Building trust as a leader: Lessons from Former CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty

Ginni Rometty [00:00:00]:
What I’d focus on today isn’t so much just the technology. I would focus on trust. The word trust. Whatever I do with this, you be sure that you’re building trust with your customer or employees, whoever it is. On the other side.

Hannah Beaver [00:00:15]:
You’Re listening to how to make a leader, a leadership development podcast from Big Think+, where we take the best ideas from the biggest minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights.

Hannah Beaver [00:00:26]:
I’m your host, Hannah Beaver.

Hannah Beaver [00:00:29]:
They say the only constant in life is change. Faced with constant change, how do leaders grow their fledgling startups to global businesses? How do they navigate industry upheavals and keep their team inspired, motivated, and focused on their collective vision? In a word, trust. For today’s episode, I spoke with Ginny Rometti, who is the 9th chairman, president, and chief executive officer of IBM. Izda named Fortune’s number one most powerful woman three years in a row. Ginny is a leader, innovator, and convener who believes that how we work and lead is as important as what we achieve, an idea that she crystallized in her book, Good Power. Across its pages, good power makes it clear that an ability to build trust with your reports is a critical skill shared among the world’s top leaders. We’ll start our conversation on the topic of her debut book and the motivations.

Hannah Beaver [00:01:22]:
That led her to write it. What inspired you to write Good Power?

Ginni Rometty [00:01:29]:
I never intended to write a book, actually. And actually a little bit of time went by when I was retiring and people urged me to write it. And I had thought about my journey and reflected on it having been abandoned as a child. I think you know my personal story, and I only wanted to do it if it could be in service of other people and people could learn from it. And so when you say what inspired me to write it, it was the idea that so many of the lessons I learned when I was young, they stayed with me and they scaled over time.

Ginni Rometty [00:02:04]:
You could do really hard things in.

Ginni Rometty [00:02:05]:
This day and age, but you can do them in a positive way. And perhaps the biggest lesson being that how somebody leads is as important as what they accomplished. And so that’s a lot of what.

Ginni Rometty [00:02:18]:
Inspired me to write the book that.

Ginni Rometty [00:02:19]:
I hope is helpful to other people.

Hannah Beaver [00:02:21]:
One key arc of your book is a section titled the power of we, and this is my favorite section, I think very actionable lessons we can learn within that second section of the book. To give a high level overview, could.

Hannah Beaver [00:02:33]:
You share those five principles with the.

Hannah Beaver [00:02:35]:
Audience and maybe your reflection on how those principles really impacted the lens through which you approach leadership.

Ginni Rometty [00:02:41]:
The middle section called the power of we.

Ginni Rometty [00:02:44]:
It’s, to me the great lessons I learned from people in revisionist history retrospect about how to change really tough things in power of we, meaning it’s less about you now and more about other people. And real, as you said, she knows wetter to tell me real quick, do the five principles. The first one, which is to be in service of something which is very different than serving something, because when you’re in service of, you put the other.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:09]:
Person or things needs before your own.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:11]:
And you trust as a result of doing that, yours will be fulfilled. But it’s a powerfully motivating way to make a change. The second lesson I learned was that it’s building. Belief is an endless thing you have to focus on, and to do it means you have to appeal to people’s hearts and their minds at the same time to get them to want to.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:32]:
Go to an alternate reality than the.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:34]:
One they know today. The third principle then says, and when you change something, be sure you recognize not only what must change, but what must endure. Often the endure parts overlooked, and it may just mean it has to be modernized. But it is, at its heart, what makes you, you and I got in trouble when I would drift too far away from that.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:54]:
True for a person, true for a company.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:56]:
Then the fourth one.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:57]:
Very timely.

Ginni Rometty [00:03:58]:
Now, it’s a topic I’ve written about for ten years, but it’s a like on everyone’s minds right now. It’s called stewarding good tech. That we are all stewards of good tech, not just tech companies. And the net of that is it’s important to manage not just the upside of technology, but the downside, and do it at the same time and again, we tend to focus on all the ups, but the downside’s way too late. I mean, just look at social media. And then the fifth principle, when all.

Ginni Rometty [00:04:26]:
Said and done, when you do hard.

Ginni Rometty [00:04:27]:
Things, it’s about being resilient, which relies on two things, relationships and your attitude.

