Lisa Sun knows trust.
She had to gain the trust of organizational leaders during her time as a consultant. She had to learn to trust herself when founding her own business. She knows that it isn’t just important to organizations, it’s essential.
“You can’t do anything without trust,” Sun said. “It changes the equation of success. When you’ve earned trust, you can have conflict and vulnerability, and that’s what leads to accountability and results.”
Sun will discuss the elements of trust in her keynote address at the Children’s Hospital Association’s Annual Leadership Conference Oct. 26-28 in Phoenix.
Ahead of the event, she spoke with CHA about trust and the importance of building it in your organization.
Why is it so important to talk about trust?
You can’t do anything without trust. If you come from a place of trust with someone, you can have conflict and recover from it. That leads to a sense of commitment, which is what drives accountability and eventually results. If you focus too much on results, you'll miss doing the hard work that everything builds from.
Trust is hard, and people get it wrong a lot. Part of that is the way our brains are wired. Trust requires a leap of faith and uncertainty, and brains don’t like that. They like predictability. Trust can’t be built instantaneously, and it’s fluid. You have to be working to build trust all the time and getting it wrong with someone can mean you lose some of the trust that’s been built up. And if someone gets it wrong with you, you’re going to remember that. Our brain remembers when we were hurt far better than it remembers when things went right.
Your workshop will focus on trust in yourself before trust in relationships. Why is that?
We’ve done research to learn more about what defines extraordinary performance, and we’ve found there are three qualities: courage, compassion, and connection. When we look at courage and compassion, we look at them in terms of self. Do you take action and put yourself out there? And then if you have a setback or disappointment, how do you handle it? Do you recover and learn from it? Trust requires vulnerability, so to form a trusting relationship with someone else, we really have to have a strong foundation of trust within ourselves.
That last quality, connection, is really about how we navigate the relationships around us. Do we work to build and strengthen them? When we have conflict, do we rebuild that relationship to a stronger place? All of these things require trust.
What are some common things you see successful people get wrong about trust?
When you’re in an executive position, you’re always under pressure to make decisions quickly. One of the common issues I see is that people start to make decisions without a sense of curiosity and co-creation. The best leaders I know use moments of pressure to get curious and ask a lot of questions. They talk to people and get their input. That also leads to a sense of co-creation, where people feel a sense of ownership over making the right decision or finding a solution to a problem.
Even if you don’t always go with what someone recommends, you’ve created a sense of openness and trust that they can speak honestly with you. If you build trust, people will feel comfortable saying something even if it’s difficult, and someone will always be watching your back.
Why is it important for hospital leaders to hear your message on trust?
When lives are involved, I think it’s imperative to be able to trust ourselves and colleagues. When you’re in a high-paced environment, you have to able to focus on what you’re doing and the results of that, while trusting your colleagues to look for problems and opportunities that you might not be able to see.
Think of it in terms of predator and prey animals. Predators have eyes that are built to always be looking forward, focused on what they’re pursuing. Prey have eyes that allow them to see in all directions to always know what’s coming. Trusting relationships allow the team to see both ways.
