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Leah Bumphrey:
I dunno if he’s recording or not, Dennis, but I think this time he means it. I think we’re on.

Dennis Collins:
I don’t know. I’m getting the boy cried wolf once too often.

Leah Bumphrey:
Well, I’m welcoming our listeners to Connect and Convert.

Dennis Collins:
I don’t think they’re on there.

Leah Bumphrey:
I think we’re here. I think we’re here.

Dennis Collins:
No, I don’t think so.

Leah Bumphrey:
How are things going in your world? You ready for a great episode?

Dennis Collins:
Of course. I love bringing these episodes to people.

Leah Bumphrey:
What are we talking about today?

Dennis Collins:
We’re going to talk about, I do my best work for someone I trust. All I want is to work for someone I trust.

Leah Bumphrey:
That’s important stuff.

Dennis Collins:
That’s not me talking.

Leah Bumphrey:
Nope.

Dennis Collins:
I might say that, but that’s a conversation I had recently with my son-in-law.

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, I thought that it was somebody that took us up on our offer. Before you tell us about your conversation, let’s talk about our discovery call offer.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah.

Leah Bumphrey:
Listeners, if you have questions like this, if you have things that you’re thinking about that you would like to have some one-on-one time with Dennis and I, LeahBumphrey@wizardofads.com and DennisCollins@wizardofads.com.

We want people to call in so that we can do this one-on-one with business owners that are really wanting to take it to the next level. Certainly you can send us individual questions and we’re going to get to one at the end of this episode, but if you want 60 minutes with us, not just 60 seconds, but 60 minutes for free full hour, contact us.

Dennis Collins:
Because we like to work with people who want to two x three x four x their business in a short period of time. That’s what we do. So let us have a chance to get to know you. Maybe we can help you. If we can’t, we’ll be honest with you. We’re not for everybody, but maybe we’re for you.

Leah Bumphrey:
But now I want to know what did your son-in-law tell you?

Dennis Collins:
It’s odd for us to talk about the workplace. We normally talk about sports. He’s a huge sports fan. I’m a huge sports fan. So when we get together, we talk about sports, but this time it got to the workplace and I knew we had talked before, he had some concerns about the leadership at his workplace, the upper, the top echelon. Those were kind of resolved when that top echelon left, retired, and they brought new leadership in, but his direct boss remained the same and we’re having dinner one night and having a few drinks, and he says, I just want to work for someone I trust. And it floored me. Just to set the stage, he works at a very high end prep school. I mean, this is one of the top prep schools around and it’s well financed. It’s well thought of. It has a great reputation. So when he said that, whoa, that kind of took me back. So needless to say, Leah being the nerd that I am, I did not want to miss an opportunity to do some primary research right there on a subject, my son-in-law to learn something from the real world, not just from the books and from all the case studies. So I said, can I dig a little deeper with you on this? This is fascinating stuff.

So I ask him, what specifically does this person do or not do that is so offensive to you? And let me tell you what he told me. He said, first of all, they’re a people pleaser. They tell people what they want to hear.

Leah Bumphrey:
Okay.

Dennis Collins:
Secondly, they change their story depending if they’re talking to the parents or talking to the kids or talking to the teachers. So they got three different versions of the same story. They share private information that should never be shared with people who have no need to know. When there’s a dispute, they’ll tell one party one story, and the other party another story. And the thing that really gets him is they’re always looking for the bad stuff, the negatives. You didn’t do that exactly right, and this was wrong.

Leah Bumphrey:
So how long has he been working for this guy?

Dennis Collins:
Not that long.

Leah Bumphrey:
Not that long, okay.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah. And there was hope that when the top echelon changed, there’d be changes down the line, but that didn’t happen.

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, isn’t it funny? You always hope that it’s going to get solved by something that we don’t have to do. I’ve been in those situations too. You just hope that someone else notices it because you’re doing what it is.

Dennis Collins:
But you know what, Leah? Hope is not a strategy, and he has found ways around this. He is working around this and he has considered, I mean, you ought to see the reviews he gets from the kids and the parents. Every year you ought to see the stuff. I mean, he’s doing a great job in spite of that. But can you imagine how much more inspired he could possibly be if he really trusted somebody that he worked for? He is suspicious of everything this person does. Everything.

