important because it means that being just above average on these skills can have a profound positive effect and, conversely, just being below average can destroy trust.
We also found that level of trust is highly correlated with how people rate a leader’s overall leadership effectiveness. It has the strongest impact on the direct reports’ and peer overall ratings. The manager’s ratings and the engagement ratings were not as highly correlated, but all the differences are statistically significant. Do You Need All Three Elements of Trust? We were also curious to know if leaders needed to be skilled in all three elements to generate a high level of trust and whether any one element had the most significant impact on the trust rating. To gauge this, we created an experiment where we separated leaders into high and low levels on each of the three pillars and then measured the level of trust. Intuitively we thought that consistency would be the most important element. Saying one thing and doing another seems like it would hurt trust the most. While our analysis showed that inconsistency does have a negative impact (trust went down 17 points), it was relationships that had the most substantial impact. When relationships were low and both judgment and consistency were high, trust went down 33 points. This may be because many leaders are seen as occasionally inconsistent. We all intend to do things that don’t get done, but once a relationship is damaged or if it was never formed in the first place, it’s difficult for people to trust.
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