Trust is the thing every leader depends on and almost no one builds on purpose. In this conversation, Jenni sits down with Dr. Rob McKenna, founder of WiLD Leaders and author of Whole Leaders, Wild Trust, to talk about why trust is a byproduct of leader development, not a topic you can lecture your way into.

Dr. Rob has spent decades running longitudinal leadership studies, including a six-and-a-half-year study following 120 leaders in aerospace, plus research with several thousand engineers moving into leadership roles and a multi-year study of leaders in large church organizations. What emerged surprised him: as teams did the work of understanding their own competence, motivation, and purpose together, they started trusting each other — without anyone naming trust as the goal.

Jenni and Dr. Rob dig into why trust feels like air (essential, invisible, impossible to grab), what happens when a CEO's read on their culture is rosier than their employees', and the single question a leader can bring to their team on Monday morning that opens the door to real candor.

What you'll hear

  • Why leader development and trust building turn out to be the same work
  • Whether trust is genuinely harder to build today, and what social media may be doing to our appetite for candor
  • The trust quadrant: team trust on one axis, organizational trust on the other — and what it means to be in the "jungle" versus the "stronghold"
  • The uncomfortable pattern in the data: leaders of low-trust organizations tend to think things are better than they are, while high-trust CEOs are accurate or under-rate their own culture
  • Why the leaders most afraid to measure trust are usually the ones who already know it's low
  • Jenni on the delta between how leaders experience culture and how employees do

Connect with Dr. Rob McKenna

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