July 6, 2010 | Whether the setting is a basketball team, a business or a religious organization, trust is at the core of successful leadership, said Kurt T. Dirks. Dirks studies the relationship between trust, leader effectiveness and organizational success. His findings highlight the differences in accomplishments between teams with varying levels of trust in a leader’s competency, character and caring.

Dirks said his studies across a variety of types of teams and organizations indicate that it is critical that leaders acquire awareness of how they are viewed by their people, establish individualized ways of demonstrating trustworthy qualities and confront mistakes head-on. In the face of a transgression, Dirks said, silence is the worst strategy.

Dirks is the Bank of America Professor of Managerial Leadership at Washington University in St. Louis at the Olin Business School, where he also directs the Taylor Experimental Laboratory. His doctoral degree was earned at the University of Minnesota.

Dirks has been a presenter at the New Directions in Leadership Research Conference at The Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at Duke University. He spoke with Faith & Leadership about the results of his research. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: My first question is, Why and how do you study trust in leadership?

Leadership is getting other individuals to work toward a common goal. That’s very hard to do if people don’t trust their leader. Followers start diverting energy toward their personal goals, such as, “How can I protect myself in this situation?”

Trust is at the core of successful leadership.

Q: You studied college basketball coaches to examine the importance of trust in leadership. What did you find?

The study was designed to provide a rigorous test of the notion that being able to trust your leader would impact the performance of the team. The setting I chose was college basketball teams. The study included 30 NCAA men’s basketball teams in 12 conferences in Midwestern and Western states.

After the basketball preseason was over, I sent out surveys to teams’ coaches. The surveys used a standard measure of trust in a leader. And team members filled out the survey asking, Do you trust your leader? Do you trust your teammates? I wanted to see if that predicts how that team performs across the season, taking into account other factors.

Let’s see how the team does in the preseason, how long has the team been together, how long has the coach coached -- all the things that you could imagine throwing in there we tried to take into account. After taking all those factors into account, the bottom line was that trust accounted for about 7 percent of the variance in performance across the season; the only other factor that predicted as much of the variance in performance was talent of the team.

Q: So a higher level of trust was correlated to a higher number of wins?

That’s exactly right. You look across those teams and the team that had the highest trust in their leader ended up being the No. 1 team by the end of the season. The team with the lowest won about 10 percent of the games, and the coach ended up being fired at the end of the year.

Interestingly, the person who was the top coach happened to be your archrival, [then-University of Kansas coach] Roy Williams.

Q: Could the study also show causality?

I tried to take into account the factors that would account for that correlation. The hypothesis was partially that how the team did last year would predict whether those teams trusted their coach this year, which in turn would predict future performance. It can’t conclusively prove causation, but it comes as close as we can with social science while studying real teams.

Q: In general, what do people look for in deciding whether or not to trust their leaders?

The first thing people tend to look for is what we call competence. Does that leader have the skills and abilities to solve whatever we face as an organization?

The second factor that we look for is character: Does the leader have strong values? Do they do what they say they’re going to do; are they fully truthful when they’re talking to me? Those are attributes that person brings to the table.

The third factor that comes into play is caring. Does the leader care about me personally? Is this someone who takes my interests into account beyond what I can do for them? You have to take all three of those factors into account in building trust in a leader.

Q: Are there concrete ways a leader can build trust in these three factors?

A colleague and I looked across all the research that has been done on leadership over the last four decades and said, “What are the top five drivers of trust in leaders?” I’ll work backwards: No. 5 was an alignment between leaders’ goals and my goals. Are our goals aligned? Are we working in the same direction on the important parts?

The fourth thing was alignment of words and actions. When that leader says something, do their actions correspond to that?

One of the last three things is the allocation of the outcomes. Do I get what I deserve, whether that’s pay or recognition? Is what I’m putting in recognized appropriately?

No. 2 was whether I get to participate in the decision-making process.

The most powerful one of all was, When decisions are implemented, how am I treated? Am I treated with respect?