Leah Bumphrey:
Well, it sounds like it’s with good reason.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, and he enumerated those reasons, and I was floored.

Leah Bumphrey:
Okay, so then here he is having just family time with you, and it’s nice to have someone that you can have a bitch session with, quite honestly.

Dennis Collins:
And he doesn’t do that often. This just happens.

Leah Bumphrey:
Well, no, it doesn’t sound like he does. Sometimes you need that. But wouldn’t it be better if he was able to talk to you about something positive, about how it’s fixed, but it gets in your head and it affects everything that affected your ability to talk about great Canadian hockey, for example. Instead of talking about that, you’re talking about work.

Dennis Collins:
Of course, that would be a very short topic. Great Canadian hockey. We might want to talk more about great US hockey.

Leah Bumphrey:
Anyways, as we were saying.

Dennis Collins:
Well go ahead. Deflect. Anyways, so I did give him some strategies. He has the ear of the top CEO. So I planted some seeds with him to say, okay, it’s not hopeless. You’re not helpless. Hope is not a strategy, but I have a strategy. And so I shared with him some strategic moves that he will take, and he has some allies there, other comrades who are fellow teachers that will support him on this. So I can’t wait for that moment when he comes to me and says, you’re not going to believe it. It’s fixed.

Leah Bumphrey:
What a great thing that he was able to talk to. I mean, you didn’t just continue digging the hole with him. I mean, because that’s always the easy way to go. It’s like this, that, then this is negative and then this, and it goes deeper and deeper. Instead, you gave him some, not hope, but you gave him some actual to-do.

Dennis Collins:
I hope I gave him some hope, but I also gave him what I call a strategy of how do we turn things like that around. Because how about you? Let’s talk about you. Have you had that trust issue with employers and maybe you had a bad experience. How did you turn it around?

Leah Bumphrey:
I have. I’ve had that happen. I’ve had situations where quite honestly, I’ve had to leave because I just could not get past it. The worst thing that I did was not talk directly to that person. I think as a first strategy, you need to do that and you can think you’re doing it. This is where it’s really important in a business setting to document before you have a conversation, this is how I’m feeling. This is why the best thing I ever did in other situations was to involve not just the person that I was having issues with that I was not trusting, but going up the ladder. And when you’re working in a culture and it all comes back, where’re often talking about company cultures where you’re able to go and talk to people and feel heard. I think that most of the time we just want to know that someone who can do something about it is hearing what we’re having to say.

So we don’t have to keep reliving it. Because when you keep reliving something, you start thinking that it’s normal to have to second guess what your boss is saying. It’s normal to feel terrible about what it is that you’re doing. None of that is normal. What’s normal is taking a work as a microcosm of life. It’s okay, what is it that we want? We want to be heard. We want to make progress. We want to be able to accomplish things and do it as a team. You can’t do that if you’re not trusting someone and you can’t trust someone if you can’t talk to them.

Dennis Collins:
That’s really important, isn’t it? The communications speaking truth to power. How hard is that? I don’t think I realized when I was the boss how hard it is for people to come to you. You can say, oh, my door is always open. You can come walking in. You can actually leave your door open and don’t have a bunch of closed door sessions. You can do that and that sends a message. But that doesn’t mean you’re approachable. That just means your door is open.

Leah Bumphrey:
That’s right.

Dennis Collins:
So what is it that sends the signal that you’re a safe space? I did a speech for a group not long ago about this safe spaces, and is your workplace a safe space? I don’t know. I bet Professor Paul knows. I bet Professor Paul knows about safe spaces.

Leah Bumphrey:
I don’t even know if he’s really there right now.

Dennis Collins:
He’s not listening. He’s listening to another podcast.

Leah Bumphrey:
He’s a Batman. You take Batman. That’s a bat signal there.

Dennis Collins:
He got a better offer. So we landed on this topic of how does a boss know if he is creating a safe space that he and his team have a safe space? How do you know that?

Paul Boomer:
There’s the ancillary, there’s the subjective and there’s the objective way for bosses to know for sure, Hey, I’ve created a trustful place, or I’ve created this trustful environment. There is a gentleman by the name of JR Gibb, and he created what’s called the TORI assessment or TORI Theory. And in that theory, it talks about there are four areas. What’s funny is I did a speech about this at Wizard Academy. And TORI stands for trust, openness, realization, and interdependence. And I have it right here on my screen because I always get those mixed up because I have all these other acronyms and such.

