Why Authenticity Builds More Trust Than Strategy Ever Will

Authentic connection: what it means, why it matters, and how we actually get it. Everything we do in our lives is built on relationships. Employees, clients, customers, spouses, friends, mentors, teammates, the people we choose to follow and listen to and be influenced by. All of it is relationships. And those relationships are built on trust. Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team: the very foundational piece of the entire pyramid, the bottom tier that everything else is built on, is trust. In business, we say we want to do business with people we know, like, and trust. And I truly believe that. At our core, we want to be in relationship with people we know, like, and trust. But then we think about the environments we find ourselves in where we're trying to build trust and connection, but it's built in an environment of performance and perfection and pressure.

Think about the interview process. Two people coming together to determine if there's a connection, if it makes sense to move forward into a longer-term, more committed relationship. We're looking to see: is this worthwhile? Is this a good investment? But the interview itself creates an environment of performance. Think about how nervous we are walking in and thinking, what answers am I gonna say? How am I gonna say the right thing? How am I gonna get them to like me? The whole air of the conversation feels forced.

I remember sitting in on an interview for a sales position, over Zoom because the candidate was in a different city. We had a couple people from our team and the candidate. We're asking questions, he's saying good answers, we're liking what we're hearing, but there's something about it. We're not getting to the real person. I still feel the veneer, the guard that's up. And I can't make a decision until I get past that guard. So I'm always looking for that moment in an interview where I'm like: okay, we got past the guard. He'd shown up with a button-down shirt and a sport coat, which we didn't see very often. Very articulate. And then one of the interviewers said, what are you wearing with the suit coat? Do you have suit pants on? And the guy laughed. He was like, No, I'm wearing basketball shorts. That was the moment. The whole interview changed. The conversation changed. Everybody laughed. We ended up hiring him, and he was amazing. We just had to get past the facade of the interview and find out who he really was.

We think that's what we want in an interview: the person with all the right answers, the confidence, the one who can just spout things off and sound really good and not stutter or pause. But in reality, that's not who we are as people. We pause, we stutter, we trip over our words. That doesn't mean that what comes after the stumble isn't valuable. I've always been tempted to get stuck in this performance rut. Every time I turn a camera on, every time I record this podcast, there's a part of me that wants to lean into having all my thoughts and notes together, planning it all out. But I've also made the mistake of going so far over to that side of wanting something to be perfect that I stop valuing good, I get stuck in analysis paralysis. And that's also the moment where the more I lean into performance, the less room there is for connection and authenticity.

Connection and authenticity and trust, at their core, happen through vulnerability. Through showing up just as we are. I spent years leaning too far into teaching and having to come off as saying the right thing and being an expert. The whole time wrestling internally because I'm like, this isn't who I am. I want to talk about authenticity and connection and faith and people and purpose and wiring. And here I am talking about SEO or marketing strategy or websites. It has been a practice of turning on the microphone and trying to communicate in an authentic way and forcing myself to be more vulnerable and more messy than I would naturally want to show up as. Because I've been realizing that we connect more through story than we do through strategy. I have always wanted to veer toward strategy: here's the framework, here's the five steps. Versus: here's the story of what I went through to figure this out, all the mistakes I made along the way.

When I share, I'm terrified. I'm gonna share this and no one's gonna care. I'm gonna share this and people are gonna judge me or reject me. No one really cares about my story, so I should just get to the meat and potatoes of the big takeaways. Only after years of doing that, I found that it wasn't working. And it was the times where I leaned in and did something scary, put myself in that uncomfortable position of saying, here's the story and here's what I learned through this process, and if this helps you, that's awesome. I hope you're able to find your own revelation through just hearing a story versus me always feeling like I need to teach something or have it all figured out.

I remember years ago, working from home with young kids, building our web design agency in the early years. I'd stepped into the sales and marketing role. My kids were about one and three, old enough that you can't just say, hey, mom's on the phone. And they understand: no, I want what I want right now and I don't care if you're on the phone. I was on a sales call pitching a website, and in the background, my kid was just screaming and crying. I was so embarrassed. Apologizing to the client. Got off the phone and I was like, oh my gosh, I totally bombed that one. The client said yes. And he told me specifically: I'm saying yes to you because I heard your kid crying in the background, and I'm in that season too. I know exactly what that feels like. I have young kids at home, I'm also running my business. I know how that feels. Moment where I shouldn't have got the sale. And I got it because there was that connection. We were both humans, both parents, both entrepreneurs trying to run our businesses.

