

The reason drills are so important in our constantly changing world: all of us are constantly adapting. Lombardi wasn’t leading his team to become robots, and neither are we. We can’t give instructions and have them fulfill the needs for the whole month, quarter, or year. Our people, like the Packers making subtle adjustments to how and where they moved each time they ran the sweep, need the comfort with their core behaviors, so when we need them to adapt, they don’t get angry, freeze, or quit. The Packers had the stability to make the fine adjustments in the heat of the moment, and that was possible only because they were so secure in all the options. Tactical drills of key behaviors are how we give our own team the same kind of confidence.

What to Do with Emotion

There’s one more section we have to include in creating stability, because if we get it wrong as leaders, emotion can blow up every effort we make to provide resources and build trust. One of the biggest ways to create instability in a team is to handle emotions poorly. It can feel as though some days we need to be psychologists if we actually want to help our people work together. We don’t. But again, we do have to pay attention to others with a sincere thoughtfulness that they can feel and believe in, because our actions have to match our words.

What matters as leaders is that we take other people’s emotions seriously. Too often, as we try to solve problems, we want to solve emotions. People get emotional for so many reasons, and we can’t control their reactions—to what we do and to what they feel based on what’s going on in their personal lives. We don’t need a degree in social work to be a leader, but we have to take emotion seriously. We have to notice emotions, and here are a few of the ways we can build lasting trust by gracefully handling what people feel.

Make Sure They Know We Noticed

One of your teams has just finished a project, and their smiles are ear to ear. But you just got yelled at by senior management about your progress on work with a different team. Even though this team did brilliant work, you spread a little of your frustration around. You nitpick. You don’t like the font they used for the headings, and you tell them. Now they hate you. If this happens once in a while, they’ll forgive you; but they’ll never totally forget.

When our teams succeed, even if we need more out of them, we have to stop and celebrate with them. We have to validate that they’ve done something they’re proud of. That doesn’t mean we have to go buy them a cake and flowers; it means we need to smile too, offer a few words of praise, and savor the good moments together—and cake never hurts.

Just as we can destroy a team by raining on their celebrations, if we don’t notice when people are struggling in their personal lives, they will stop trusting us. Here’s a daily or weekly scenario on every team: one of your best people, someone you want to stay on your team, cancels a meeting with you because of personal issues. You don’t ask her about it until the next week, not wanting to be nosy.

There is almost never a moment where a leader shouldn’t at least pick up the phone or send a quick e-mail that says, “Is everything all right?” If the person doesn’t want to talk about it, she won’t. But if she needs you for a few minutes, you may have just earned a teammate for life. You don’t have to become her therapist to show that you’re aware she’s going through hard times. If you’re worried that she’ll talk forever or discuss something you’re not comfortable with, simply say, “I have only a few minutes, but I wanted to check in quickly to see if you’re OK.” Your job is not to fix her problems, but to let her know that you know she is struggling. If she needs more time than you can give her at the moment, you can set up more time for later or direct her to the resources that will support her return to health.

When They Get Angry, Show Magnanimity

When people disrespect you, if you don’t fall for the trap and continue to give them an opportunity to succeed, others will trust you no matter what. A classic example is the older male barking at the younger female, even when she’s the boss. It is easy for us to argue when someone yells at us. As a leader, it can be even easier to use our authority to put someone in his or her place.

It is very normal to want to assert that we’re right, to relish the squashing of the person who has been a perennial pain and whom we just wish would go away. And while it’s completely normal when we feel that way, if we behave that way we’re not leading. Sometimes, as a leader when the lion roars, if we smile and show respect for how much that person cares about what we’re doing, we show ourselves to be the kind of stable presence who others will listen to when it really matters.

Hold Bad News

There will be bad news that no one on your team can do anything about. The obvious question is: when do I tell them? The general rule in keeping the commitment to stability is, once you know for sure. If there is any chance they can affect the outcome and the challenge to overcome is clear, you want them working on the problem. Sometimes, though, there truly is nothing that can be done.

