S1E6 - Believability – The Missing Currency of Strategy

You can’t PowerPoint people into believing you. In this episode of Leadership Matters, Glenn Price and Terry Reynolds tackle believability – the often-missing link between a clever strategy and actual execution.

They unpack why leaders rush to push accountability before they’ve built belief, the difference between hope and genuine confidence, and how silent cynicism creeps in long before people stop showing up. From owning mistakes and adjusting the “how”, to building trust through consistency, credibility and real conversation (not spin), this episode gets under the surface of what makes people think, “We can do this – and I know how.”

If your people are nodding along but not truly bought in, this one’s for you.

Transcript

Welcome to Leadership Matters, a podcast series created by LeaderShape Consulting to help leaders take their vision and deliver results. My name is Glenn Price. I'm joined today by my business partner and co-host Terry Reynolds. How are you feeling today, Terry? I'm great. Looking forward to this one. Outstanding. We're still in the emotional section. Step two. So first step was set the direction. We had three drivers there, vision, strategy and alignment. And now we're starting to get into the emotional ones which is all around engage and excite on our last podcast, we talked about experience, but now we come to this topic of believability and inside the vision to results book, we've said, if people don't believe it, they won't deliver on it. And I think sometimes that, that believability is the missing currency in most strategies, right? Like leaders, we talked about this a bit on the strategy podcast, you know, leaders think their job is to communicate the plan. We talked about that horrible word, cascade the plan.

But ultimately, if people don't believe in the plan, then that communication, it's just announcing intent, right? There's no traction that's gained. And I think believability is about credibility, not necessarily charisma, right? It's the difference between that will never happen and we can do this and I know how. That sense of comfort, that unwritten sense of belief that either you as an individual or you inside that team or your team inside that organisation can win. So my first question to start our podcast today to you, Terry, is why do people keep pushing for accountability or leaders keep pushing for accountability before they've built belief? You know, it's an interesting question because I think accountability or a whole people to account comes a lot more natural to leaders than to build believability. you know… You're talking through frameworks like a racy framework or a… …or a…you know, it's written down, An action plan. These are the things that you've got to do. We've all experienced that. We've been given these things to do. They're going to hold my feet to the fire. I've got to execute on those types of things. But emotionally I'm not connected to anything there. And I think that, you know, what we really want to sort of talk about this morning is going…

Well, how do you actually get people to buy in? How do you actually get them to believe what it is that you're going to be held to account in the first instance? Do you think there's a difference there between? So when we did the research, we would ask exec teams, do you believe you've got the right strategy to get to your vision? And of course, they all nod, right? Because they're the ones that made it. You don't ask a chef, do you think this is a good meal? He's going to turn around and tell you it is, right?

What's really humbling is when we ask the wider audience, do you believe? All right. So let's say we I was thinking one European firm, about 5000 people. When we ask those 5000 people, the overwhelming response. I think this is quite human and quite humbling as they said, I'd like to believe I just need more evidence. So then that begs this this, you know, maybe it's easier to hold people to account than to build the belief one, which is what you said before.

But I'm beginning to go, is there a difference between hope and belief? We always say hope's not a strategy, isn't it? Yeah. And yet, you know, we go out there, we tell those strategy narratives and the majority of people are going, I'd like to believe you just need to give me more evidence. So that talks a little bit about the communication. What do you believe are the believability killers? The stuff that just gets in the way of people really attaching themselves or buying in to the strategy or the direction of the firm?

The one big one that I often see is where the strategy's been put down, they get people to buy into it, the organisation is not hitting the numbers or the measures that they wanted to. So what ends up happening is that the strategy gets pushed to one side and something else is implemented. And that happens time and time again, depending on the market, what's actually going on, maybe if they're an Australian company that managed head offices in, you know, in Europe or something, they're getting direction from a different market. I think that what that does is for…as an individual you start to question whether the leaders actually know what they're doing as opposed to holding the line. So I think that in itself people start to question that. You lose believability around that because it's like, hang on a minute, we had a plan and now we're moving.

I think that's pretty realistic. can't expect people that that wouldn't be an emotional withdrawal, right? We can see stuff changing. think where I've seen that done well is that the leaders at all levels of the organisation have gone, we got that wrong. And they pull back. So the strategy doesn't change, but the way to achieve the strategy needs to change. And the leaders are taking responsibility, accountability and going.

I've made a decision to move this and this is why. So the people feel a little bit attached to it. I think, look, I know that you've got a very real example of somebody owning up, but I would say that that is not a common thing. don't, in most organisations I've worked in, you know, through leadership, I wouldn't say that the leaders would publicly announce that they got it wrong. They wouldn't own it.

Why do you think that happens? it's saving face. It's way easier to push down that responsibility to, you know, ops or sales didn't get it right and all of those types of things. But the leader themselves standing up and going, I got it wrong, I'll own that and this is what we're going to do. I think in actual fact, that type of behaviour would create believability because all of a sudden that connection with the leader to go, they're real. They're not going to get it right every single time. think that is a really, really powerful thing to do. I think it would just build trust. Previously on this podcast series, we've talked about Pat Lencioni and he talks about that requirement for vulnerability based trust. If people don't weigh in, they don't buy in right next level. So to get buy in, that's a different way of saying belief. How do you involve your people to do it? Therefore there's collective ownership. And I think that creates a forum, a platform that it's not just the leader themselves, the individual or even a leadership team going, hey, we got this wrong or market forces or even without saying that there's got to be a degree of vulnerability based trust. And Meister often talks, David Maister measures trust, right? And he says it's credibility plus reliability plus intimacy in the relationship. divided by self-orientation. And so if the leader is a humble leader and it's not about them, it's about the organisation and their customers, right? Then we look at the top line and we go, I think what builds trust, but also builds believability is a level of credibility. Are the leaders saying the right things in a consistent manner? Reliability, are they behaving in that way, whether we're getting it right or getting it wrong, they have that ability to continue measuring progress and adjust as we go. But then

You know, in the last podcast, we talked about experience. And that for me is the intimacy in the relationship. If you're only seeing your leader once a year on a town hall, then that's that's not terribly intimate. Right. And so I wonder whether one of the believability killers is as and you said it before, these emotional drivers feel uncomfortable to most their muscles that most leaders know they should be doing, but feel more uncomfortable with doing them.