Sometimes in the sales process or in leadership, it's easier to want to stay safe, go with what we know. I was leading an entrepreneur small group. We talked about faith, we talked about business. I was in a stressful season of life, and I'd been working on a new teaching idea I was excited about. But I'd also had the story of Joseph on my heart. Him getting a dream, then being sold into slavery, spending years in jail before the dream came true. I felt like God was saying: you need to talk about this story and how it relates to business. But because work had been busy, I didn't have as much time to prep and study as I wanted to. And so I defaulted to the topic I already had prepped and ready to go. I went and I presented it, and it bombed. It wasn't that the ideas weren't valuable, but there was no connection, no authenticity, no storytelling. Instead of being willing to do something messy, something unprepared, something God was asking me to do, I leaned into: this is what's safe, this is what I know, this is what I can deliver without messing up. That decision haunts me in a lot of the decisions that come forward now.

I'm learning to share authentically, not for the outcome. Not for the affirmation or the encouragement I want in return. Sharing authentically out of obedience, because I know that's what I'm called to do and I know that's where connection starts. I've shared authentically and done something uncomfortable and put myself out there and gotten nothing in return. Just crickets, just silence. And at first that was really discouraging. But over the last few months I've been learning: God is teaching me to do this not for the outcome, because that's actually not what matters at all. It's about being willing to share out of obedience, out of surrender. I don't want to get in the habit of sharing only when I get something in return.

Years ago, we were at a web agency conference. We'd had a really rough start, one of the hardest years of our life. I felt convicted to share our story. I remember writing it out, feeling this gripping inside of me: I'm not gonna be able to breathe or think about anything else until I share this. They asked for people who wanted to come up and share their experience with the group. I got up there in front of probably a hundred people and shared our story of the last year, which had been brutal. We had been so broke. Overdrawn personal accounts, overdrawn checking accounts, not enough money coming in, debt rising. I remember one time having to go pick up a check from a client, and our accounts were overdrawn, and we had no gas in the tank, scrounging the house for change and dollar bills to get $3 worth of gas, just enough to drive to the client to pick up the check so we could deposit it. I'm telling this story and I'm crying as I'm telling it. And I'm talking about how ugly things were, and then how we had started applying some principles that completely turned our business around. We'd gone from not even $2,000 a month to our first six-figure year, $10,000 a month, within twelve months.

I was so scared to get up and share that story. But I was crying, my husband was crying, and there were other people in the room crying because they had been having real rough years too. We weren't the only ones who'd felt that failure and that struggle. It wasn't that I was teaching them anything. It was just that I was sharing a struggle they knew. They were like: you're putting words to things I've felt that I've never wanted to admit. Afterwards people were coming up and saying thank you for sharing your story. And the whole rest of the conference was different after that. Not just for me. I think for other people. Being willing to lead with vulnerability then helped there be other conversations about vulnerability, about the real stuff, about what they were struggling with as business owners.

Now, the bad side: I went and did that and saw what happened, and then I went about it completely the wrong way. I stopped leading with story, stopped leading with vulnerability, and got the formula all wrong. I just went back to trying to teach, trying to be an expert, instead of just trying to be authentic. And I spent years trying to connect with people by asking a ton of questions, trying to understand them, 100% trying to establish a real relationship. Only I never shared first. I was always trying to get other people to be vulnerable. I was always trying to dig into their story out of genuine fascination, but I didn't share, I didn't lead. And I ended up realizing that all these relationships I'd spent so much effort trying to build hadn't worked. I hadn't built real connection because I had failed to share. It was only one-sided, not two-sided. That realization was a huge catalyst for this authentic journey I'm on. Oh wow, I have to lead with authenticity, and that means being vulnerable. And in order to connect, it means sharing the real stuff.

I train hiring managers to understand: don't expect your candidate, who is nervous and under the microscope, to come in and share authentically. You have to lead that. You have to break it down. You set the tone. We can only control what we do. And so as a leader, as a hiring manager, as a person, in whatever relationship we're engaging in, if we can be willing to take the first step, willing to make the first move, willing to lead with vulnerability and sharing and being uncomfortable, if we can sign up for that first, it has a ripple effect. It can change the entire dynamic of a room.

When I left Montana and God called us to Alaska, he said: you will share this story. I didn't fully understand what he meant at the time. I thought he meant: you're gonna share the story of how you moved from Montana to Alaska. But I didn't realize the depth. It's all of it. The story of everything I'm learning, of all these ups and these downs. And now as I meet new clients, new businesses, new leaders, it's changing the way I show up, the way I try to set the foundation for a relationship. I don't want to build a relationship that isn't authentic. I've spent too long not being authentic, getting stuck in those ruts, and having all these relationships built off a false foundation. And realizing that all the time and effort I'd invested into those relationships didn't really go anywhere, because it wasn't built on that foundational trust piece to begin with.

Interviewing and hiring is the first time to start a relationship. The very beginning. That's where the foundation is being built. How do we create a strong foundation of trust? How do we strip off the performance and the expectations and the perfection and get into real territory? So that when we start to work together, we're gonna like each other, we're gonna know each other, we're gonna trust each other. And it starts at the beginning. If we don't get the beginning right, everything that comes after is so much harder. It's like if we could just start it off the right way the first time, we could save ourselves so much time and headache and expense by getting it started off on the right foot.