Wanna See Us Naked?
Wanna See Us Naked?
Leadership Land reader check-in #2: building trust with radical transparency | Beating ourselves over the heads with a consistent posting schedule
Imagine you’re in a training seminar. The instructor walks into the room and dumps a sack of screwdrivers, power drills, and Swiss army knives on the table in front of you. After showing you how each tool works, he says “my work is done here. Good luck building your space station!”
Now imagine you’re at leadership training. The instructor walks into the room and presents a PowerPoint of icebreakers, motivational quotes, and teambuilding exercises. After going through each slide, she says “my work is done here. Good luck building trust with your team!”
Conventional training is reliant on the belief that “if we give leaders more tools, they will achieve better results!” The instructors hand us a sack of assorted tools, and assume we’ll figure out the blueprints on our own. But without understanding what trust actually is, leaders are stuck in “spray and pray” mode: indiscriminately spraying random trust-building techniques at people, and praying that something sticks.
Self-Censorship in the Desert of Good Intentions
Worse still: conventional trainings never address mistrust. Teaching leaders to build trust while neglecting mistrust is like teaching a teenager how to use a credit card without mentioning the downsides of debt. Or teaching a pilot to fly a plane in ideal conditions while neglecting all the things that could go wrong.
Why do instructors neglect mistrust? We suspect they’re sterilizing their curriculum of any negativity to avoid upsetting their trainees. Sure, it’s well-intentioned. It’s also paternalistic and insulting. By neglecting mistrust, instructors deprive many leaders because a few couldn’t handle the truth.
We went to leadership training with a craving for triple chocolate cake, but all we got was a bowl of raw radishes. So we baked our own cake. We wrote eight uncensored articles on trust and mistrust (nine if you count this one). We want to provide you a deeper understanding of trust and mistrust. We want you to think critically about building trust intentionally and thoughtfully, instead of using the spray-and-pray approach that results in those awkward potlucks where people self-segregate into their usual cliques.
It’s time to show, not tell. Let’s run an intentional trust-building exercise between reader and author, using the Temple of Trust analogy from two posts ago.
Mixing the Mortar of Vulnerability
A brief refresher: we previously defined “trust” as the willingness to give someone the power to harm you, and hoping they won’t. This means that vulnerability is a non-negotiable ingredient in building trust:
Trust – Vulnerability = Expectations
Trust = Expectations + Vulnerability
If you sweep a cup of tea off your desk, you expect it to fall and create a mess at your feet. If you share several polite interactions with acquaintances in your office building, you expect the civility to continue. But without either side offering vulnerability to the other, there’s zero trust1.
Now consider situations where you expose vulnerabilities to someone else.
You share secrets with a confidant, who can divulge them to score social currency with someone else.
You confide your deepest fears to your spouse, who can exploit them to manipulate you.
You leave town for several weeks, and invite a friend to housesit. Your friend can invade your privacy and steal your stuff.
You express your frustrations to your boss, who can retaliate by writing that you’re “emotionally unstable” on your next performance appraisal.
You grant building/network access to a subordinate, who can abuse those resources to run a black-market drug business.
Exposing vulnerabilities and expecting (hoping) that the other person doesn’t harm you builds trust. If they betray you, it damages trust. Constant vigilance against the possibility of betrayal is mistrust.
To deliberately build trust with you, we must expose our vulnerabilities to you. We will give you reasons to stop reading, and hope that you won’t.
Should You Trust or Mistrust Us?
We recently re-wrote our About page to better explain our “getting good by not being bad” approach to leadership. Please take a moment to read that, then come back. It’ll set the stage for this trust-building exercise.
Greetings, Fellow Human. Let Us Exchange Auditory Data.
Let’s start with the obvious hurdle: we’re internet strangers. It’s really hard to build trust with a faceless entity operating out of some undisclosed location. Given recent advances in AI technology, how do you know that you’re reading words written by an actual human being?
Despite the trust-building value of revealing our identities, we intend on maintaining the Veil of Internet Anonymity for a while. Anonymity allows us to:
Invite you (an internet stranger, from our perspective) into our inner world and darkest thoughts without sacrificing our psychological safety.
Be brutally honest about our imperfections without sabotaging our real-life leadership roles.
Write candidly about mental illness, attraction to coworkers, and other taboo-but-relevant topics without destroying the polite fictions that lubricate real-life social interactions.
Use fake names like Company McCorporateface, Inc. to learn from other people’s mistakes without damaging their reputations.
→ Reasons to trust us: The Veil of Internet Anonymity creates a paradox of intimacy where we can freely expose our vulnerabilities to you precisely because we don’t know each other.
→ Reasons to mistrust us: There’s no way for you to tell whether we’re making all this up. In fact, we might be robots pretending to be humans, and you’d never know2.