Hannah Beaver [00:04:37]:
In her nearly 40 years at IBM, Ginny led the company through several pivotal moments, including IBM’s acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting. It was a relationship she forged, strengthened by trust, that made those key moments successful. To build those relationships, Ginny used a concept she identifies as building belief. Here she is to explain that concept.

Hannah Beaver [00:05:03]:
So you define the notion of building belief to be the heart of good power and the vital how of how to influence your team and build followership can you speak to some of the foundational elements of building belief, and what can this look like in practice?

Ginni Rometty [00:05:18]:
I got the both honor, the privilege.

Ginni Rometty [00:05:20]:
To work with so many great people.

Ginni Rometty [00:05:22]:
When it came to building belief. Probably some of the most meaningful lessons I got was when I managed the integration. When IBM acquired Pricewater, Cooper’s consulting, pricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM’s consulting business, they were equally large, 30,000 each. And I tried to fill that chapter with some habits and approaches, things that I think everyone could take. So, as an example, when you’re going to do something really hard, one of the principles would be, or lessons I learned was to co create it, meaning it’s not about you sitting off some side coming up with the idea. So when I merged two units, I could have said in some cases, we were clear, take one way or the.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:01]:
Other way of doing things, adopting go. But there were many things that there.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:05]:
Wasn’T a right and a wrong. They were just different. And I think in today’s world, that’s a really important thing, to find a third way through.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:13]:
There’s not a winner, there’s not a.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:14]:
Loser, because they were both right for of doing something one way or the other, but compromise. So you had to find a third way through. So this idea to co create that way with people, then enlist their support, one of the second things was to personalize everything. And that idea of personalization, to me, is really critical. Cause that gets to the heart of head and heart when you’re trying to speak to people about how to change things. And again, I’ll just use that merger as an example.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:45]:
It was very personal to me, too.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:46]:
Because it would be one of the.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:48]:
Biggest assignments I would get in the company.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:50]:
So this was going to be make or break. This was, and I was honest with people. I said, look, me too. You feel at risk?

Ginni Rometty [00:06:56]:
I do, too.

Ginni Rometty [00:06:57]:
This doesn’t work well, I will probably be doing something else in another place at another time.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:01]:
And it was never as a threat.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:03]:
It was very personal. And it was also very personal that.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:06]:
I understood for every one of them.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:08]:
You know, what they were giving up, coming into something both ways. So this idea of personalizing, in a million ways to me, speaks to people’s hearts. And then the third thing I learned, and I have to tell you, first.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:21]:
I heard it from Ken Chenault, who ran American Express.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:24]:
He said, look, the job of a leader is to paint reality and give hope. And I can remember I was giving a talk someday because I would come back to that touch tone so many times. When I would do something hard about building belief because it’s not about rah rah, because people are like, no, that’s.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:40]:
Not what I’m experiencing.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:41]:
You can’t say that. I would google it.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:44]:
It was actually Napoleon who said it.

Ginni Rometty [00:07:46]:
I had to tell Ken. He’s got to say Napoleon now. But the point would be I had to be brutally honest of what went well. But then there was always a way forward and it’s that paint reality. So be honest because people appreciate that honesty and then that hope about where.

Ginni Rometty [00:08:02]:
It is you go from here.

Ginni Rometty [00:08:03]:
Those would be three kind of, I think, practical things when you’re leading and doing tough stuff that if you just keep coming back to, they helped me through every hard thing I ever did.

Hannah Beaver [00:08:15]:
Transforming a business and keeping up with current trends of the industry is more than stating, we were once this and we’re now that. So as a leader, what are the vital questions that one must ask when leading a team or an organization through a period of change?

Ginni Rometty [00:08:30]:
I kind of briefly mentioned it when I said the principles. Here’s my most important one that stays in my mind is ask not just what should change, but what should endure. And when you talk about what to change, there are tensions to manage. So we could come back to that, but fine. It’s usually easy to say, oh, what do we have to change? What do we have to change about what we make, what we do? But then we don’t often ask what should endure. And I would get in the most.

Ginni Rometty [00:08:54]:
Trouble, as I mentioned, when I would.

