Trust and Inspire

Stephen Covey is the founder of CoveyLink and the FranklinCovey Global Trust Practice. He is also a keynote speaker and adviser specializing in trust, inspiration, leadership, ethics, and collaboration. He is the former CEO of Covey Leadership Center which, under his direction, became the world's largest leadership development company. He is the author of the bestselling The Speed of Trust and co-author of Smart Trust. Stephen M.R. Covey is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Brigham Young University.

The traditional "Command-&-Control" leadership style was that there was a job to be done, and the leader's responsibility was to leverage people and resources to accomplish the task at hand. Did this leadership style really work all that well? Probably not most of the time.

The world has changed and moved on. Thanks to various emerging forces, old-school Command-&- Control techniques have been superseded by a better way to lead — "Trust-&-Inspire".

Today's most effective leaders don't try and bulldoze people to do their work. Instead, leaders today achieve far more by inspiring and empowering their people, and then trusting them to tap into their innate talents and potential. This approach produces far better performance, and is, in fact, a new and better way to lead.

Forget about trying to Command-&-Control. Trust-&-Inspire your way forward.

1. The future of leadership. The world has changed, and so has the nature of work, the workplace, and the makeup of the workforce. Yet for decades, Command-&-Control has been patched and propped to make do as a leadership style. Incremental improvements will no longer work. It's time for a new style of business leadership.

2. Becoming a Trust-&-Inspire leader. To change from Command-&-Control to a Trust-&-Inspire leadership style, start by looking at your paradigms about people and leadership. Once you do that, start viewing leadership as a stewardship. Specifically, there are three stewardships that you need to be good at to excel as a Trust-&-Inspire leader:

3. Overcoming the five barriers. To succeed in becoming a Trust-&-Inspire leader, there are five generic, pretty much universal roadblocks you'll have to overcome:

4. The new way to lead. To become a Trust-&-Inspire leader, become a Trust-&-Inspire person first. Recognize there is greatness in the people around you, and trust them to deliver great results. Trust-&-Inspire is not only a better way to lead, it's also a better way to live.

1. Forget a command-and-control leadership style. It's doesn't work at all well today. Instead, trust-and-inspire your people.
2. Always view leadership as a stewardship. It's your job to model the right way to act, to trust your people to figure things out, and to inspire them to go above and beyond. This is the best way to lead in the digital era of business.

What's the best way to motivate employees? That's the topic which Stephen M.R. Covey tackles in this week's book, TRUST & INSPIRE. The author's father was Stephen Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame. I was intrigued that the son (Stephen M.R.) was actually in charge of the marketing strategy for his father's book, which ended up becoming one of the two most influential business books of the twentieth century according to CEO Magazine. Stephen M.R. then joined his father's leadership training company as a client developer, then national sales manager, and finally president and CEO. During his tenure, the company achieved Inc. 500 status, doubled its revenues twelve times, increased shareholder value by sixty-seven times, and merged with FranklinQuest to form FranklinCovey, the world's largest leadership development company.

So basically Stephen M.R. Covey knows what's he's talking about when he says the best way to motivate people is to forget the conventional command and control approach. Instead, trust and inspire them. Empower them. View leadership as a stewardship rather than a gravy train, and work to model the right behavior, trust your people, and do things which inspire them to chase greatness. This really is a better way to lead and grow an enterprise.

"It's time for a new way to lead. It’s time for a new style of leadership—one that is relevant for our times. This workforce demands a new kind of leader—a leader who can see, develop, and unleash the greatness in every person. A leader who can model authentic behavior with humility and courage. A leader who can inspire others." — Stephen M.R. Covey

Could be something in that idea.