Trusting Leaders Under Pressure By Dr. Rob McKenna

What You Need to Know About Trust and Pressure

Trust is one of the most valuable resources in every organization. When trust is high, decisions flow like streams of intelligent consciousness, and work becomes a missional rhythm rather than a dreaded trudge through the mud. When it is common and deep, honesty, humility, and courage flow through our veins, and our people innovate, dream, and execute the visions created in our organizations.

Trust is the natural lubricant that creates opportunity, possibility, wellness, and the highest performance levels. Unfortunately, far too many of us experience the opposite. We experience a depletion of trust that creates corrosion and rust in the machines of our lives and infections into the lifeblood of our relationships that make our organizations move and flourish. 

At the same time, trust is too often treated as fragile that it is lost and gained in moments instead of built and sustained over years of working on a mission together. Trust is not built and broken in the healthiest organizations but is questioned and sustained. We all ask for the trust we place in each other at different times. The healthiest organizations create cultures working hard at trust because they know that when it is there for the long haul, it bridges the necessary gap between our human beings and our human doing – between our operations and systems and the people who use those systems together every day. 

Leading Under Pressure

Years ago, I created the Leading Under Pressure Inventory—a rigorous and practical assessment of a person’s default tendencies under pressure and the unique strengths they bring to high-pressure moments. The development of this particular tool in our WiLD Trust Platform was critical because pressure is such a fundamental element in our faith, learning, performance, and wholeness as human beings. We don’t have to be convinced by the decades of research on leaders and their learning to know that pressure is important.

We experience its importance every day. Research on leadership performance and development has taught us that pressure is both a key indicator and a necessary catalyst. As a leading indicator, pressure tells us that something is changing and that we are in the midst of something important. But pressure is more than an indicator of change.

Pressure is a catalyst for learning. While pressure is challenging at times, it is also necessary for growth. Times of high pressure often involve constraint, narrowing, and focusing. They are not fun, but those constraints cause us to focus on things that matter. Times of pressure bring out an honesty in our awareness of ourselves and others as they strip us down to our basics. They are moments to pause, reflect, and refocus in their best form. In their worst form, they are moments to double down on our stubbornness, our need for control, and our default to be right instead of righteous. 

The Aspiration

Trust requires honesty about my integrity, abilities, reliability, strengths, and limitations. When anything requires honesty, it also requires vulnerability—a willingness to say, “I got it wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Trust requires us to know ourselves and others well enough to see things as they are, not as I want to see them. It requires ongoing maintenance of that knowledge because, as human beings, we are in a constant state of learning and growth – we are changing. 

This is precisely why an honest and flowing understanding of our presence under pressure is crucial to building trust. If we understand our temptations and defaults in the most challenging moments, we are ready for those moments. We realize that pressure is hard, but it is also necessary. If we know ourselves better, accurately understand the strengths we bring and the shadow tendencies that get in our way, and begin to share those things with others, whole and sustaining trust begins to be built. 

We must know each other to trust each other in the hardest moments of our daily work together. And to know each other, we must know ourselves. 

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Dr. Rob McKenna is the CEO and Founder of WiLD Leaders, Inc., Named one of the top 30 I-O Psychologists alive today. Dr. McKenna is passionate about developing whole leaders, increasing performance and well-being, and creating whole and sustaining trust.

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