In this Friday edition of The Effective Statistician, Alun Bedding takes center stage to discuss a topic central to leadership and personal influence: Trust.

With his characteristic insight and practical approach, Alun explores how trust forms the foundation of effective leadership, regardless of one’s title or position. Drawing on real-world examples and actionable strategies, he highlights the habits and choices that help build trust, foster authenticity, and inspire those around us.

Whether you consider yourself a leader or not, this episode will challenge you to think differently about your role and influence. Tune in and discover how trust can transform your personal and professional life.

Key Points:
  • Trust as Leadership Backbone
  • Leadership is a Choice
  • Leadership vs. Management
  • Authenticity
  • Inspiration vs. Motivation
  • Trust Equation
  • Nine Habits of Trust:
    • Deliver
    • Be open
    • Be honest
    • Be brave
    • Coach
    • Be humble
    • Evangelize
    • Be consistent
    • Be kind
  • Trust is Earned
  • Empathy and Kindness
  • Trust as a Bank Account

Trust is the foundation of leadership, inspiration, and meaningful connections, and this episode offers invaluable insights into building it effectively. From understanding the habits of trust to choosing authenticity and kindness, Alun Bedding provides actionable advice that can transform how you lead and influence others.

Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your personal and professional impact—listen to the full episode now! If you find the discussion helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues who can benefit from learning how to cultivate trust in their own lives.

Together, let’s spread the power of trust and make a difference!


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Alun Bedding

Executive and Team Coach | Leadership Consultant | Statistical Consultant

Alun is dedicated to helping professionals make significant shifts in their thinking on various topics. He understands that each individual is unique and tailors his approach to meet each person’s specific needs. Alun works with professionals at all stages of their careers, including neurodiverse ones.

He specializes in guiding new leaders through the challenges of their roles and believes that everyone has the potential to achieve their vision. Acting as a thinking partner, Alun empowers individuals to reach their goals.

The most common subjects Alun addresses include:

  • Navigating the uncertainties of starting a new leadership position
  • Managing career transitions
  • Building confidence
  • Prioritizing important tasks
  • Enhancing teamwork
  • Preparing for job applications and interviews
  • Understanding the impact of climate change

With a background as a leader in statistics and the pharmaceutical industry, Alun brings firsthand experience to his coaching. He also works as a statistical consultant, focusing on early clinical development and pre-clinical drug discovery. His expertise lies in dose-finding, dose-escalation, adaptive designs, and Bayesian methods. Additionally, Alun supervises PhD students working on basket and platform trials.

If you’re ready to work with Alun and believe he can help you, contact him on LinkedIn or at alun@alunbeddingcoaching.com.

Transcript

Trust

Alun: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of the Effective Statistician. My name is Alun Bedding and in these Friday episodes, I explore things that can help a statistician become more effective. The topic I want to discuss today is Trust. Trust, as I always say, is the backbone of leadership and the key to being inspirational.

Before I give you some hints and tips on how you can become a more trustworthy leader or person, I want to get your mind thinking about this from you as a leader. The other thing I’m going to say is not, not everyone is going to like what I say and that, and that’s healthy. It’s healthy to have different opinions and those different opinions are always welcome.

And I know Alexander likes different opinions in the effective statistician. Let’s go for those opinions. So before you switch off thinking, well, I’m not really a leader. I’m going to categorically say, yes, you are. You [00:01:00] don’t have to have some fancy title or be selected to be a leader by some Person very senior in your organization and you certainly don’t need to have direct reports You can choose to be a leader In fact, you do choose to be a leader Even if you are selected in a particular title or in a particular role You still have to choose to be that leader and the more you can demonstrate the qualities of a leader the more you influence and have impacted everybody around you.

Now I’m going to use an example for this. I’m going to use a friend of this podcast, Caspar Rufibach, who many of you know I worked with at Roche. Many of you also know of Caspar’s expertise in the Estimam field, but also In the field of statistical methodology, but nobody put in there. Nobody said to him Casper You’re going to become the expert in estimands.

You’re going to become the expert in Cisco methodology [00:02:00] He chose to be the leader in those fields So he chose to be a leader in the field of estimates and what he did was proactively learn about The subject vestments and more and more. He learned the more and more he knew the more and more You People then saw him as the leader of Estimates, but nobody told him to be there.