How Many HBS Degrees Does it Take to Bake a Cake?
An excerpt from our About page:
Instead of boasting about our credentials and leadership accomplishments, we’ll take the opposite approach of claiming zero expertise (hence our empty suit logo).
We chose to self-impose this “zero credentials, zero expertise” limitation because:
The people with the fanciest credentials aren’t always the most credible. Academic ornamentation often makes people more interested in defending their intellectual turf than truth-seeking.
Even if past accomplishments and credentials mattered, the Veil of Internet Anonymity prevents us from proving ours to you.
Most of our role models and mentors (both dead and alive) achieved eminence by practicing leadership, not by pursuing fancy degrees and credentials.
The more credentials we claim, the greater incentive we have to bombastically utilize ostentatious verbiage for the purposes of fabricating a precarious veneer of erudition3.
That means Adventures in Leadership Land will not start out as a full-service restaurant. Until we earn your trust, we will be a tiny bakery that only serves triple chocolate cake…and we want to serve you excellent cake. Writing in the mornings and evenings forces us to distill our thoughts, which improves how we perform our day jobs, which generates new experiences that fuel further writing. It’s a virtuous cycle of learning, self-improvement, and cake consumption.
The ingredients we’ll be using in our cake:
Logos. Adherence to via negativa means focusing on what not to do. Confirmation of truth is much harder to accomplish than disconfirmation of falsehoods. We’ve chosen to eschew any credibility that allows us to do the former, so we’ll focus on the latter.
Pathos. Observant readers may recognize certain things, but lack the vocabulary to express them. We want to listen to the music of your soul and sing its melodies back to you.
Ethos. Sometimes we’ll borrow other people’s credibility when we need to make a point. This is icing on the cake – a nonessential ingredient to make the cake more palatable.
→ Reasons to trust us: We need no credentials to truth-seek by eliminating falsehoods, or to elucidate truths that already exist in your head.
→ Reasons to mistrust us: Instead of outsourcing your “who should I listen to?” decision to an authoritative third party, you’ll have to think critically and decide for yourself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Great Internet Popularity Contest
You’ve undoubtedly noticed the “Share this post” and “Subscribe now” prompts at the bottom of each post. Sometimes, we stick them awkwardly into the middle of a long post, like this:
That’s because we want to make it easier for you to spread the heterodoxy of Leadership Land far and wide. We also want to earn subscribers, because each subscription is valuable feedback for us – it’s an honest signal that you have deemed our work to be worthy of your attention.
There’s an ulterior motive here, and we won’t sugarcoat it: earning subscribers satisfies our craven desire for approbation. We rarely receive feedback from subordinates or superiors in real life unless we prompt them (or when the annual performance review compels them). So we compensate by seeking feedback from internet strangers. It doesn’t have to be positive feedback; we love constructive criticism. Even insults are preferable to silence; it’s more insulting to be forgotten.
→ Reasons to trust us: We have an incentive to produce quality content in exchange for internet points, the same way a housebroken dog performs tricks for treats.
→ Reasons to mistrust us: We have an incentive to engage in shady tactics (clickbait titles, pandering to the lowest common denominator, unscrupulous marketing) to feed our hunger for social currency.
What Terribad Cosmo Advice (Meant for Horny Teenagers) Taught Us About Conflicts of Interest
We’re organizational leaders by day, but we aspire to be internet beggars by night. One day, we want to convert Adventures in Leadership Land into a paid newsletter. We have no idea when, and we haven’t decided which articles will be paywalled. “Making money on the internet, eventually” is the kind of amorphous desire that executive coaches warn us against – the exact opposite of a SMART goal. We might as well make a New Year’s resolution to get six-pack abs while inhaling industrial quantities of triple chocolate cake.
We have no ambitions of buying a diamond-encrusted yacht – we want to set up a paid newsletter to insulate ourselves against job loss. One of the downsides of practicing what we preach about paranoia means that we’re painfully aware of our disposability to Corporate America. Having a backup income stream would provide us some measure of psychological safety in the face of economic uncertainty.
Going paid would also land us in the Straits of Conflicting Interests. Many years ago, we were browsing an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (don’t judge). We found atrocious sex advice that was titillating, but could foreseeably turn a frisky romp in the bedroom into a hysterical visit to the emergency room. We found dating advice that could produce short-term results, but almost guaranteed a trail of misery and shattered relationships in the long-term. We realized that Cosmopolitan had two twisted incentives:
Provide advice that’s good enough to attract readers
Suppress advice that’s so good that readers would no longer need Cosmo.
We scoffed at the magazine back then. Yet today, we find ourselves trapped in the same incentive structure.