So I just want to make sure. But anyway, it measures those things. Trust, openness, realization, and interdependence. And by taking this assessment, you’ll get an idea of where you are in a trust area, and therefore you can go, okay, I need to work on being more open, or I need to be better at realization, meaning working with each other. And I’m sorry, that’s interdependence, but it gives you a framework to work on this. And interestingly enough, if you simply go to the Google and type in, TORI assessment, what comes up is the assessment I provided for that course at wizardacademy.org.

Leah Bumphrey:
Really?

Paul Boomer:
Yeah. It shouldn’t, but it does. So on behalf of Connect and Convert and wizardacademy.org, we’re going to provide this assessment to you, which you can find really actually almost anywhere because it is open and it is old enough that it’s kinda publicly named. Yeah, it’s kind of like the Myers-Briggs where everybody’s trying to do it, and you can do it, but it’s not an official. Yeah. Anyway, download that assessment.

Dennis Collins:
Thank you.

Paul Boomer:
It has strongly agree, disagree, agree, all that stuff. And it has, I think like 21 questions or no, I’m sorry, only 16 questions. And it gives you the score. Now what you do with that is up to you.

Dennis Collins:
That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Paul Boomer:
Yes. That is really the most important part.

Dennis Collins:
And anybody who’s listened to us on these podcasts knows we don’t believe in just doing assessments and doing training for training’s sake. We do feel there’s value in learning and training, but the value comes in the installation, in the use. Developing skills, developing trust skills, developing leadership skills.

Leah Bumphrey:
Your use of the word installation there, Dennis. I always love it because it goes beyond practice. You can practice something and not install it. I mean, think about it. You’re installing within yourself a way of doing something that’s been proven.

Dennis Collins:
The only way to build a skill, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s hard work. It’s deliberate practice and deliberate practice. People hate deliberate practice. You know why? Because you practice at the edge of your capabilities. You’re failing.

Leah Bumphrey:
It sounds like you’ve practiced that. Dennis,

Paul Boomer:
I’m going back.

Dennis Collins:
Be careful, Leah.

Paul Boomer:
No, keep going. Leah, keep going on. So there’s an episode, I don’t remember what it’s called necessarily that you did many weeks ago. Izer theory or how much you forget.

Dennis Collins:
Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.

Paul Boomer:
There you go.

Dennis Collins:
Ebbinghaus was my friend back in Austria. Yeah, we used to walk the streets of Austria.

Paul Boomer:
That’s right. Ebbinghaus. So that’s why you harp so hard. So on installation, there we go. Is you talk about these things, but in order to be able to do these, you have to have trust amongst a team. So what better way to figure out where you stand today than to do this very easy, quick TORI assessment.

Dennis Collins:
That’s a good point.

Paul Boomer:
And know, okay, again, this is what I need to work on so that I can build trust within the group or the organization or myself or whatever, and then go on and continue to build those role plays so that you can improve and your employees can improve upon themselves. A rolling, it’s a big snowball that goes and goes. But all starts with trust.

Leah Bumphrey:
Because trust, I mean, Dennis, you had mentioned open door policy, people can come and talk open door, closed. You know what? There’s nothing wrong with a door being closed. There’s nothing wrong with having private meetings. But if I’m walking by going, Ooh, Dennis and Paul are talking in there, what the heck are they talking about? Wait a minute, I want one of those buttons where I can shush one of them. Then there’s no trust. It has more to do with how and the why than it does with the what? A closed door shouldn’t be an issue.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, you’re right. But it does, having lived in a culture, several cultures, that closed door has meaning sometimes. It’s not always a positive meaning. I understand your point of view, but I wanted to make the point that just because you have an open door doesn’t mean you’re approachable. It means that you have an open door. Approachable is a whole other skill about safety. And professor, producer, Paul just kind of talked about that. Does someone feel safe sharing stuff with you? My son-in-law does not feel safe sharing critical information with that person because his fear is it’s going to be used against him somehow.

Leah Bumphrey:
And that makes sense based on what he’s feeling and what he’s experienced. Life dictates trust or lack of trust,

Paul Boomer:
And I feel so sorry for your son-in-law because if he’s bringing it up, how many other people are feeling that same way?

