Have you ever needed the benefit of the doubt?
By October of 2015, my family was exhausted. On top of homeschooling three kids, Sarah founded a theatre company that year and staged two professional productions. At Walmart, the team I led had spent the last seven months delivering four concurrent Leadership Academies for high potential leaders.
Our family was ready for a break. So we took off on a road trip that included visiting family and friends in New York City, attending my West Point class reunion, and spending some downtime in a remote cabin in West Virginia.
I returned to work refreshed and energized. However, I immediately discovered something was off with my team. They were getting the work done, but engagement had ebbed and there was a general air of pessimism. Were they tired? Unhappy? Worried?
I soon uncovered the source of the gloominess. Speaking with one of my direct reports, she revealed that someone on my team had told everyone I was surely interviewing for a new job in New York and was going to leave the team and the company.
“What!?!” I exclaimed. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” I was shocked. I was angry. I was frustrated. Some people on my team, when given the choice, had not given me the benefit of the doubt.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: The moment you need the benefit of the doubt, it’s too late to do anything about it.
After cooling off, I made a plan. I confronted the source of the rumor. I discussed the details of my trip with the team. We started planning for the next year. Though I hadn’t named them at the time, I was deliberately reinforcing the integrity elements of trustworthiness—authenticity and dependability.
It’s tempting to blame the person who started the rumor. However, as a leader, I needed to take responsibility for the levels of trust I had cultivated. The greater the trust, the easier it would have been to assume positive intent and give me the benefit of the doubt.
On this month’s Inside West Point Podcast, Colonel John Baskerville, a professor at the US Military Academy, shared a reflection question he asks himself to ensure he’s regularly fostering trust:
How do you think you did in that interaction…if you said or did something right now—and they saw it out of context—and it looked like it may harm them…do you think they would give you the benefit of the doubt?
Good question.
Don’t wait to build trust until you need it. Cultivate trust today so when you need the benefit of the doubt tomorrow, they’ll be ready to offer it!
For Reflection: Who might not give you the benefit of the doubt today—why not?