Ginni Rometty [00:08:55]:
Get far away from that topic, I can remember, very competitive, you might be able to sense that even already. And we were doing work for Marriott and the CEO of Marriott I knew well. And I called him and I said, arne, I really, and Arne has passed now. He’s a great leader. And I said, arnie, this little marketing project we really wanted, here’s all the reasons. And I always remember the conversation. He said to me, jenny, stop. Just be the best IBM you can be.

Ginni Rometty [00:09:20]:
I thought to myself, I mean, I can still hear Arne’s voice. And it was like, why do you care about this little thing?

Ginni Rometty [00:09:27]:
You do all this mission critical work for me.

Ginni Rometty [00:09:29]:
And it was this idea of, okay.

Ginni Rometty [00:09:31]:
What had to endure was my mission.

Ginni Rometty [00:09:33]:
Critical core essence of my work and everything else. If it got too far from that, it may have had to be modernized. But be sure what endures about you. Some people, it’s their values. It could be what you do, how you do it, trust, how to endure. And so I would learn to focus as well on the endure part. So the question to ask yourself is, what has to endure, even if it has to be modernized? And then the second part, if I can put a companion answer, is back to that point of it’s not just what you do and change how work gets done.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:07]:
And I see this in a lot of companies right now.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:09]:
You’ll hear talks of layoffs and we have to be efficient. And if you just tell people be more efficient, it’s not going to happen. Yes, you will get things on the edges. But I learned telling the whole workforce, go faster, go faster, because we could.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:22]:
Feel the intensity of having to change.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:25]:
When all these new companies were sprouting up. And I realized after a year, I’m like, they’re not going faster, but they’re more tired. It really sunk into me that part of a leader’s job is to change how work can get done in a company. The team doesn’t wake up in the.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:42]:
Morning and go, hey, let’s be slow today.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:44]:
It’s the things you put around them.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:46]:
That make that happen. So whether it’s rules or layers or.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:49]:
Processes or whatever it is, and that takes management to help move and change some of that stuff. And so focusing on how work got.

Ginni Rometty [00:10:58]:
Done for us, it would take us and no, this is 2012, as you.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:01]:
Know, Anna, so this is back.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:02]:
It would take us on a journey.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:03]:
Of agile and design thinking at scale of hundreds of thousands of people.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:09]:
We would be some of the first.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:10]:
To do that and this idea of consumerism, but in a business world, and.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:15]:
It would take us down those journeys.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:16]:
So how work got done, got changed, and then the skills of the team that had to be changed for the future. So I would focus on what would endure, how work got done, and the skills of the team would be the.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:30]:
More important questions than just what it.

Ginni Rometty [00:11:32]:
Is you go make.

Hannah Beaver [00:11:36]:
One way that Ginny manifests trust is in her approach to continuous learning. As a leader, she has identified a change in the way that hiring decisions are made. Instead of putting faith in traditional forms of qualification, a college degree, for example, she puts her trust in people who have the skills that she needs. And in almost all cases, the primary skill that she is looking for is an ability to learn and adapt to change.

Hannah Beaver [00:12:07]:
It’s very clear that you’re a champion of lifelong learning still. So what are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned as a leader? Working to reskill or upskill your employees?

Ginni Rometty [00:12:16]:
First lesson is a leader. Access and opportunity are. Access and aptitude are entirely two different things.

Ginni Rometty [00:12:23]:
Aptitudes spread evenly in the world.

Ginni Rometty [00:12:25]:
So think about that when you go to look for employees, but access is not spread equally or opportunity is not. And I would learn that in going to hire cyber people when it was.

Ginni Rometty [00:12:36]:
A no burgeoning industry and it didn’t even exist yet.

Ginni Rometty [00:12:39]:
And I would find, just for serendipity, through work we did in corporate social.

Ginni Rometty [00:12:43]:
Responsibility with some schools and very low.

Ginni Rometty [00:12:45]:
Income neighborhoods, high schools with community college, we would fall upon a model of six year high schools. I won’t tell you the whole story, but it would show me, wait, wait, wait. These are great employees. I have to change because I only hire college degree people right now, but.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:02]:
If I change my requirements and write.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:04]:
Them for skills, I just happen to hire them at a different starting point.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:08]:
And it would give me a more inclusive, diverse workforce.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:11]:
It would lead me second. Learning skills first. I call it today meaning hire someone for their skills, not just their degree. When you consider that 65% of people.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:21]:
In developed countries do not have a.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:23]:
College degree, 80% of black Americans don’t have a college degree yet. They’ve got the aptitude, just did not have the access. So that idea where you start should not determine where you have to end. We just have different starting points. My next thing on skills would say, okay, well, that means I better build new pathways. I can’t just have college degrees as the only pathway into my company. And by the way, different conversation, we would prove that people would be equally successful, by the way, so we don’t have to talk about this wasn’t to dumb down a workforce. It was a skills based workforce.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:57]:
And I also think what I would.