→ Reasons to trust us: Voting with your dollars would encourage us to write well, and often. Paying us for content removes all excuses to not deliver on the promised triple chocolate cake.
→ Reasons to mistrust us: We have an incentive to provide advice that’s good enough to keep you interested, but not so good that you no longer need Adventures in Leadership Land.
Weeding our Gardens in the Nude
Long before we heard of radical transparency, we practiced it. As youngsters, we grew tired of dating rules like “playing hard to get” or “don’t call for X days after a date.” We didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but we intuited that these behaviors fostered mistrust. So we took the contrarian approach, putting our weirdness and idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities on full display. One of us proudly proclaimed ownership of more library cards than credit cards.
Yes, we were unpopular. Yes, it destroyed some of the sexy mystique of dating. But when we found someone who not only tolerated our weirdness but embraced it, it was like finding a kindred spirit. By displaying our authentic, vulnerable selves to the world, we rapidly built trust with compatible people and filtered out everyone else.
Then we grew up, entered the workforce, and realized with dismay that the grown-ups hadn’t actually grown up. Middle-aged adults interview for jobs in a manner similar to how acne-scarred teenagers search for a prom date. The dating rules are now codified as “best practices” and “standard operating procedures” – the same drivel, dressed up in more elegant packaging. Instead of building trust, we habitually hide behind layers of cover-your-assets (CYA) documentation and legal boilerplate, which are manifestations of mistrust.
Sure, all that stuff protects your interests. And we’ve written in previous posts that mistrust is a very useful tool. But is it better to initiate a long-term relationship from a position of trust, or mistrust? We began from a position of trust with the people we eventually married. We trust our subordinates until they give us reasons to tighten their leashes.
Likewise, we want to begin a long-term relationship between reader and author from a position of trust. We’re deliberately showing you so many of our vulnerabilities that you’re basically seeing us naked (puts a new spin on “radical transparency,” doesn’t it?). Some readers will be disgusted by our ugly bits and leave. Others will convert from casual readers to loyalists, becoming regular visitors to our Temple of Trust.
If you’ve read this far, we’ll let you in on a secret. We had another ulterior motive here: we’re creating a self-weeding garden:
The self-weeding garden approach: rather than go through a long process where you have to verify every little detail with another party, devise a way for the other party to self-identify that they are a problem.
If a reader doesn’t like radical transparency because they’re horrified by the sight of us tending our self-weeding garden in the nude, then we’ll say “good riddance.” They can go find someone else who obscures their ugliness under layers of fancy degrees and credentials.
After all, executive coaches, self-help books, and training programs are susceptible to the same bad incentives as we are. Every reason you have to mistrust us also applies to other authors, leadership coaches, and training instructors. Who’s more trustworthy: someone who downplays/hides those bad incentives, or someone who conspicuously dumps them on the table and invites you to walk away?
Posting Schedule for Next 10 Articles
If you’re still reading, we hope the trust-building exercise was helpful in deepening your loyalty to Adventures in Leadership Land. We have a lot of stuff coming your way:
We’re generating ideas for new posts faster than we can write them, which isn’t saying much. In our first reader check-in, we noted that it took about two months to write the first 10 articles. After that, it took six months to publish the next 10.
Whoops 😅 We could blame it an extended illness, our full-time jobs, how the word count for recent articles has ballooned into the 2,000-3,000 range…but it really comes down to a lack of discipline.
Substack pesters us to publish regularly, and we really want to. We enjoy the feeling of anticipation on Tuesdays, because we know that’s when
will be publishing. Reading/listening to his posts is like unwrapping a Christmas present every other week. We’d love for you to feel about us the same way we feel about Adam.In order to publish regularly, we may need to:
Jump randomly throughout Leadership Land. We might visit the Contrarian Caves for one post, then go to Executive Mountain the next, then onward to the Silent Graveyard on the third article.
Keep some posts short. 300 words would be 1/10th of the one you’re reading right now! We’ll do our best to keep the shorter posts as insightful as the longer ones.
Pre-write a series of “buffer” articles to smooth out variability in our output.
Please use the two polls below ↓ to tell us what you’d like to see over the next 10 articles. We’ll announce the results on our social media, rearrange our habits around your preferences, and see how well we adapt to the new writing/publishing schedule.
Lastly: thank you for reading. This trust-building exercise was cathartic for us. There’s a wonderful sense of freedom in knowing that we can be radically transparent with you in a way that we can’t be with our coworkers. We hope this deliberate trust-building exercise inspires you to try something similar with your teams, friends, and families.
See you next article. Until then, we’re going to stuff our faces with triple chocolate cake.
If your cup starts confiding in you, you can build trust with it at the expense of your sanity!
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Use big smart words stupidly.