Dennis Collins:
Oh, he shared with me. He has a group of people that are his colleagues and they all feel the same way. So they continue in spite of it.

Paul Boomer:
So the writing on the wall is that leader needs to make an adjustment or they’re going to lose great employees because it will not last.

Dennis Collins:
I’m sure that they already have, but sometimes there are other reasons for hanging in. You know what I mean? There are superseding reasons that supersede some of those things. That’s what’s going on.

Leah Bumphrey:
The other opportunity is by talking to and springboarding over this guy who’s his direct supervisor, talking to someone else. And if people are willing to trust him, and there’s 30 of us, there’s 10 of us, there’s five of us that feel this way, then the people in charge of this guy who’s not great to work for, they have some decisions to make, but give it to them. Then you can either decide, do I trust the organization? They’re going to either train it out of ’em or get rid of ’em.

Paul Boomer:
So Dennis, I’m curious because I already have my thoughts, but you know me, my curious whole self, without sharing what you can’t share, obviously speaking of trust, what was your advice to your son-in-law to do in this situation regarding this person? And if you can’t talk about it, I get it.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, I want to make sure. Yeah, I may have already said too much.

Paul Boomer:
How about I’ll share that and you do with whatever you want. How’s that? I’ll just leave it there.

Dennis Collins:
Okay. Fair enough.

Paul Boomer:
In my opinion, because I have dealt with this before with my own clients and what to do, and my job as a leadership coach is to empower the group, the employees, to do the best they can do and become leaders themselves. They have to become the leaders. And in this situation, what I hear is if there’s a group of people who are like, “yeah, this guy, no, not so much,” is they’re going to have to grow some balls, really. And sit down with this person and say, “listen, we have some concerns, but we want to know, do you A want to hear them or not? And B, do we have permission to be completely and totally honest with you, and are you willing to listen to them without …”

Leah Bumphrey:
Being mad! I don’t want to see that vein in the side of your forehead.

Paul Boomer:
Right? And be honest with them. But if this person says, no, I don’t want to hear this. Then you have to say, okay, I get it and be done. But what that does, it brings that group of people together. It allows them to become leaders of the whole organization. It also allows the leader of the organization, the one, the single person to learn something that their employees care enough to tell them this, and it gives them the opportunity to change for the better. But what I most recommend is once they hear this information, if this person’s willing to hear their thoughts and has to be honest, it has to be open. It cannot be “you did this.” It has to be actually constructive conversation. Then that leader needs to find a place to learn more about how and what it means to become a good leader.

Leah Bumphrey:
What a wonderful world it would be.

Paul Boomer:
Yes.

Dennis Collins:
Oh my gosh. She’s a singer as well!

Leah Bumphrey:
And I’d dance if I could, but that’s fantastic advice. It’s scary for people listening to think, oh, could I do this? Could I get the troops?

Dennis Collins:
Well, let me speak to that directly. Of course, that is the preferred solution. But here’s the deal. It is not a safe space. This person has hire / fire authority over these people with pretty much carte blanche. And there is a fear that confronting this person with that information would be held against them. So there is not the openness. Again, I enumerated some of the things that are going on, and you can tell from those five things that I mentioned that this is not a friendly situation, and there is fear amongst the troops and grow a set, but yeah, grow a set and get fired or something. They’re not at that point, but I gave them other strategies to work around that.

Paul Boomer:
So there’s two thoughts, and I’m not debating this well, I am debating this with you because it’s a very important thing. I hear this all the time, actually.

Dennis Collins:
I’m sure you do.

Paul Boomer:
And there’s one thing, there’s safety numbers to a degree, because yes, one individual can still target other individuals within that group. That’s very absolutely true. But what that also tells me, Dennis, is this school hasn’t yet built enough of a relationship with their employees. And what I mean by that is that if employees cared that much about their place of employment, they would speak up. But if they are truly afraid…

Dennis Collins:
They have spoken up to the higher authority.

Leah Bumphrey:
And so now it’s a wait and see what’s going to happen with that?

Dennis Collins:
Higher authority is a new kid, and they’re obviously still finding their wings.

Paul Boomer:
Oh yeah.

Dennis Collins:
I tend to oversimplify the case only so that I don’t want to put too much detail in it.

Paul Boomer:
Oh, absolutely. No. Again, it goes back to trust. We get that.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, because again, I’ve probably said too much, but bottom line, the traditional theory of the intervention with the person is not going to work at this point.

