Latest / Executive Careers with Fexingo: VP, C-Suite, and Senior Leadership Career Strategy / How Senior Leaders Rebuild Trust After a Failed Initiative
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this moment every senior leader dreads, and it's not the failure itself. It's the Tuesday morning after, when the board has been told, the project is dead, and you walk into the office knowing twenty people are watching to see how you handle it. Luna: And most executives either go into damage control or they go silent. Both are mistakes. Lucas: Right. And today I want to get specific about the trust repair playbook, because I've seen a couple of executives handle this brilliantly, and one in particular stands out. An operations chief at a mid-sized manufacturing firm, let's call her Dana. She led a two-year ERP implementation that collapsed during the summer go-live. We're talking production delays, customer orders slipping, the CFO publicly frustrated. Luna: Ouch. That's the kind of failure that can end a career if you play it wrong. Lucas: Exactly. And what Dana did in the first seventy-two hours after the board meeting is the most instructive thing I've seen in a long time. She didn't send a company-wide email. She didn't call an all-hands. She made a list of eleven people, by name, and she went to see each of them in person. Luna: Eleven people. That's a deliberate map, not a panic move. Lucas: Exactly. And the list wasn't just the obvious stakeholders, the CEO, the CFO, the board chair. She included the plant manager who'd been skeptical from day one, a regional sales director whose biggest account had been affected, and the IT director who'd actually built the system. She told me later that the hardest part was deciding who she didn't need to see first. Luna: Because over-apologizing can be as damaging as under-apologizing. Lucas: That's the line she had to walk. So let's break down the three phases of trust repair I think she modeled. Phase one is what I'd call honest ownership without self-flagellation. Phase two is renegotiating expectations with key stakeholders. And phase three is demonstrating competence through early, visible wins. Luna: And each phase requires a different kind of conversation. Lucas: Right. In phase one, Dana went to each of those eleven people and said, in her own words, 'This failure is mine to own. I made the call to go live when the data said we weren't ready. I'm not going to blame the vendor or the team.' But then she stopped there, she didn't grovel. Luna: There's a difference between owning a mistake and volunteering for a punishment. Lucas: Exactly. She owned it, and then she asked a specific question, 'What do you need from me in the next thirty days to feel confident we can recover?' That's the pivot from apology to action. And that's where most leaders blow it, because they apologize and wait for the other person to tell them what to do. Luna: So the question forces the stakeholder to define what trust would look like going forward. That's smart. Lucas: It also gives Dana a list of concrete expectations she could actually meet. The plant manager said he needed a weekly operational review with her, not her delegate. The sales director wanted her to personally call the top three affected customers. The IT director asked for cover, he wanted Dana to publicly take responsibility for the timeline, which she'd already done. Luna: And that's phase two, renegotiating expectations. You're resetting the terms of the relationship. Lucas: Right. Because before the failure, the expectation was, 'She's got this, the ERP will work.' Now the expectation has to be something more realistic, like, 'She's managing a messy recovery, and she'll keep us informed.' Dana had to actually ask people what they needed to feel okay, and then she had to deliver on those specific asks. Luna: And that's the seed of the third phase, because if she does those eleven things, people start to see evidence of competence again. Lucas: Exactly. Phase three isn't about grand gestures, it's about small, visible wins. For Dana, that meant having the plant manager's weekly review on the calendar for the next eight weeks, no matter what. It meant sending a one-page status update every Friday to those eleven people, even when the news was bad. Because, and this is the key, showing up consistently with bad news builds more trust than disappearing during a crisis. Luna: And it's so tempting to hide when you don't have good news. But silence reads as either incompetence or arrogance. Lucas: So let me tell you what happened. It took about four months, but Dana not only kept her job, she was actually promoted to a broader role at the end of the year. The CEO told her that her handling of the failure was the reason. And I think that's a really powerful lesson, trust repair is not about the immediate aftermath, it's about the sustained behavior over months. Luna: And I know our listeners are often in that seat, or they might be advising someone who is. So what's the one thing you'd tell a leader who's in the middle of this right now? Lucas: Make the list of the eleven people, and go see them today. Not after you've fixed the problem, today. Because the cost of waiting is that the narrative gets written without you. Luna: I love that. And it reminds me of something I want to bring up, because we're able to have these conversations without ads, and that's rare in business media. If this show has helped you think through a career move or a leadership challenge, you can support that choice at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small gesture that keeps us independent and ad-free, and we genuinely appreciate it. Lucas: Yeah, and it's not about perks or anything, it's just about keeping this resource available to anyone who needs it. Now, back to Dana, because I think there's a really important nuance about who you should not talk to in the first few days. Luna: Who would you leave off the list? Lucas: The people who don't have a direct stake in the failure, but who will be affected by the rumor mill. Dana didn't talk to the whole department, she didn't do a town hall. She let the eleven people carry the message. And that's actually a trust-building move too, because it signals to those eleven that they're the ones who matter. Luna: But at some point, you do need to address the wider team. How did she handle that? Lucas: She did a team meeting about a week later, but she didn't lead with an apology. She led with a simple statement: 'I want to be transparent about what happened and what we're doing about it.' Then she gave a one-page summary of the recovery plan. She took questions, and when someone asked a tough question about whether heads would roll, she said, 'I'm not going to talk about personnel decisions, but I will tell you that my focus is on fixing the system, not on assigning blame.' Luna: That's a great line. It's both transparent and boundary-setting. Lucas: And that's what I mean by honest ownership without self-flagellation. You're honest about the facts, but you refuse to perform the role of the scapegoat. Because if you do, people will believe you're the scapegoat. Luna: And that reminds me of another piece of this, which is the emotional toll on the leader themselves. How do you keep your own head straight while you're doing all this repair work? Lucas: That's a great question, and I think it's where a lot of executives quietly struggle. Dana told me that she had a coach she could call, and she also had a small group of peers outside the company who she could vent to without consequence. Because you cannot do this well if you're spinning out internally. Luna: And I'd add that you need to schedule time for your own thinking, not just the meetings. Dana made a point of blocking thirty minutes every morning to just think about the recovery, not to do work, but to think. Lucas: Yes, and she told me that was the most important habit she formed during that period. Because it forced her to step back from the firefighting and reflect on what was actually working. And that reflection is what led her to the idea of the weekly status update, which became her signature move. Luna: So the weekly update was a product of reflection, not just a tactic. That's a great example of how phase three emerges naturally from phase one if you're paying attention. Lucas: Exactly. And I want to wrap this up with a forward-looking thought. Trust repair is not about returning to the way things were. It's about building a new kind of trust that's actually deeper, because it's based on how you handled failure, not just how you handled success. And that's a lesson that applies to any leader, at any level. Luna: And if you're listening to this and you're in that moment, I hope you make the list. It might be the most important thing you do this week.