TRUST AND LEADERSHIP

"Trust is a bigger compliment than love." This statement in the early days of my career was made by a boss who trusted me to the core. Yet trust based largely on belief and faith runs counter to the basic tenets of administration that advocates a mild dose of skepticism with one and all. Leaders who handle people more than wealth that too in a power situation all the more practice it to perfection.

Doubt for them is not suspicion but absence of trust in entirety. Leaders accept integrity as a virtue and respect people to enhance their recognition and credibility, yet hold the ace of counter check to ensure that no failure happens for want of control. It is not just financial integrity but also sincerity, reliability, fairness, loyalty, commitment and all of them with consistency are demanded by leaders as they work thro people. To ensure that it is maintained and not tampered by personal ambition, forces leaders to maintain a dose of skepticism.

In leadership positions achieved through competition wherein competitors are accommodated as colleagues, the leaders all the more hold skepticism as a tool in the backend and display trust in the frontend. Competition forces such fear of trust among leaders and a tall leader would always hold his cards close to the chest be it strategy, finance or personal targets and ambitions.

Thus trust would flow freely to people who mind their work and do not compete to grab other's positions and also to those who have limited ambition and limitations of talent to grow. But to those who burn with ambition there is always distrust waiting in the corridor from rivals especially if the rivals are colleagues with similar goal.

  

Allies or friends are people who stand with leaders during their thick and thin. Yet a true leader would live in a ring of caution to ensure that they know many things but not everything especially related to matters of high secret. A leader by the very leadership definition has to do things that annoys or uses such close aids but all of them choose to stay together for the common good. 

Like a sweet turns sour a friend turns foe as relationships break and all the tolerance and sacrifices get retained in the mind and the favors and benefits derived vanishes in thin air. It may happen from both ends only that the one who endured more decides to hasten it. The proverb "last straw on camel's back" comes into operation in many cases. A successful leader realizes this and hence puts a fence of secrecy around him.

Strange and weird but true are these games of leadership and Trust.