So many of you will be saying, well, leadership’s great, but what about management? And I’m going to say management and leadership are different. I always keep talking, whenever I talk to people about this particular topic, I always say that there are differences between leadership and management. It’s not semantics either.

There’s a fantastic quote by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. Please look her up if you don’t know about her. She is one of the original data scientists and one of the first Rear Admirals, female Rear Admirals in the U. S. Navy. And her quote goes along the lines of, you lead people, you manage things. [00:03:00] It’s a very simple thing to remember.

But as you, as you think about that, yes, you are always going to be leading people and things are solid things that you can’t really lead, but you can actually manage them and move them around. And I have, I have heard a quantifying statement from this is that if you, you always lead soldiers into battle, you don’t manage them into battle, you lead them.

And so that’s what a great leader would do. They’d be a leader of people, not a managing lead, not a managing people. But is this just semantics? No, the more you start to say, I manage people. I manage people. I manage people that will be ingrained in your head. And what I’m going to say is the more you think about managing people, you are micro managing people.

So there is a clear distinction. Simon Sinek has a great quote that there are two ways to influence human behavior. [00:04:00] You can manipulate it or you can inspire it. Managing people is manipulating them. Leading people is inspiring them. If you want more on this difference between leadership and management, read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

In it he distinguishes, distinguishes leadership and management by asking you to imagine you’re jungle. You guys read jungle. And there’s managers there that are creating plans about how to get machete wielders to be more effective. So you might get their arms to be stronger. He might be sharpening the blades of machetes.

They’re busy producing. They’re busy chopping down trees. The leader on the other hand climbs to the highest tree, looks around him and then cries down wrong jungle.

The point here is A leader is the one who has the vision. The management is saying, well, okay, we’re, we’re, we’re busy doing this stuff. We’re busy getting the machete [00:05:00] wielders to be stronger. The machete is to be, to be sharper, but it doesn’t matter if they’re going in the wrong direction, doesn’t matter how hard they work and how much they manage these things.

They’re going in the wrong direction. So you need to have. Leadership coupled with good management. And that’s why I’m saying management is not bad, but you cannot have management without leadership. So how does this all relate to trust? Well, that’s what I’m going to come to. I just want to assure you that you all leaders.

And you always lead one person, that person’s yourself. If you’re not leading yourself, think about it. The other thing I am going to say is that good leaders are trustworthy and inspirational. And the two go hand in hand. And I use the word inspiration rather than motivation. And again, you might be arguing, well aren’t these the same?

[00:06:00] No, no, no, they are not the same. There’s a great, there’s a parable of the donkey and the carrot versus a stick approach to make the donkey move. Both of the carrot and the stick are motivational. They’re motivational because if you hit the donkey, he’s going to move. You put the carrot in front of him.

He’s going to move. Now what happens if you remove either of those, those aspects, either remove the carrot or the stick, the donkey does not move. Donkey stays where they are. So you remove them. Donkey’s going to stay where they are. Doesn’t matter how much you shouted him. He’s just going to look, I’m not going to do anything.

So what you need to do is nurture the donkey, nurture it by giving it some love, giving it companionship. It will trust you and you might not need much to do much for it to move along. It might just move the minute it sees you because it’s now trusting you. So I hope you’re seeing that being [00:07:00] a leader and being trustworthy leads to being inspirational.

It’s a virtuous circle. If you can imagine these three in a circle, The more you are, you are trustworthy, the more you build trust, the more you can become inspirational, the better leader you become, and then so on and so on. So I’ve talked a lot about the differences between leadership and management and how to be inspirational versus motivational.

So how do we gain this thing called trust? Now, one of the most important things I’m going to say to you, the listeners here is Be authentic if you act in a certain way to try and make people trust you You are now trying to, to, to manipulate them. You’re going back to that manipulative approach. Yes. They might for the time you might have some influence it, but it’d be short term.

If you try to come across it, if [00:08:00] you try to make people, Trust you and not be authentic. It will come across as fake and in the long term It’s not a recipe for success and you keep having to think well What did I do? What did I say last time? You keep having to go back and worry about that So the thing I would I would encourage you to do is just be authentic.

Be authentic. Don’t try and just please people Building trust is not about getting people to like you or pleasing them. And what people pleasing really is, is manipulation. Again, don’t fake it. Be authentic. The other thing I’m going to encourage you to do is not think about this in terms of trust equations, which is slightly odd for a podcast for statisticians.