Right. Yeah. You know, I'm just thinking as you were saying that I'm thinking, you know, what would I see or hear or do in an organisation that has believability? It's very easy to work out what you wouldn't. And the thing that I focus on there is where you have organisations but people go silent. And that is they become cynical but in a very, very quiet, retreating way.

So now all of a sudden there's no communication about, why are we doing this? Or there's no questions. People just accept, but emotionally they don't believe. Do you know what scares me? Firstly, I completely subscribe to what you're saying. And what scares me about that is I think people stop believing long before they stop showing up. So if they're not showing up verbally or they're not showing up physically and engaging in that tension in the communication around the strategy or how we get there on a consistent basis.

Can you imagine when they stopped believing? And that's why I'm pulling it back to this element of trust. Belief is built on a lot of different things. The cool thing about belief is it can be real or vividly imagined. And so if the organization is lacking in evidence, which I think needs to be there at some point to go, hey, we're doing the right things. We've got some evidence. We've got some success stories. But in the absence of that, the only thing that they can trust is the leader themselves.

So then that begs the question, can a brilliant strategy survive if the people presenting it, the leaders that are communicating it can't be trusted? Yeah, that's a really…that's a big question. You know, trust is one of those things that it's hard to earn but very quick to lose, isn't it? And then what happens I guess is once you stop believing, you lose trust in that leader or that executive group, or the plan itself, is that people start to look for evidence to support what it is that they believe. Now if the belief is it's never going to work and, you know, we're heading north, we should be heading south, et cetera. People are going to build up enough evidence to go, I'm not on board. And I think that's when something needs to really be really changed within that business and leaders should be aware of it to go, hang on a minute, I haven't sold this very well. Yeah, that's when the belief is slipping underneath the surface. Right. mean, you know, we often in our work use that iceberg model where we say, look, we ask a group, can you tell what I'm feeling?

Of course they can't. How you feel is below the waterline. How we feel though has an impact on our behavior, what we do and what we say. And what we do and what we say has an impact on the results that we get. But belief drives how we feel. It's pretty deep though. And so I kind of go, what are the signs when belief is waning? You've talked about one of them, people go a bit quiet or they get a bit skeptical. They begin to look for evidence to prove whatever their belief system is, whether that's an empowering belief about the leadership team and the strategy or not. But once again, I think that people stop believing well before they stop showing up. And by then, your execution sort of falls away by that point. You're probably going, need to choose a different strategy because we're not producing the results. We're getting a result despite the people, not because of the great people that we've got.

I remember in one of the organisations where I actually worked, as in real job, where, you know, the plan was handed down, there was a lot of excitement, they wanted to create believability. But in my head I didn't feel like there was realism around what it is they wanted us to do. And I think there's an interesting thing from a leadership perspective about how do you bridge the gap between the ambition of what you want to achieve and the realism of actually executing on it. That is a really, really important facet for people. think this is where we're opening up Pandora's box in psychology, right? I mean, as a leadership coach, as an executive coach, I don't care what you believe. I genuinely don't care what you believe. Only thing I care about is whether it's going to help you take action on what you've determined is the right thing for your customers, right thing for your teams and your strategy in order to get to your ambition. And so I think once again, because of the emotional nature of that leaders struggle with it. They're not quite sure how to build belief. They're not sure how to measure it. And there is a number of tips and tools that we can provide leaders. But what we do know is that it's not just the communication piece.

This is the behavioural change management piece that needs to be there to set the right environment for performance. Or what we absolutely know is that you can't PowerPoint people into believing you. do think you can create evidence along the way, small proof points along the way from your own people and from customers. Even if you haven't got the end result yet that you've made progress, that there were occasions where we won against the odds.

And we highlight those things or we highlight areas that we, haven't won on, but we've been able to learn something from it. Right. So here are some top tips for leaders on how to build believability. Let's try and take this emotional driver and make this a little bit practical for you. one, match your story to your scars. Terry and I believe that leaders who's who have lived the pain, not just describe the plan are the best ones to be able to cut through. So just ask yourself, are you the right leader to be communicating this part of the plan to build believability? Or would it make more sense that you give tools to the frontline leaders, the ones that are closest to our customers and our team, so that they can bring people on board and demonstrate vulnerability and share with them their experiences? 

Two, make sure keep your promises public. As Terry said before, keep those commitments out loud, track them out loud. When leaders follow through visibly, belief tends to multiply. 

Three, balance stretch with stability. Set those goals that stretch, but don't snap belief back to that. What's the gap between the belief and the ambition? We need people to see a path, not a cliff. And then, and then we get back to that hope thing that we talked about. 

Then four, eliminate all corporate spin. So our belief is over-polished messages. They signal insecurity. If it sounds watertight, if it doesn't sound human, if it's not how you would have this conversation, if you were sitting in a restaurant with someone then I think people can smell that. And so our advice and what we encourage leaders to do is say it straight because credibility loves clarity. We always end with a little bit of a challenge. So on believability, it's a big one and it's a personal one. If belief was the battery of execution, what's the charge level in your organisation right now and what are you going to do about it? Look forward to seeing you on the next podcast.