For instance, your team has been working on the deal of the century. It’s a creative partnership that’s never been done before. It will fill your entire sales quota for the year, and it’s only January. The problem is, there is a conflict of interest with a government agency. Your team is grinding away to make the deal happen, but the new laws may make the project impossible. Our job as leaders is to create stability. As soon as you know the problem will get in the way, your team needs to know too. That’s the kind of regular update that builds trust. If it’s the kind of problem that you can take care of yourself, that’s what leaders do to maintain stability and help their people stay focused on what they can control.

Provide Two Choices to People Who Are Stuck

A final behavior that creates stability has to do with people who get stuck because of their emotions. In teaching, when students can’t focus in class, teachers give them two choices: put their mind back into the work or go to the principal’s office. Our brains get completely overwhelmed when we have too many choices. When fear, panic, or anger gets into the work of our teammates, one of the best ways we can create stability is to provide them with two choices.

A teammate doesn’t know what her priority should be: go through the list together two by two and help her discover which is more important. A teammate is in a rage about a colleague or experience: offer him two options about what to do with his anger, such as go home to get some rest or focus on a particular project. When groups of people freeze in the understandable emotion of a world where so much changes so fast, we can also give our teams two choices of where to place their attention, and set them free to act on what’s most important right now.

Simple Assessments: What Do You Need?

The simplest assessment that proves we’re committed to the stability of our teammates is to ask the question, “What do you need?” Then, whether we’re answering the question for ourselves or listening for their response, we have to pause. We may have to pause for a long time. Too many organizations pay little or no attention to need. We’re paying attention to metrics, budgets, performance management systems, and the screens (the screens are your computer, laptop, tablet, smart phone—and if you’re super old-school, a phone or beeper that you keep around because, even though you never use them, they remind you of a simpler time).

When asking about need, most of the time, at least at first, we don’t get an immediate answer. We have coached people for years, and after literally years of starting out the weekly conversation with “What do you need?” the question still surprises them. They still don’t know. Apollo’s temple at Delphi had the inscription “Know Thyself.” That phrase has been attributed to dozens of sages and used by thinkers from Socrates to Emerson. The reason: we don’t—too often we don’t know ourselves, what we need, or how to go about getting it.

Enter the leader. We have the opportunity every time we sit down with a teammate or a small group, and even at company-wide meetings, to address what people need. To pay attention to the needs of our people is to create an experience of working together where we can’t get distracted. After creating clarity, which is the first way to provide stability, fulfilling needs, whether based on Maslow’s hierarchy or on our own observations of what produces connected relationships and meaningful progress, may be the most important thing a leader can do for her people. No matter what we say, whatever our ideas, they will remember if we notice what they needed and deliver on our promise to provide.

So first, ask yourself, “What do I need to have unshakable stability in the work I’m doing?” Don’t judge your answers. Some of us need money; others need teammates; and some people need a quiet room to think and create. Now think about Jack. Do you know what he needs? Do you know what your team needs?

Kennedy thought about his crew and made sure they had food and safety. Harriet Tubman used words and a pistol to remind people that freedom always overcame fear. Shackleton anticipated the needs of a team of 14 men and provided plenty of bacon, the reminder of home they needed when living all alone for two years in the darkest place on Earth. What do you, your teammates, and your team as a whole need as a group to produce?

The power of committing to stability is not that it immediately generates results; it is the launching point from which the greatest possible results are produced. Without stability, no human being will take risks. As leaders, when we pay attention to what our people need—providing every kind of resource and the behaviors, such as development plans, regular updates, tactical drills, and paying attention to emotions that build trust—not only do they know we care about more than results, they learn to pay attention too. A team that pays attention to need is ready to fulfill it, and fulfilling the commitment to stability is the only way we can find a rhythm where more of the results we want are possible.