The cover of the Harvard Business Review is titled, “Rebuilding Trust”, and is chock full of articles about what executives have to do to learn and earn trust. In Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, the (then) new General Manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, and some of his old school scouts disagreed about whether or not to pick a baseball prospect because the player had great athletic ability, but wasn’t a good hitter. The discussion went like this:
Scout: “The swing needs some work, but he’s a great athlete.”Bottom line: The athletic “tools” someone has will do them no good if they don’t know the difference between a ball and a strike or can’t hit a curveball, and by the time they are twenty-something years old, they have ingrained habits about hitting that cannot be changed at that point. Isn’t this also true about executives and “trust”?
Billy: “Baseball isn’t good at fixing swings.”
While it is a novel concept to promote trust as something executives should focus on- it is not a skill set that can be taught in an MBA or any executive education program. By the time someone is interviewed for an executive position, either they are trustworthy or they are not.
Maybe the weeding/ qualification process should be first about character and last about credentials. Maybe they should have to play a round of golf to see if they count every stroke, play every lie, and maintain composure as they miss a three-foot putt. Executive education programs, coaching programs, and anything else trying to “fix” the “trust problem” are already too late. Trust is who someone is, not what they have learned at business school.
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