Credibility HowLeaders Gain and Lose It WHY PEOPLE DEMAND IT

Abstract

Credibility is the foundation of leadership. This is the inescapable conclusionwehave come toaftermore than thirty years of research into the dynamics of the relationship between leaders and constituents. People have to believe in their leaders before they will willingly follow them. That’s why we first wrote Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It twenty years ago, and it’s why we have taken the time to thoroughly update and revise it. Credibility is about how leaders earn the trust and confidence of their constituents. It’s about what people demand of their leaders as a prerequisite to willingly contributing their hearts and minds to a common cause, and it’s about the actions leaders must take in order to intensify their constituents’ commitment. Timing is everything. When the first edition of Credibility was published in 1993 we noted that nearly half of America’s workforce was cynical. Worldwide, 60 percent or more of workers believed that their management wasn’t honest with them, more than half had lost confidence in the abilities of their top management, and overall confidence in major business was at a historic low of only 26 percent.1 We wanted to remind leaders how important it was to attend to the fundamentals. We thought they should take the importance of xi Introduction earning and sustaining credibility more seriously. We wanted to offer a useful framework and practical suggestions on what leaders could do to increase the trust and confidence others had in them. We hoped we could play some small part in restoring people’s faith in their leaders.