The Role of Trust in Business: Reflections on Class Discussion with Joel Peterson

Joel Peterson knows a thing or two about the importance of trust in business.

As the former CEO of Jet Blue Airlines, his lessons on the importance of trust are vast and insightful. At the personal and corporate level, trust is the currency that underpins success.

Employing a baseball analogy, Peterson reflected on the notion of a five-tool player — someone who can do it all, and deliver success for a team. Across all players who have ever played baseball, Willie Mays — the great San Francisco Giants player — is number 3 on the list of those who generated incremental wins for his team (Wins Above Replacement, or WAR). His presence on the team was literally game-changing. He was a consummate five-tool player.

Peterson’s reflections focus on how the world of business can cultivate five-tool leaders — people like Allen Mulally — who can to step in to the most complicated of situations and not just administer process, but lead effectively and deliver results that matter (like Ford following the 2008 financial crisis).

Peterson shared four pillars that effective leaders need to cultivate to move from average to outstanding:

Trust: Trust is the essential currency of effective leaders. Developing trust at a personal level extends to create high-trust organizations. As a leader, understand your core values, be intentional about your reputation — the five words you want people to say about you — and translate that into how you show up for your organization.

Mission: Clarity of what winning looks like in your business. Shared purpose across an organization serves to both focus activities and bring clarity to what is most important. It also helps reinforce “we” rather than “I” in organizations (“It’s not about me, it’s about the mission”).

Team: Building to ensure the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In high-trust organizations that are mission focused, building strong teams requires, first, hiring great people, then providing ongoing training and development, and, importantly, firing with empathy to ensure you keep the organization fresh, innovative and forward looking, and avoid perceptions of the accumulation of deadwood.

Execution: It’s about more than finishing a to-do list. To me, this section boils down to how a leader makes decisions in uncertainty (comfort in ambiguous situations through experience, “I’ve seen this movie before”), how a leader keeps their organization on board (continually communicating to reinforce the mission), and a leader’s ability to lead through change (“chaos and difficult times bring out leaders”).

These pillars are all essential to the ‘five-tool leader’ of the future.

The world of business is changing all the time, but the constant is always people. People make companies successful and that success depends on people trusting each other.

As a leader, if you are not actively focusing on cultivating a high-trust organization, you cannot be successful. It doesn’t happen by magic. It doesn’t manifest overnight, and there is no single thing that creates it.

For me, the most important takeaway is that leaders who consider trust-building as a central part of their role will always be the most successful.