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Kathy Stoddard Torrey

~ Leadership Coach and Trainer

Kathy Stoddard Torrey

Tag Archives: #Reliable

The Importance of Being Reliable

15 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Leadership, Team Building, Uncategorized

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Tags

#LeadershipRules #LeadYourselfFirst #KathySays, #Reliable, #self-discipline, #trustworthy

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Trustworthiness is the cornerstone of exceptional leadership. If people don’t feel that they can trust us, we do not have psychological safety or the positive relationships required for organizational success. However, trust is a difficult thing to cultivate and maintain because it relies on us being consistent. Great supervisors are consistent, dependable, and reliable.

Honestly, none of us are going to be reliable and consistent all the time, but we need to manage it most of the time. Our employees need to know that we aren’t going to yell at them when they come to us with a problem. They need to feel confident that we are going to be calm and reliable. We’re going to ask questions and figure out how to fix the situation. We want our employees to feel that we are a stable, reliable force that is going to help them. Until employees feel confident that their leaders are reliable and consistent, they are going to be tentative and watchful—maybe even subversive or dishonest in order to avoid an unpleasant confrontation.

Keeping our emotions and, more importantly, our actions in check takes a great deal of emotional intelligence. Specifically, we must exercise self-discipline. We don’t get to fly off the handle and yell whenever we get angry. When we talk about this in workshops, participants ask me if I ever lose my temper, yell, and say hurtful things. My answer is “rarely.” Actually, I can’t think of a time in the last ten years when I’ve hurled mean-spirited insults at anyone. I do get angry, and I sometimes raise my voice a bit and sound stern, but my words are still intentional and measured.

The first reaction that I get is incredulity, and then there is a definite belief that to control one’s temper is not healthy. One does need to express anger, but we don’t need to damage people, walls, furniture, or relationships to do it. Exercise is a great way to release pent-up anger. When my boys were young, I would hold sofa cushions while they hit on them and yelled. I’ve used both of those techniques.

I’ve also walked through my home ranting and yelling. I have a friend or two that will allow me to vent to them. One time I called a good friend and fellow coach and said, “I need you to say, ‘What an ass!’ every time I pause for breath for about three minutes.” She did, and I felt better. Recently I bought an ax-throwing kit for children. Think Nerf when you visualize it in your head. Throwing foam axes can be very cathartic.

The bottom line is that we can manage our anger so that we don’t intentionally harm others. Words can be powerful weapons. We want to express our anger in appropriate ways to others, and then go home and take it out on the sofa cushions.

Fortunately for us, people have a tendency to extend trust to others in the beginning of a relationship. The trust is a gift that we need to appreciate and work to keep. We want to avoid breaching trust because once it’s gone, trust is difficult to gain back. However, all is not lost if we lose someone’s trust. There are things that we can do to regain it as quickly as possible.

The first thing to do is to admit that we’ve done something disappointing. If we made a bad decision, forgot something, or lost our temper, we should admit it. The second thing to do is to apologize. Some old-school thought states that leaders should never apologize. It’s based on the belief that leaders have to be perfect to be great leaders. The problem with that thinking is that none of us are perfect. We are human, and we make mistakes. We only make matters worse if we don’t admit them and apologize.

We also need to do whatever we can to fix the problem if that’s possible. An apology goes a long way, but we also want to do what we can to make things right. If we forgot to do something, how can we get it done and deal with the results of forgetting? If a plan doesn’t work, it’s time to regroup and try again. We help to rebuild trust when we do what we can to repair any damage that we’ve done.

After we have broken trust, we will have to continue to behave in a consistent, reliable manner until everyone feels comfortable again. It may take some time, so we need to be patient.

In summary, when we break trust, it’s important to acknowledge it, apologize, and do what we can to fix it. Then we continue to be trustworthy until whoever was affected decides that they can trust us again. However, the best course of action is to do our best each moment of every day to be reliable, consistent, and dependable.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

Psychological Safety: Final Answer (5)

29 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Leadership, Positivity, Psychological Safety, Uncategorized

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Tags

#Consitent, #Google, #KathySays, #LeadershipRules, #LeadYourselfFirst, #ProjectAristotle, #Reliable

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I have been discussing my leadership list in depth, and we are up to number five. Only one more to go after this one! My list is a response to Google’s research on the qualities of exceptional teams, as described in Project Aristotle. Here is the list with the bullet points that I’ve discussed so far.

