Kent Svenson:
Welcome to the trusted leader show. I’m Kent Svenson producer of the trusted leader show. And for this week’s episode, we have an exclusive clip from 2022 trusted leader summit, where David sat down with Dr. Brent Hales from Penn State University Extension and Lisa Kaslon from the University of Nebraska Lincoln Extension to discuss how to cascade a culture of trust in your organization. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

David Horsager:
One of the things about universities and extension specifically are they are complex in a very unique way. We’re not gonna get into all of that today, but if, if they can make a dent, then others can, and of course, these are great institutions already. We’re not saying we changed everything, but some great things happen. Let’s start with you, Dr. Brent how, how did you even come to this? How did, why did you decide to what was your trust journey to start?

Dr. Brent Hales:
Well, I had the opportunity to listen to David speak at a couple of conferences. And at the time I was with the university of Minnesota extension and they’re here today, the leadership of, of university of Minnesota extension. And we decided that we wanted to make an investment in trust building. And so I took on the responsibility of becoming a certified facilitator coach. We trained others and in the organization, and then I was given the opportunity to interview for the director’s position at Penn state. And it was interesting. I had a little bit of insider knowledge per one of the leadership team members about some of the issues that were salient at Penn state and the word toxic kept coming up a toxic culture. And so I use some of the skills that I, I gained from the facilitation to create a vision for trust and trust building in my interview process. And as a result of that, I got the job, but when it came time to get hired I said to my now boss, I said, look, you’re hiring me on the basis of this presentation, which included the trust edge work. And if you don’t let me do that, I will have zero trust in the organization. So I need that commitment. And he said, do you want it in writing? And I said, yes. And so that’s how we launched into this. Mm-Hmm

David Horsager:
Amazing journey. It’s been a privilege. So Lisa, how about university of Nebraska extension?

Lisa Kaslon:
So I think we all know, we hear in our organizations, the word trust thrown around a lot. People say it every time they’re unhappy. Every time there’s an issue, right? That I don’t trust my boss. I don’t trust my supervisor. I don’t trust this organization. It was it’s evident for all of us, I bet. And it was evident for us. And I think the, the statement that you have said three times today, I believe, and I’ve heard for seven years, is that organizations don’t change. People do. And so the basis and premise for us was everyone kept saying, you guys need to change. Administrators need to change. The leadership needs to change, do something about this organization. And it became very apparent that we needed to take a step back and think about how do we really do this. Mm-Hmm . And we really do this one individual at a time.

Lisa Kaslon:
So it gave us the opportunity to take individuals in our organization, work with them through the trust edge experience, surprised them by the fact that this wasn’t a session to come and learn about how the organization was gonna change, but to make them look at themselves, see where they had pillars of character or pillars of trust they needed to work on, and then to take that individual journey so that together we can make the change. And I, I really think looking back, that’s why we started how we started, why we’re still going and we have lots more work to do.

David Horsager:
We all do. And I think so just on your, I, I can’t remember what was in this little clip for a minute, but basically, you know, there’s a lot of parts to this. You guys have measured trust multiple times, as far as the enterprise trust in index, you have you know, I’ve spoke there. We’ve had a lot of different things, but really cool thing in your certified, trusted certified partners, facilitators have trained over 500 people in pods of about 20, over the last six years in three days, many of the companies are gonna be like, no, we get a day if that, but that helped build a common language. Tell us about the impact of that real quick.

Lisa Kaslon:
Yeah. So you can, you can decide right. Half day, three days, whatever you want in our, in our situation, we need to, to invest the time with people. This isn’t an overnight fix. I’m doing a lot of research right now on transfer training. We’re gonna, he’s gonna, David’s gonna throw out a lot of things today. Nothing sticks if you don’t want it to, by

David Horsager:
The way, her PhD is on transfer, transfer training. So how do we actually, so many people, sorry to interrupt. Good. They waste millions of dollars in in leadership development and nothing happenings, right? So

Lisa Kaslon:
Yeah. How do you make it stick? And for us, we really felt to help it stick as we needed to invest some time with people and really live out the, the pillars within that three days, you know, let’s have some connection, let’s get people networking, spending time together. Let’s build their competence by putting this in front of them. Let’s provide some clarity and have a session with the Dean. For many of our staff. They don’t get to meet daily with the Dean. And so we bring the Dean to them in a session and allow them to talk about some of the trust issues they have with our leader, which was transformational mm-hmm over time, it went from very skeptical conversations about what we were doing to, gosh, I don’t have trust issues, but it’s so cool to get to know you let’s talk about your family.

Lisa Kaslon:
And you know, it, the culture changed over that time by putting the Dean, the leader in front of them. And so those three days were impactful. It, it forced people to look inside themselves, spend some time thinking about my character, my competence, my clarity, what can I improve? How can I do better? And we kind of stepped back from that with COVID because after doing all those face to face, we’re like, this cannot be done the same way virtual. And so we need to regroup and it’s time to get going back face to face, to bring along new people.