Ginni Rometty [00:13:59]:
Focus on today running a company, is.

Ginni Rometty [00:14:01]:
That I’d look at my HR team and say, I need you to focus on building skill, not buying skill, because the rate technology is moving as a silver thread in all our jobs, we will all have to learn a new skill every three to five years. So all of a sudden, it’s not.

Ginni Rometty [00:14:18]:
Once and done anymore.

Ginni Rometty [00:14:20]:
This would then change. My last lesson would be about hire for someone’s propensity to learn, not for what they know in the moment.

Hannah Beaver [00:14:30]:
With the speed at which technology is changing, leaders like Ginny must cultivate the ability to change with it. Here’s Ginny Rometti one more time to talk about the importance of how leaders earn consumer trust as new changes and technologies present themselves.

Hannah Beaver [00:14:48]:
During your tenure at IBM, you not only led the company through transformational technological change, today, it’s hard to ignore the recent buzz around ever developing AI technologies particularly chat GPT, I know has been on everyone’s mind. So what wisdom would you impart on leaders who are trying to navigate the ethical challenges that new technology presents? And I guess in essence, that question would be, how do we harness the power of technology for good?

Ginni Rometty [00:15:16]:
I absolutely am a believer that this.

Ginni Rometty [00:15:17]:
Technology can bring more good than harm if we bring it into the world safety safely. And that’s an if. And I was on this topic, I mean, ten years ago, we came up with something called principles of trust and transparency. In particularly for AI, you got to.

Ginni Rometty [00:15:33]:
State your principles and live by them. So for us, the principles were things.

Ginni Rometty [00:15:36]:
Like, number one, the technology is to augment mankind, not to hurt it. And that isn’t just for the guys building it, it’s for any of you using it. Think about how you’re using it.

Ginni Rometty [00:15:47]:
The second is, be clear who owns.

Ginni Rometty [00:15:49]:
The data and how they benefit from it. And the third was probably most important, transparency in the technology. And free of bias and explainable, all that gets to is a short answer to your question is, what I’d focus on today isn’t so much just a technology. I would focus on trust. The word trust. Whatever I do with this, you be sure that you’re building trust with your customer, on the or employees, whoever it is on the other side. And that is what worries me the most about right now with chat, GPT, how it was just unleashed like that, which with some small voices saying, oh.

Ginni Rometty [00:16:25]:
Be careful, it’s not always right. It can’t solve everything. Don’t do something important with it.

Ginni Rometty [00:16:29]:
But that got drowned out by hype to bring something safely into the world like this technology. It will matter how it’s trained, how it’s introduced, give it guardrails, the problems.

Ginni Rometty [00:16:41]:
It should be used for, what it.

Ginni Rometty [00:16:42]:
Should not be used for. And the challenge we have right now is it took Netflix three and a half years to get to a million users. It took chat five days. So now it’s democratized. Yet people aren’t clear. And I don’t want to kill it for the good things it can do. When people get frustrated, it’s one thing to use it for healthcare, one thing to pick a movie with it, okay? Don’t care if it’s wrong. I learned that through my experience with AI.

Ginni Rometty [00:17:08]:
People have a very different tolerance, even if it’s better than what us as humans can do. Very different tolerance to being wrong for really important personal issues than for kind of general things. And if you’re a company, big companies are going to get much smaller leeway.

Ginni Rometty [00:17:25]:
When it comes to breaking trust with.

Ginni Rometty [00:17:27]:
Their customers than a small company.

Ginni Rometty [00:17:29]:
And so your brand promises at the heart of it.

Ginni Rometty [00:17:31]:
So the answer this whole question, if I had one word, it is trust is the word to take away what to work on. And we all have to be stewards of good tech.