Paul Boomer:
So now I go back to actually thinking, okay, what is this person’s social style?

Dennis Collins:
I don’t know.

Paul Boomer:
But okay, I’m going to stop now because…

Leah Bumphrey:
I got two nerds down here. You guys are trying to turn this into a textbook case, a case study. Sometimes those intangibles, man are, they’re tough to untable. What I find interesting about our topic right now is…

Paul Boomer:
That’s why we’re hired though.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yes, I know. That’s why I love you guys.

Dennis Collins:
But I got to tell you, I never ever see it as strategy A is the strategy. I see it as I have A, B, C, and maybe D and E. And what is it? They said it about war or something. I’ve never seen a battle plan survive contact with the enemy.

Leah Bumphrey:
That’s right.

Dennis Collins:
I’ve never seen a strategy about how to deal with human personnel issues survive contact with the humans.

Leah Bumphrey:
Which is why we have vodka. Success is 99% failure. Just the last time he drives something, it’ll finally work.

Dennis Collins:
I tried to give him multiple strategies that could still be effective, but not maybe the most effective strategy, obviously is doing what Paul said. No doubt about it. But that isn’t always possible.

Leah Bumphrey:
The question of trust. When we began this particular podcast, I didn’t realize how closely aligned it was with the question we have from our reader for this week. Here’s the question from reader, and then I want to talk about it as we’re winding down here. But when we are inviting people to our discovery class, and we’ve had our discovery session, the 60 minute, we had a question from one of our listeners, and his question is, what are you going to try and sell me? And it didn’t strike me. It’s actually to be able to have the trust to sit down with us for an hour. This is not down in Florida. You guys have this dentist where they sit you down and they don’t let you leave the room till you sign in the dotted line, and you have your timeshare. That’s not what this is.

Dennis Collins:
In Florida, they have that everywhere.

Leah Bumphrey:
No, it’s only Florida.

Dennis Collins:
Okay, sure.

Leah Bumphrey:
But it’s a question of trust, isn’t it?

Dennis Collins:
I think we can answer that very quickly. It would be, in my opinion, malpractice in our industry to prescribe something or sell you something the first time we ever met you. It would be like going to your doctor and the doctor says, yeah, okay. Hey, I got a special today on elbows. I can replace your elbow. I can fix your elbow. Doc, I’m not in here for my elbow. I’m having a heart attack. We don’t sell anything.

We might actually end up offering you a couple of big ideas. We might come up with some big ideas that come up in our discussion that we would offer you, not sell you ,offer you, but the real main purpose is to see if we have anything in common. I mean, do you have something you need? If we have a solution to your need, then maybe we should talk. If we don’t, we shake hands and say, let’s keep in touch. Nice meeting you. We’ll move on. Does that describe it, Leah?

Leah Bumphrey:
I love the way you said it. That’s exactly it. Because we love helping people and there ultimately can be a price tag attached to it, but there isn’t to this podcast. There isn’t to the questions. There isn’t to our 60 minute discovery call answered.

Dennis Collins:
So one final thought, what is it that I look for to a trust signal? What is a trust signal that I look for? It takes a while sometimes to figure this one out, but my biggest trust signal is, does this person have my back? Do they have my back? Are they backing me up? Now, that’s assuming I don’t do anything terribly illegal or stupid even sometimes when I do stupid things. Do you have my back? Are you on my team or are you on your team or somebody else’s team? And the people that I trust are the people that say, yeah, I got you.  Just don’t embarrass me. Don’t do anything stupid or illegal, but I got you. That works for me.

Leah Bumphrey:
And past performance, that’s going to dictate moving forward. If you throw me under the bus and you throw me under the bus and you throw me under the bus eventually, you know what? I’m just going to get under the bus all by myself. I don’t need to be thrown.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, you don’t have to throw me. All right, kids. I think we’ve done it today. We’ve had great interventions by professor, producer, Paul. He’s always got something good to say. And of course, Leah, you’re always challenging me at every step and I love every minute of it. So thank you.

Leah Bumphrey:
We have a lot of fun. I love it.

Dennis Collins:
Thank you so much. We’re going to wrap it up for today. Remember, every week we have a new episode, so tune in to connect and convert. See you next time.

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