Gus Gordon

Applied Trust Leadership

Trust is a foundational element of all types of relationships. The concept of trust is woven through the fabric of leadership, which requires a relationship between leader and followers. Trust leadership is the crucial aspect to obtaining voluntary followership and to coordinate all collective efforts toward organizational success. Accordingly, this chapter reviews and discusses trust leadership and how it can be actualized by a leader, including behaviors that engender trust.

Leadership as It Relates to Organizational Behavior and Performance

This chapter explores the idea that leadership can have an impact on the organization’s performance. Anecdotal evidence supports the common sense idea that leadership does influence organizational outcomes. This chapter reviews past research on the links between organizational performance and leadership. Additionally, some non-academic references about the impact of leadership on organizational performance are included.

Guiding Organizational Culture

This chapter discusses the leader’s responsibility for pushing the leadership philosophy to the lowest levels of the organization. How can a leader reach the lowest levels of the organization in a sense-making way to promote organizational philosophy and culture that is congruent with leadership’s vision for organizational values and organizational mission? This chapter suggests an approach that functions well in linking values and mission and illustrating expectations of all employees at all levels in order to accomplish the leader’s responsibility to set tone and organizational culture, and build trust in the process.

Leadership and Metrics

This Chapter illustrates the use of metrics to assist with leadership strategies and how to engage employees through metrics. The focus is on linking metrics to strategies to determine the efficacy of strategies and implementation. Linking metrics to strategies focuses management on measurement of what matters and reduces “noise”. Innovative approaches to measurement and well-designed incentive structures assist the leader in guiding organizational performance and building trust.

Communication, Vision, and Mission

The proper strategic vision, given the context at any point in time, is the first step to organizational success, which is the overarching goal of leadership. From the vision flows the mission, or purpose. This chapter discusses the leader’s role in this critical aspect to organizational success and how the role can further enhance trust. However, an appropriate vision without the ability to communicate in a sense-making way to employees may render the vision useless. Ideas on how to make the connection of vision and purpose are provided.

Basic Academic Theories of Leadership

Over time one or more theories has occupied a prominent place in academic leadership research. While leadership constructs may manifest differently in specific contexts, trust usually is a part of any specific theory, either explicitly or implicitly. Categorizing pure academic leadership theories may not be a realistic strategy to understand effective leadership since most behaviors of effective leaders are a mix of academic leadership theories so that lines become too blurred to use a specific academic theory as a recipe for leadership. Nevertheless, due to the pervasive use of categorized theories of leadership in the literature, they are discussed in this chapter by leadership typology.