Build trust
Once you have your team established, then you have to foster trust among the team members so that you can collaboratively move the organization forward. He says it’s crucial to
have confidence in each other and promote openness, transparency and vulnerability.
“You have to encourage the team to have healthy debate,” he
says. “I always feel like if my team can’t have healthy debate,
it’s my fault. It’s not their fault. It’s I haven’t created the environment to ensure that can occur.”
The first part of this involves listening more and talking less.
He says that in order to be an effective listener, you have to
have a dose of humility.
“If you begin from a position that you’re right with a capital
R, it’s very hard to set aside the views that you might have at
that point in time and listen as actively as you should to other
people’s views,” Bettinger says.
You can’t listen if people don’t talk, so make people comfortable voicing their opinions.
“Make as clear as they possibly can that it is not only safe for
the people on their team to have differing views from the
leader but actually an expectation,” he says.
Part of that comes from criticizing yourself.
“You have to be, to a certain extent, self-deprecating, self-critical, so people recognize that you would be the first to recognize if the king walked into the office one day without any
clothes on,” he says.
You also have to admit your mistakes to everyone in the
organization — all the way down to the lowest levels.
“They have to recognize that when they put together a team,
they own that team’s mistakes,” Bettinger says. “You can’t take
credit for the successes as a leader, nor can you pass off the mistakes. You have to attribute the successes to your team,
and then you have to personally own the failures.”
This trait is the fine line that divides successful leaders from
average ones.
“Both probably make 50 percent good decisions and about 50
percent of decisions they make aren’t as good,” he says. “But
the difference is that the better executives are more open and
willing to admitting the half that they made that maybe weren’t
as good and are willing to do something about it. The executives that are more mediocre struggle to understand which 50
percent were which and maybe don’t have the humility to
admit that they were wrong and reverse course.”
Your people will help you identify the wrong 50 percent, but
you have to leave room for people to counter you.
“When a leader makes a point, they also have to always wrap
around that this is not necessarily the correct answer, but this
is how I see it right now,” Bettinger says. “You have to give
those openings — that room for people to maybe say, ‘Well,
you know, Walt, I agree with you — I think your point is
wrong.’ You have to create the openings. If you make a series
of definitive statements, it’s very hard for people in an organization to voice their opinion if they’re contrary.”
Bettinger also makes it a point to thank people who counter
him so they know he appreciates their feedback. That humility
acts as glue, and it makes you, your team and, ultimately, your
organization stronger.
He says, “If the leader doesn’t leave room for the capabilities
and the competencies of the people on their team, it’s very
hard to keep a team together.”
HOW TO REACH: The Charles Schwab Corp., (866) 232-9890 or www.charlesschwab.com
