Trust is to an organization what oil is to a car engine. It keeps the moving parts from seizing up and stopping forward motion.

But trust is not something you can take for granted. It takes months—sometimes years—to build. Unfortunately, you can lose it overnight.

Leadership begins with knowing who you are and what you believe. Authenticity is the need for leaders to be themselves regardless of the situation. For this reason, it is more than self-awareness. It is the ability to share the deepest and truest part of ourselves with others.

My undergraduate degree was in Business Management. The first thing we did was to identify successful leaders and write papers on how to mimic their behaviors. Textbooks were full of tips on how to do this and tests made certain we ingested the critical points that led to their success.

Yesterday, I posted the first part of the interview with my friend, Anne Jackson, is a writer, speaker, and activist. In her newest book, Permission to Speak Freely, Anne chronicles her own story of growing up in church and being afraid to talk about certain “taboo” topics. She also shares some of the many “confessions” she received in response to the question she originally posed on her blog: “What is something you feel you can’t say in church or around other Christians?”

As I mentioned yesterday, the premise of Permission to Speak Freely is that you are not alone in your battle with secrets and brokenness.

My friend, Anne Jackson, is a writer, speaker, and activist. In her newest book, Permission to Speak Freely, Anne chronicles her own story of growing up in church and being afraid to talk about certain “taboo” topics. She also shares some of the many “confessions” she received in response to the question she originally posed on her blog: “What is something you feel you can’t say in church or around other Christians?”

The premise of Permission to Speak Freely is that you are not alone in your battle with secrets and brokenness.

Most leaders periodically talk to their teams about how they value honesty and why they want more of it. This talk on honesty has become one of the classical management talks in the business world.

However, judging by their behavior, I have noticed that very few of these leaders actually encourage honesty. And I’m confident this doesn’t apply just for the leaders I know. It’s very easy to state that you want honesty from people; it’s much harder to create a culture that actually fosters it.

Several months ago, a former executive at our company made a commitment to a third-party via email. It is obvious that he didn’t research the cost of his promise, nor did he get anyone else’s approval. I was not aware of the obligation until the other party brought it to our attention. When I learned that the commitment was north of six figures, I gasped.

I started my selling career in high school. I sold door-to-door for Fuller Brush and a local cable television company. In college, I sold Grolier encyclopedias. Each of these sales positions involved “cold calling.” It was basically a form of human spamming: I called on people I didn’t know, who had not indicated an interest in the product, at times that were inconvenient for them. It was brutal work.

Today, we live in a world of near-total transparency. Google, Wikipedia, and many other websites make it possible to check any fact almost instantaneously. As a leader, speaker, or author, you have to be particularly careful with your statistics. If you exaggerate the facts, you will be found out. And the results can be embarrassing—or worse.

For example, we occasionally get proposals from authors who claim to have a blog that draws thousands of visitors. In fact, about a week ago, I had an agent claim that his client was “the most popular Christian blogger on the internet.” Perhaps he was just taking the author’s word for it. Maybe he was using hyperbole. Unfortunately, for him—and his client—this kind of claim can be easily checked.