‘Trust and Inspire’ Over ‘Command and Control’: A Conversation on Authentic Leadership with Stephen M. R. Covey

When your father wrote one of the most influential leadership books of all time, the expectations for your own career are high.  

“I wanted to distinguish myself from my dad, partly because I didn’t want to be a poor man’s version of him,” says Stephen M. R. Covey, author of the new book “Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others” (Simon and Schuster, out April 5, 2022). 

That’s why he began working in commercial real estate development before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School. He graduated with plenty of opportunities on Wall Street, but his father said, “Why don’t you join me? We have a chance to really change the world,” Stephen recalls. 

“Dad,” is the late Stephen R. Covey, the author of the perennial bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and 13 other books. In 1985, he launched Stephen R. Covey and Associates (which later became the Covey Leadership Center) and, in 1997, merged with Franklin Quest to form FranklinCovey, a global business consulting and talent development firm.

Stephen (junior) “had a little bit of hesitancy about joining up with my dad and going down a family path,” he tells me on an episode of the Finding Gravitas podcast. “But I actually knew the power of those seven habits because I experienced them growing up.”

Habit number one, for the uninitiated, is to be proactive — to focus and act on what you can control and influence instead of what you can’t.

So Stephen worked his way up in the family business, from salesperson all the way to President/CEO of the Covey Leadership Center, growing it into the largest leadership development company in the world.  

“Creating a company, scaling the company, figuring out a business model. That was important work. [But] after the merger [with Franklin Quest], I found something I wanted to say.”

That “something” is about the importance of trust. “Trust and Inspire” is the latest of three bestsellers that explore trust as the “underlying foundation of every dimension of relationships, of teams, of cultures, and of life,” he explains. 

“It is trust that makes our world go round. It is trust that makes our organizations thrive. It certainly is trust that makes our relationships happy and joyful. And if you can get good at building trust on purpose, what an advantage that is.”

In a powerful conversation about leadership, Stephen shares his empowering approach, how trust helps us innovate faster and why mindset isn’t just about our own thinking — it’s about empowering others.

The ‘speed of trust’ vs. stagnant ‘command and control’ 

After 18 years of “learning through doing” in a variety of roles, Stephen knows that we need a new kind of leadership today, in the era of a dispersed workforce and a global economy.  

“I’m calling it ‘trust and inspire’ in contrast to ‘command and control,’” he says. “You can’t ‘command and control’ your way to innovation.”

The command and control model is deeply ingrained in business management circles, especially in the automotive industry. It’s a relic of the hierarchical military command structures of postwar manufacturing. But it’s completely ineffective for how we work today. It stifles innovation.

As a veteran of the auto industry myself, I know many leaders who will bristle at this. They’ll say: We have high performance standards and razor-thin margins; we’ve got to produce. 

There’s a lot of fear about abandoning traditional strategies — What if someone messes up? It’s on me; I might lose my job. And because we’re going so fast, we’re on a sort of hamster wheel. We think there’s no time to meet with people one-on-one. We’re obsessed with numbers. 

“Look at the data,” says Stephen, who points out that “with people, fast is slow and slow is fast.” 

Being “efficient” with people usually backfires in the long run. If you lose people, you have to replace them and train them. If you don’t get their buy-in and their involvement, “you’ll get compliance but not commitment; you’ll get the minimum of what’s required, but not their creativity, their innovative spirit and their heart,” he adds.

“Be efficient with things, be effective with people.”

Making time for trust makes everything move more swiftly 

If you think you don’t have time, that’s all the more reason to do it. 

In his first book, “The Speed of Trust,” he argues that “speed happens when people trust each other. And nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. Nothing is as profitable as the economics of trust.”

“Taking the time to listen, to understand and to demonstrate respect … takes time up front, but you’ll move faster.” 

Paradoxically, we do need to invest time and effort into people, but the return on that investment is profound (and happens sooner than we think).

Stephen’s model of leadership begins with the belief that people are creative, collaborative, and full of potential. It focuses on ways to help individuals self-actualize and do their best work. In fact, trust and inspire upends management entirely. People don’t want to be managed; they want to be led.

“You’re truly empowering people around an agreement, with clear expectations and accountability,” he explains. “With that, you can do so much more. People will judge themselves against the agreement and report back to you, instead of you having to hover.”

Shift your mindset, strengthen your teams

One of my 21 traits of an authentic leader is mindset — “and it’s a great one,” says Stephen. “Our behavior flows from our mindset, and if you want to change your behavior, change the way you think first — change your paradigm.”

One such shift: Operate on the premise that most people are basically good. We can acknowledge that some people might “color outside the lines,” but we should recognize them as outliers. Organizations built with the command and control mindset were designed “for the 5% we can’t trust, not for the 95% we can,” he adds. “We penalize the many because of the few, and the cost is enormous.”

There’s a better way to do this and still retain the control we need to have as leaders. 

“But it’s built-in control through culture,” Stephen says. “Through expectations and accountability, through agreements that govern. People [who] don’t belong get weeded out, as opposed to more rules, more policies, more procedures and processes.”

We should also embrace the idea of “growth mindset,” popularized by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. This concept is important to nurture within your team as well as yourself, says Stephen.

“I could have a growth mindset for myself as a command and control leader … I call it ‘enlightened command and control.’ That’s a good thing. It’s better than authoritarian command … But the real question is: Do I also have a growth mindset for others — that they can grow?”

The book “Trust and Inspire” begins with the fundamental beliefs of a leader who follows this model, which “collectively comprise the mindset, the paradigm for how you view people and leadership,” Stephen explains.

The very first one is: People have greatness inside of them.

“My job as a leader is to unleash their potential, not to control them … to inspire, not merely motivate. People are not just economic beings, they’re whole persons. They have a desire to contribute, add value, to develop, to grow.”

Goals, growth, and gravitas

As leaders, we’re architects of big-picture goals. We strategize to achieve specific outcomes. But command-and-control cultures make us feel that, even as senior executives, we need to be down in the weeds, micromanaging details. But if we have teams of people to attend to those details, we need to empower them to do so and trust that they will.

Stephen says that in order to have trust (the noun, aka the outcome), we need to be both trustworthy and trusting. Trust (the verb) is necessary to create that outcome.

“You could have two trustworthy people working together, and yet no trust between them,” he explains.

The same thing goes for teams within organizations and companies working with suppliers. Each party in a relationship must be willing to extend trust to the other. 

“You win in the workplace when you build and inspire a high-trust culture, and you win in the marketplace when you collaborate and innovate. That’s how you stay relevant in a changing world,” Stephen says.

Naturally, his definition of gravitas centers on trust as well. 

“The Greek philosophy of influence was expressed in three words: ethos, pathos, logos,” he says. “What gravitas means to me — it’s ethos, pathos, and logos in that sequence. My trust and inspire model is modeling, trusting, and inspiring. … That’s gravitas. It’s who you are. It’s your credibility; it’s the moral authority that precedes you.”

Tune in to the full interview with the Stephen M.R. Covey

Jan Griffiths is the president and founder of Gravitas Detroit, which provides online courses, workshops, and internal company podcasting services to accelerate high-performance teams and develop leaders. A passionate advocate for authentic leadership in the automotive industry and one of the top 100 leading women in the industry. She hosts the Finding Gravitas podcast. 

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