In Trust podcast EP 31: How Intentional Transparency Builds Trust with Gabriel Maldonado

Quotables

“As I began to trust myself more and become more confident in my own leadership and that I did know what I was doing and when I didn’t, I knew who to ask for help, I think that gave way to us, attempting at least, to try and have a culture of trust, where we trust and are open and honest with each other. I extend that to my board of directors who I have an extremely bidirectional transparent relationship with, and have regular and ongoing communication with our funders, not just telling them about our successes, but giving them progress notes along the way of our challenges.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“As the organization grows, there has to be a reinvestment in the team’s financial well being. I started to become very aware that my team has families, and they have kids, and they have husbands and wives and caregivers, and that they are caregivers to people and so they need resources. But I think beyond that, they need to also come to work and feel emotionally and spiritually invested in a way that it’s their own journey.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“Allowing my staff to cultivate those ideas really promoted an entrepreneurial culture within the organization. It’s important to let my departments and teams pioneer their own ideas and to find the dollars to be able to support their out-of-the-box ideas, even if they’re only temporary so we can see if it works to see if and it’s something that could shape outcomes. I think those are little subtle things that I’ve tried to do within their actual scope of work to make doing their job a little bit more enjoyable.” – Gabe Maldonado

“Transparency, at first, is extremely uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable for anyone under any circumstances. Transparency involves revealing things of a private nature in which there was a great deal of context within it and now you have to let people see something that they may have limited or no context at all. So there’s an anxiety around interpretation. You want it to be read correctly, you want to be understood, you want to make sure that you’re in the green light. There’s a worry.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“That approach is in intentional transparency: it’s not just being transparent when it’s asked for.”- Gabriel Maldonado

“It’s important that I’m transparent with them about how I am as a leader, because that’s important too.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“Just being able to talk openly and honestly about what’s happening, you find that they [board, funders, stakeholders] aren’t as much of a Boogeyman as they may have been perceived to be. They really are just people who want to understand, who want to know what’s going on, and who want to know how do we best achieve our outcomes. We can get to those outcomes and work through that together as long as there’s an openness about expectation and deliverable.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“My team are the most important people in my life. They have saved me and rescued me and healed me and loved on me, and championed me, when I literally felt like no one else had my back.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“I try to have as many individual one-on-one conversations with my leadership. I talk to them very directly and let them know that there is an openness about discussing our flaws. ‘So you can feel free to tell me when I do something that’s off and I’m going to let you know when there is something that’s off because we want to both make each other stronger and better. So when we have our one-on-ones, let’s just talk about it. Let’s just go at it, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ I think that casualness with being able to discuss both our desires as well as our challenges and frustrations with each other is really great.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“It’s a system of built trust. My team rewards me for the emotional labor that it takes to go that far with them, because it is laborsome on the leader to do that. My team rewards me where I don’t even have to ask them to put in the extra mile. They have a by-any-means-necessary mindset and they will work as hard as needed to, so I don’t have to drive the ship. In that regard, my job is really to make sure that, as they do that, I’m looking out for their wellness and self care so that they don’t burn their own selves into the ground. That’s all I really need to be doing. Because they push themselves hard.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“I am a flawed, healing, and hopeful person, like anyone else. I got into this field because I was trying to find healing from a childhood and adolescence that really, really strained a young, black, brown, colored boy, from Compton. It really was a set of experiences that I had to figure out a way to maneuver. Trusting in myself required a healing from a great many things that the world told me that I was not good enough, or smart enough, or a lot of enough. So that was the process that I had to begin with.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“When you can start to put together those pieces of self-care, and also begin to establish a counsel and have strategic advisors, you begin to have so many different mirrors of reflection and healthy tools in your toolbox to start to cultivate a sense of trust in your leadership.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“There really is no hierarchy on what is a “good culture.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“No one should be trying to be like us. What they should be doing is identifying a set of core principles and tenants. You, your company, your leadership, and everybody that’s in place with all the different personalities – you all can come together and get aligned on a set of agreeable principles and cultural norms.” – Gabriel Maldonado

“I’m about outcomes. ‘Did you get it done? Is it done? Is it finished? Is the box checked?’ That’s all I want to know. As for your process of how you got there, I am flexible and negotiable. I don’t really need to overly monitor. We just need to agree on a set of guidelines, meaning you’re going to get this done at this time, this is what it’s going to look like, this is what we’re trying to achieve, these are the people that you’re going to work with, and these are the milestones in which you’re going to inform me. ‘Got it? Good. All right, get onto your work!’” – Gabriel Maldonado

“You want to have these sort of loose, fixed norms that you can move with. The effort in that is to give freedom which allows for innovation and creativity. You only put in regulation, rules and process as it relates to fixing a lingering problem with that, if there are lingering problems. So that is a response, but you don’t create these things without necessity. Or if they’re preventative, you’re preventing a problem that you see is about to happen. But I think often people put in processes for redundancy and out of insistence and we have to be mindful and vigilant of that.” – Gabriel Maldonado