We all mess up sometimes in our leadership.
And whether the issue is a failure of competence or a failure of character, our next question is often, “How do I rebuild the trust I just lost?”
It’s easy to get caught up in mechanics. What should I say? How should I structure my apology? How do I show them I had good intentions?
Whatever happened may have hurt your team, your peers, your senior leaders, or maybe even all three. You know your reputation suffered, and you want to rebuild.
There’s a bit of a paradox, though, in restoring trust.
On the one hand, if your focus is on perfecting the actions you need to take to look trustworthy again, you’ll struggle. The carefully crafted apology statement will sound rehearsed. New behaviors will appear to be a performance.
Instead of asking what you can do to look trustworthy again, explore how you can actually become a person who is more trustworthy in the area where you stumbled.
And that will look different depending on whether that stumble was one of competence, reliability, honesty, discernment, care for others, or something else.
But here’s where the paradox comes in. Any internal change you experience won’t help rebuild trust until others can perceive that change. Restoration happens on other people’s timelines, based on what they observe.
So you have to let them observe your internal change.
Sometimes that means accepting more oversight, sharing more details, inviting more feedback, or even relaxing some of your boundaries and letting people encroach on your personal space.
Rebuilding trust is one of the most difficult challenges in all of life. It does require visible change, but that change needs to start with the invisible.
If you’d like a confidential thinking partner to explore the details of your specific situation, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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