Now, I often say building on the George Box quote, that all trust equations are wrong, but some of them are useful. [00:09:00] But no one keeps a trust score for people. I would argue no one keeps a trust score for people. I certainly don’t. And if people do keep a trust score for people, then you’ve got to think, well, okay, what’s their issues?

And I’m going to leave you to think about that as your own thoughts. So I’m going to say don’t think about trust in terms of necessarily a trust equation. The other problem with thinking about trust equations Is that in the numerator, they’re usually additive credibility plus reliability plus intimacy All divided by something called self orientation So what’s the problem with this?

Well, let’s take an example. Let’s say there’s a statistician working in the pharmaceutical industry That’s just, they’ve been there for 20 years. So they might have some credibility already. They may have written a number of papers as their credibility. They’re honest with all their dealings. So they have intimacy and they’re [00:10:00] not doing the work for themselves, but they say, well, I’m doing it for patience or well and good, but they don’t deliver.

They don’t deliver on time, they deliver the wrong things, they make mistakes so their reliability has now gone down. But if you use the additive trust equation, they have something for credibility, they have something for intimacy, they have something for self orientation, so they’ll have a trust score.

But deep down, You don’t trust them to deliver. So what should a trust equation look like? Dr. John Blakey in his book, the trust, the executive talks about a multiplicative trust equation. Trustworthiness equals ability multiplied by integrity, multiplied by benevolence. And in my example above the trust score is now zero because that person’s ability is really not there because they’re not being consistent and they haven’t been able to [00:11:00] deliver things.

And this reflects more on how we feel. But does trust equations matter? I’ve, I’ve said already that I don’t believe trust equations actually matter. So what I’m going to do now is turn to so called habits of trust, which are outlined again in John Blakey’s book, The Trusted Executive. And these nine habits of trust underpin John Blakey’s trust equation.

And they are things that you choose to do The theory is, if you choose to exhibit a habit, the more trustworthy you become. So the habits are, 1. To choose to deliver. 2. To choose to be open. 3. Choose to be honest. 4. Choose to be brave. 5. Choose to coach. 6. Choose to be humble. 7. Choose to evangelize. Eight choose to be consistent [00:12:00] and nine choose to be kind simple way of remembering these is to think of the acronym Do hb check I would also encourage people just to write these down Write them down on a piece of paper and the more you think about that acronym the more you’ll remember these Now I’m going to go into some nuances about all of these particular habits, but I’ll also say that I’m a work in progress myself.

I’m not perfect in all of these habits, and I know when I don’t live to these habits my trust has gone down. Not only my trust in myself, but also trust in other people One thing i’ve learned along the way is that trust is like a bank account If you don’t build up if you sorry if you build up enough reserves slowly and over time You build that trust on one slip or minus that might not be bad might be too bad It might be if you don’t correct it quickly But it might not be that bad.

Although what I would ask, say to people is [00:13:00] ask, ask people what might be a deposit for them? What might be a withdrawal for them? They might be different to what you think they are. So now a bit more on to the nuances of these habits. So the first is choose to deliver, to deliver. And this sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it?

You know, you’ve got to deliver things. And as a leader, your main job is to deliver. So I would say as a, as, as a leader, as an employee, Whatever you’ve got to be delivering the minute you don’t start delivering the mate the minute your trust goes down So if you say i’m going to deliver the results of this trial by this this date Make sure you do deliver if you make a mistake and say well, okay I I haven’t then be open and honest about it and i’m going to come on to those habits in a minute So I’m, let’s say I made a mistake and I can’t deliver by the end of next week.

Well, okay, then say I’d made a mistake. I cannot deliver this by the end of next week, [00:14:00] but I can get it to you by the end of the week after or the middle of the week after or the beginning of the week after people are much more forgiving. If you can be honest enough, open up front. But one thing I would say is don’t wait until the deadline has passed before you start being open and honest.

Do it early on. If you, if you realize, well, I’m, I’m not going to deliver this, this, this by the day, then make sure you communicate that to somebody. Make sure you communicate it. So being honest is, is, is, is all about that. And being open is about sharing your concerns. If you have them, if there’s bad news to, to, to share, share it, share how you’re feeling as well.

Be open about your own feelings. And again, that’s one way you’re going to get to develop trust with people. When you choose to coach, I’m not going to say you have to be a professional coach. I’m, I’m a professional coach myself, but I’m not saying you have to be, and it’s not about using fantastic coaching skills.