Kathy’s Leadership List

  1. Be present, and show that you care.
  • Focus on keeping your mind present during conversations and meetings.
  • Use good nonverbal communication to assure people that you are listening.
  • Show interest in people’s activities outside of work.
  • Maintain appropriate boundaries for personal discussions.
  1. Enforce and model respect for self and others.
  • Watch vigilantly for situations that make a person or group feel a lack of respect.
  • Talk to employees and peers about disrespectful behavior in an appropriate setting.
  • Behave scrupulously, in a way that always shows respect for others.
  • Establish Designed Alliances whenever possible so that respectful behavior is explicitly defined, expected, and required.
  1. Include others in decision-making as much as possible.
  • People like control. Great leaders give others control as much as possible. Autonomy is motivating.
  • Meeting people’s personal needs to be listened to, understood, and respected creates positive relationships.
  • We make better decisions with more information. People who don’t agree with us can have valuable information to share.
  • After making a decision, a leader should share the reasons behind the decision and their feelings about it.
  • Inclusive decision-making saves more time in the long run.
  1. Ensure individual and team goals are clear and in alignment with organizational goals.
  • Leaders must understand how their group contributes to the overall success of the organization.
  • It’s important to make sure everyone in the group understands how they, as a group, help the organization achieve its goals.
  • Roles and responsibilities must be clear to everyone in the group.
  • Each individual needs to know how he or she makes a difference.
  1. Be consistent, dependable, and positive in your actions, attitude, and mindset.
  2. Make curiosity your default.

So, let’s discuss number five.

Be consistent, dependable, and positive in your actions, attitude, and mindset. There is a lot packed into this one. Let’s start by discussing what it means to be consistent and dependable. We want to be like Horton the elephant in Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. Horton agrees to sit on the egg of the feckless bird Mayzie, who promises to come back. She doesn’t, and Horton stays fast on the egg through all sorts of trials. He stays until it hatches, all the while saying, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.” We want to show that same determination to keep our word.

Of course, things come up, and life challenges us in ways that make it difficult to do what we way. However, great leaders are careful with their words and only promise what they are sure they can deliver. If we can’t for some reason, then we must apologize and make it right in any way that we can. It’s ok for leaders to make mistakes as long as they acknowledge those mistakes and make sure they don’t happen again.

Behaving in a consistent way can also be a challenge. We want to stay calm and reasonable as much as possible, but we have bad days and trying times in life. However, even through the trials of life, we want to show some emotional maturity and not lash out at others.

We could be consistently awful and negative, but that’s not what I’m going for. That’s why I added “positive” to number five. We want to be reliable and positive. Think about leaders whom you admire and follow without question. Any of them negative people? Mine aren’t. I had one woman in my life who I felt was a wonderful leader, and then something happened and she turned negative. She immediately lost her influence over me.

Just to be clear and complete, I specified that we want to be consistent, dependable, and positive in our actions, attitude, and mindset. Actions are easy to define. We want to act in a positive way that proves to others that we are reliable because when people have faith in us, we build trust and personal influence.

I don’t want to quibble too much about the difference between attitude and mindset. In general, I think that we can have a positive attitude about one thing and a negative attitude about something else. We want to cultivate a positive attitude about as many things as possible.

Once we’ve done that, we’ve gone a long way to developing a positive mindset that encourages us to see challenges as opportunities and have faith that things are going to work out for the best. Great leaders have positive attitudes about people and things at work. They also have positive mindsets about life in general and confidence in themselves and the world. A positive attitude and mindset help us to cultivate personal influence that invites others to follow us.

Here are the bullet points to remember:

  • Great leaders are reliable in word and deed.
  • Consistency builds trust.
  • Positive leaders build personal influence.

We are successful leaders when others have the same confidence in us as they do in the rising sun each morning. Bonus points if we create a positive relationship that conjures the warm fuzzies that coffee drinkers feel towards their first cups. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – leadership is all about creating positive relationships. Positivity, reliability, and consistency are the foundation.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

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