David Horsager:
What, what I think is cool, a couple things one, and I don’t know if we’ll get to all this, but that you, the way you contextualize it, ultimately that be, it became much better and better. We might come back to that. And number two, you started to hear, at least when I came back in about the fourth year, I’m significantly common language. We talk about common language. If people don’t know common, you can’t build a common language without dripping it over and over and over now you’ve had this reinforcement in some of those kind of things.

Lisa Kaslon:
It’s a joke. The word clarity is like now the joke. Yeah. Cause everybody’s like I need more clarity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know

David Horsager:
yeah. Stop saying communication. I didn’t say it this morning, but you never have a communication issue. Never have a communication issue at the core communication happening all the time. Clear communication is trusted, unclear. Isn’t compassionate communication is trusted hateful. Isn’t high character trusted low character. So when you define that, you start to get the communication you meant. Right. So Dr. HAES, what do you think? I think to just think through this, what do you think were some of the keys to starting the cascade of trust as you’ve, as far as your perspective?

Dr. Brent Hales:
Well as you know, David, what came to Penn state at the best time possible to do the executive training with us in March of 2020 . And it was during that executive session that we found out we were shutting down. And so during,

David Horsager:
During in the middle.

Dr. Brent Hales:
And so I kept going out and getting calls from the provost and, and getting calls saying we’ve gotta shift cuz I’ve got 67 offices in every single county of Pennsylvania and all those had to be shut down and there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. And so we began to figure out kind of on the fly how we could do this while simultaneously adjusting to this new reality. And so we brought in the leadership team, we brought in some of our amazing facilitators led by Renee psy to figure out how we can actually do this. And it, that language, that common language is absolutely critical. And so we launched our first trust enterprise index at the beginning of COVID. Now you can imagine you would expect a high level of trust, but going back to that notion of toxic we had a lot of work to do.

Dr. Brent Hales:
And so we began offering the trainings virtually and very quickly pivoted. And over the course of the last two years, we’ve trained 400 people virtually. And, and we use the language, the eight pillars in every single interaction. Additionally, I keep the trust in the, the, the pillars. I keep the cards on my home computer, cuz we were initially working from home and then on my work computer just below the monitors. So in every interaction that pillar, those pillars are coming back to me, what do I need to be focusing on? How do I need to be doing this? And then as a leadership team, initially, just myself I began mapping mapping every single

David Horsager:
Initiative that surprise you here. Shocking

Dr. Brent Hales:
Every single initiative that we do back to trust.

David Horsager:
Thank you. And with permission, I’m gonna show that that picture and we haven’t run through these, but I just thought I asked you I’ll show ’em in just a second. Maybe first I should show this our perspective on how, you know, how many would like to on any let’s not take trust. Let’s say how many would like to have a better culture? Like how many need to, to kind of transform their culture in some way. Okay. So we’re kind of, so here’s my perspective and this was inspired a bit by a Harvard research back in 2016 that showed the loss the wasted money in leadership development programs. And we added to it, tweaked it and made it what we think it takes to create cultural change, which is not easy, but it can be done. And so here, I’ll just give you whip through the nine steps to culture transformation from our perspective.

David Horsager:
And then we’re gonna come back and say what was hardest and what was maybe most important to you guys. And I might even come out in the audience in touch with touch with a few people to keep us going here. But number one, it, I don’t care what you do this. If you’re chief people, chief culture officer, if you’re you care about culture and you, you have to go beyond a person this has to align with whatever it is. It has to align with your strategy and values. It won’t last number two, you have to find a champion. This is our experience. You’ll see chief culture officer United health group tomorrow in our almost decade of working with him. It, you had to have a champion like that and it has to last, you can’t, unless you wanna be one and done or flavor of the month, which you can do with great things and terrible things.

David Horsager:
But you have to have a champion that actually cares at least in the business unit. And it can be small. It doesn’t have to be big university, but you have to have one. I believe this to my core, if you don’t help the person with an actionable they can use today. When we talk about, you know, whatever we talk about, you have to take that eight pillar framework say what’s a way I can increase trust tomorrow. So when you, many of you’ve seen our deeper work. So the ODC model or the DMA model or the how ha ha model, you have to take that. And I have to be able to use it tomorrow to help me. You have to help your people use it. If it doesn’t help them have less stress, more sales, quicker results, it doesn’t matter. They need to bring research down to usability.

David Horsager:
Number four, you have to create a, if you’re in the learning and development process, there has to be a safe environment. You have to have a safe environment for learning to happen. Number five is I believe more than ever today. You have to include live interaction, even if it’s virtual live. So we did some of, you know, we had 250 virtual events from our five camera studio at the Institute up in white bear lake. But the best ones were not everybody sit down and watch a video. The best is if you’ve seen the way we do it, it’s interact right there. Even through virtual. You have to have a live component so people can respond. Number six, I believe just like Drucker as you know, the, the late great Drucker. What’s his first name? Peter, thank you. Like I said, Peter Drucker you know, what gets measured gets managed and that’s where we, we believe if you’re not measuring trust, you’re not measuring the right thing.