You don’t have to go on some [00:15:00] coaching skills course to actually be able to coach. It means more about empowering people and truly listening to them, not listening to ask your own particular question or make your own particular point, but really listening to people and asking them how they’re feeling, how they’re getting on, how they’re doing with their various things, but it’s not a cozy chat.

Don’t think of coaching as a cozy chat. It’s all about Working and challenging people but letting them find their own solutions Also be careful about jumping in immediately to give advice We all have an advice monster that advice monster sits there when somebody comes to us says I want your advice They go, yeah, fantastic.

I can jump in with my fantastic advice. But remember, you might be answering the wrong question. So make sure you’re staying curious and you’re [00:16:00] actually finding out and letting them, you’re better off actually letting them come up with their own answer rather than giving your own fantastic advice. And if you do give advice, ask them, how does that resonate with you?

Being humble is something we all should choose to do. I’ve already said, we’re all leaders. So we all should be being humble and what being humble looks like Is where we seek input from others when there’s something we don’t know And we admit we don’t know something. It’s showing a vulnerability. It’s showing that we’re vulnerable.

We actually, and that, that for some people can be quite dangerous, but vulnerability is not a weakness. In fact, admitting you don’t know something is actually far stronger than not admitting and then going away and making something up. Remember, there is not one person on this earth that knows absolutely everything.

So never behave like you do. [00:17:00] If there’s something you don’t know, put your hand up, put your hand up and say, I don’t know. I can find out. I can, I know I can ask this person. I know I can ask that person. Find it out. Evangelising is, is a word we don’t use very often. But it’s something we, we can actually do quite well.

If we just try the once or try it twice. You know, we, we can try it. And the more we try it, the more it becomes a habit. What this means is if somebody does something fantastic, something in your team or something in another team, or some, one of your colleagues just does something fantastic. Why didn’t you recognize that person?

Put, put a post together, recognize them on LinkedIn, recognize them internally. You will not believe how much trust they’ll start to have in you. If you start to recognize them when you’re recognizing them though, do not give the credit to yourself because if you do, you’ll erode that trust straight [00:18:00] away.

If you’re evangelizing somebody, evangelize them. Don’t be taking the credit for yourself. Being consistent is something that I have often struggled with, and I’m not sure if it’s, if it’s something that that’s in my past or wherever it is, but it’s something that I’ve struggled with certainly in my past, but being consistent is critical to being trusted.

So whatever the circumstances, you need to keep your message consistent. It shouldn’t change. It shouldn’t change depending on who you’re actually talking to. Doesn’t matter if you’re talking to the most senior person in the, in the world. Yeah, the old hippo effect. You, you shouldn’t be changing your opinion just because somebody says you should change your opinion.

Be consistent. Your trust will go up and you’ll be so much more of a, of a leader as [00:19:00] you do that. Now I’m going to leave the most important one to last and that’s choosing to be kind. And that may sound a bit weak. But it’s not. Choosing to be kind, I would argue, is the biggest builder of trust there is.

But it’s one that’s overlooked. And I’m not talking here about being walked all over or anything like that. I’m talking here about showing empathy to people. Thanking somebody for the job they’ve done, and a job they’ve done well, is kindness in itself. And explaining to them what they did well and how they how they they’ve influenced people that is kindness Another way of being kind is if somebody’s going through a difficult time If if you’ve got somebody in your team or a friend or a colleague who’s going through a difficult time Be there to support them and that is showing kindness.

So they have the habits of trust [00:20:00] Remember the acronym do hb check choose to deliver Choose to be open. Choose to be honest. Choose to be brave. Choose to choose to coach. Choose to be humble. Choose to evangelize. Choose to be consistent. And choose to be kind.

If you practice these habits regularly, you’ll find that trust builds quickly. There’s an old saying that trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. So this is one of the things we need to be wary of when we’re cultivating these habits of trust. I would argue that it can arrive on horseback, but the minute you then underpin, underline some of the issues around around trust, that’s when it will leave on horseback.

And I’m going to leave you with a quote from Stephen Covey. Trust is the glue of life, it’s the [00:21:00] most essential ingredient in effective communication, and it’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships. So thank you for listening to this edition of the effective statistician if you liked what you heard today Don’t forget to subscribe to the effective statistician podcast and sign up for the effective statistician newsletter. Thank you very much for listening.

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I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.

I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.

When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.

When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.

When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.

I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.

Let’s work together to achieve this.