Hannah Beaver [00:17:43]:
I learned a lot from my conversation with Ginny, and it was fascinating to hear her lessons in leadership learned during her eight years at the helm of one of the biggest global technology companies in the world. With leadership lessons in mind, I recently attended ATD 24, the association for Talent Developments annual conference that brings together over 9000 learning and development professionals. I spoke with L&D folks on the expo floor about the top leadership traits that they believe will need to be developed over the next five years. I heard themes emerge around digital fluency and building employee motivation. But just like Ginny’s forward looking philosophy on leadership development, several of the people I spoke to had the concept of trust. Top of mind people like Ann Creedy, a strategic business partner for the center for Creative Leadership, who stressed a critical need for trust to create an environment where people can communicate openly and provide constructive feedback.

Ann Creedy [00:18:43]:
It’s the foundation. And how are we creating psychological safety and trust through the way in which we communicate. And I think that is ground zero when we kind of zoom out and we look at the macro level in terms of what kind of conditions do leaders, or rather organizations need to cultivate for leaders and where they need to emphasize. It’s on vertical development, because it’s about that mindset, expansion. It’s about organizational and psychological safety as all those challenges are coming at them. How, what is the organization’s relationship with the people within it, and how are they building trust? And maybe the most compelling is this environment of continuous learning, learning agility, and how are we learning from the bumps and mistakes that we’re making and the great triumphs that we have. But how are we together as a collective, pulling all those insights together in order to get better and better every time something new comes at us?

Hannah Beaver [00:19:43]:
I also spoke to La Donna Hendricks, the senior director of training for Freeman, who echoed the importance of trust, particularly in the face of change.

Ladonna Hendricks [00:19:54]:
Yeah, I think trust is always a big one. Yeah, especially with every the change in the environment, you always have to have trust, you always have to have empathy as well. I think that’s another key one, communication. Because if you don’t communicate effectively, what you want from your employees not going to work as well. And then I think just really having a growth mindset because we’re constantly changing and everything’s always changing, that if a leader doesn’t have a growth mindset, then they can’t move forward and their team can’t move forward. So those are probably the top four that I think we should always keep our eye on. And the growth mindset will always be something that we need to have. If not, we’re always going to stay stagnant.

Ladonna Hendricks [00:20:32]:
Always learning, always growing, always learning, always growing.

Hannah Beaver [00:20:39]:
For more from Ginny Rometty, check the show notes for a link to her book and to listen to our full conversation. And for more from how to make a leader, make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode. We’ll be back next month and every month with more big insights and ideas from another L&D leader. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time as we learn how to make a leader.

In a world where change is the only constant, leaders must navigate their teams through uncertainty, inspire motivation, and maintain focus on collective goals. The modern leader is constantly faced with making decisions that will impact both the business, and the people working within it. Questions like: How do you navigate a corporate acquisition successfully? How do you adapt to constant technological innovation and the change that goes along with it? Ginni Rometty sums it up with one simple concept: Trust.

As the former chairman, president, and CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty draws on her eight years of experience at the helm of one of the largest technology companies in the world to share lessons she’s learned in leadership throughout her career. In this episode of How to Make a Leader, Ginni offers her insights on the crucial role of trust in leadership, drawn from her book, Good Power.

Together, we explore Ginni’s five key principles of how to use power for good to build trust and lead through change, emphasizing the importance of lifelong learning and a growth mindset. For an extra bit of insight, we asked attendees at the recent Association for Talent and Development conference for their thoughts on the top skills necessary for successful leadership, and how trust plays a role in leadership development.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to promote transparency and honesty in your team through regular communication techniques.
• Strategies to engage your team emotionally as well as intellectually through co-creation practices.
• The importance of focusing on skills and aptitude in hiring decisions to create a more inclusive and adaptable workforce.
• Clear principles for technology use that prioritize transparency, fairness, and empowering people.

Things to listen for:
(05:22) Lessons learned in building employee trust after a significant IBM acquisition.
(11:36) Why Ginni values continuous learning in leadership decisions.
(15:49) How using data helps you avoid bias and build transparency.
(18:43) Building psychological safety and trust through communication.

For more from Ginni Rometty watch the full How to Make a Leader live interview.

Buy Ginni’s book, Good Power: https://ginnirometty.com/
Support OneTen – https://oneten.org/about-us/our-approach/