I was at a leadership training workshop recently. This was part of a six-session course about leadership. The theme of this particular session was that the most important quality in a leader is trustworthiness, and that the most important thing a leader can do is establish and nurture trust. While there are other important leadership qualities, to be sure, according to this training session, trust rises to the top.
Going to this session got me thinking about leadership and the various ways that it plays out for us, the different ways that each of us understands and experiences leadership. And I started to wonder: if I asked a hundred people at random what was most important to them about their leaders or about themselves as a leader, how many times would trust come up? Do all people frame what is important to them about their leaders or about leading in terms of trust? How else do they talk about it?
This is not a research project that I necessarily want to undertake. My point is that effective leadership probably looks quite differently to different people, based on their backgrounds, experiences, and personal proclivities. Can all of those differences be reconciled under the umbrella of trust?