David Horsager:
You know, you can measure other things, but if you’re not measuring trust I, I hope with just passion and, and humility say that, but you have to measure it to close gaps. And that’s why I use the enterprise trust index or the trust industry, 60, those kind of things, whatever you wanna change. And there’s other things you can measure that are good. Number seven, you have to provide, this is just added because we saw things stop unless you provided healthy accountability. I’m not gonna teach it today. Many of the certifieds know it, but if you’d like our simple sex six did I say, did I say something six, six with an eye six step process for accountability, anybody here’s welcome to it. Email Gabe or Margaret or somebody. And you can see that six step process. Of course we can go into it, deeper with you, but we’re happy to give that to you because you have to have healthy accountability to have things keep going.

David Horsager:
Number eight, it must be reinforced consistently the cultures that have changed Lisa with a seven years. Several of you, it’s a multi-year process, even though in one of the organizations here, we saw attrition go down by two to 4 million in nine months. If you want things to keep going, it has to be a consistent process. Number nine, it has to, a lot of organizations go with training and development that only helps the organization. It doesn’t work. You have to help the individual, do their job better to get buy in and keep with it. They have to have tools they can use tomorrow morning. So of these, what what was, what was the hardest and most important,

Lisa Kaslon:
Hardest is probably that we are. So in extension we’re a large group within the university system, but there’s larger systems around us, right? So there’s an Institute of ag that we’re a part of. There’s the, the entire university of Lincoln system. There’s the, the three campus system. And so there’s a lot of other people, right? We’re a people business. We’re reaching out, working with stakeholders. So there’s, there’s our stakeholders across the state. And so we can only control what we can control. And that’s working individually with our faculty and staff. So somebody outside of us that we’re connected to though is still gonna create a trust issue. We can’t control that. We can’t manage that even right now in the midst of everything going on, we in trying to build trust with our own faculty and staff who knows what pay raises might look like this year.

Lisa Kaslon:
So does that affect their trust? Absolutely. And so I think the biggest thing for us is this ongoing idea of how to manage that with people and not now say, oh, geez, this organization has trust issues. Well, there’re always gonna be trust issues. Absolutely. There’s always going to be something. How do I step back? How do I get the clarity to understand why we might not get pay raises so that while I might not agree, I understand. And then I don’t distrust you know, the organization. So I think that for me has been always the hardest because you can do all you can. I mean, I care deeply about our faculty. I wanna help them succeed. I want them to say, we love this organization. We trust it. I don’t know if they’d all stand up and say that today after seven years, because there’s always something. But I really want them to figure out then how do they manage that? Yeah. And I would, I would say that eight pillars do that.

David Horsager:
Thank you. So let’s jump here. You can add whatever you’d like to it, but I was very encouraged when you were working through a project and this was your this is your board. Tell us what that means. What’s that about?

Dr. Brent Hales:
So as you can see on the left hand side, those are some of the initiatives. We took the data from the enterprise index. We took our initiatives and said, what are we doing that we can map back to the eight pillars? And if we can’t map it back to the eight pillars, if they’re not contributing to trust, why are we doing it? Mm-Hmm . And so initially individually, we took these initiatives and please forgive the, the acronym soup. But we looked at all of our initiatives and said, why are we doing it? Is it contributing? Is it not contributing? What pillar is it reinforcing? And this became, this exercise became the core of where we’re going and how we’re gonna do it.

David Horsager:
Love it. So I’m gonna give another slide here to keep us moving along. And when we look at it, how do we simplify all this down while most looking at most organizations, we simply fi down to IEA, most organizations, we need to shift thinking around trust. First, most of you that have hired us have to do culture work, have seen me speak at an event, seen Michelle seen Dave Cornell seen Milton. You started by just, oh wow, there’s an aha that, oh, trust is this important. And so it started with this inspire. And the second piece we often do is equip. That’s where we certify some of your folks to keep it deeper, to kind of be the ambassadors. That’s the second step. And I don’t care what you do, no trust stuff, whatever you want to do, you have to have a group of ambassadors to take it forward, to carry it in your context, you know, better your context than any of us do, even though we might be experts on trust in a way, you know, I mean, the way we do it in in Kenya might be leading a certain way with something even the pillar.

David Horsager:
So the way we do it over here, policing issues or whatever it is. So, but we wanna equip some of your people to be certified partners. And then align is where we go deeper that’s can be a significant project. It always starts with a measurement tool. And usually with the enterprise trust index, because of all the cool thing all the times, we’ve done it over all the years. One time has the index not gone up with work, not, and there was a very unique, specific situation, but we align and we align in align. We align leadership to it. It’s there’s a whole lot that goes into aligning, but it starts with an index. So that’s, that’s that,

Kent Svenson:
That’s it for this week’s episode, be sure to check out trusted leader, show.com for all the show notes and links and information from anything mentioned in today’s episode and for interested in learning more about the measurement tools that trusted leadership Institute has to offer, be sure to check out, measure my trust.com to learn how you can cascade a culture of trust in your organization. And if you haven’t already, we would greatly appreciate a review on apple podcasts as this is a great way to help support the show and help others to discover it. But in the meantime, that’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time stay trusted.