Keeping Secrets and Being Loyal

The Essential Intangibles Part 6

“So why do you think you and Chad don’t connect well in ministry,” I asked another pastor who had troubles with a young leader that worked for him (I’ve changed the names in this story).

“Well, after thinking it through I believe I can trace a lot of my problems with him back to one thing he did two years ago,” my friend Bryce said. 

“What did he do?”

“I had begun to share with him more of my own feelings about our work and some of the struggles and direction of things. I had stressed with him that one of the things I told him was a significant secret, but a few weeks later I found out that he told that very thing to several people and broke confidence. I think that broken trust and loyalty is what began to erode stuff between us.”

This is part 6 of the series “The Essential Intangibles,” the little things that can make or break a leader. These intangibles are essential, but thankfully, they can be learned by anyone.

The Essential Intangibles - Table of Contents

Nothing cuts quite as deep as a betrayal, especially a trusted secret someone tells about you. All leaders have different values in their work, nuances that give texture to their leadership. But I’ve found that leaders at the highest level often value loyalty over almost anything else, and they just don’t tolerate someone in their inner circle that can’t keep confidences. In church work I’ve found that Senior Pastors in particular are looking for loyal staff people most of all, leaders that will follow and not get out of alignment, and people that will know the inner workings of the team and not break confidence. Of course counselors and pastors are often told private information about people’s lives, and that’s where it starts, but it extends to those we work with too.

When you are loyal and keep secrets

If you’re a person that is loyal and can keep secrets then you’ll find that you’re “in” on more decision-making. If you’ve been trusted in the past and found to be trustworthy, you’re trusted with much more the next time. And if your superiors find out that someone tried to get something from you and you didn’t crack (like a prisoner of war under interrogation) then their estimation of you climbs to a very high level. Your loyalty enables you to be entrusted with information, decision-making authority, and influence in your organization that just couldn’t be entrusted to someone who might be self-serving. And when you can keep the most sensitive of secrets within your organization you are often the first one others go to in making such decisions in the future. Loyal people who can keep secrets become a hub within an organization, like a safe that is locked up in the middle of a vault… others bank on you; they depend on you at every turn.

When you aren’t loyal and don’t keep secrets

Perhaps more than any other intangible, the difference between doing it and not doing is most extreme for this one. Whereas those that are loyal secret-keepers become a hub in an organization, those that aren’t loyal and don’t keep secrets are shunned and avoided, and eventually pushed out or fired outright. A lack of loyalty shows up in making self-serving moves that don’t help the organization or those who lead it.

This dynamic also shows up in how you interact with those outside of an organization. If you’re constantly trying to advance your own career over the ministry or business of your organization, then your loyalty is shown to be to yourself alone. It will be clear the organization is just a platform to serve your own ambition, instead of the other way around.

Even more striking is someone that can’t keep secrets. This shows up when people “have information” that shouldn’t have it yet. With sensitive information in a leadership culture, it’s almost always about timing. When someone knows something is as important as what they know. When a leader tracks back to the source of information and finds it to be someone they personally shared the information with then the trust is eroded and that person is not told sensitive information in the future.

Now, here is my B.O.D. for this post… My Big Ol’ Disclaimer:

When I say “being loyal and keeping secrets” that does not include things that are immoral, illegal, or abusive. It does not apply to those who are breaking laws, contradicting the morality of the organization, or of course those who are committing various kinds of abusive acts. These leaders do not deserve our loyalty and their secrets are not to be kept by employees, boards, and organizations. It is actually an act of loyalty to the mission of the org, the rule of law, and/or to God himself to be disloyal to these people and share what they would prefer be secret. This post is about the good kind of confidentiality and the proper management of information.

How to become loyal and keep secrets

Here are a few practices I’m working on in becoming more loyal and a better secret keeper:

1. I’ve stopped asking others to keep secrets I should keep in the first place. If I have to tell someone, “You can’t tell anyone about this,” then it’s a pretty good sign that I shouldn’t tell them that information in the first place. I always wonder if the person I’m telling key info to will go back and tell the same person who told it to me. If they can do that and the original secret-teller won’t be offended, then I feel like I can share it. If they would be offended, then I don’t share that with them. 

2. I often tell people “I trust your judgment with who should know this.” Instead of swearing others to secrecy, I instead impress on them that the secret I’m telling them about myself, or in some cases information about others, is surely sensitive information, but that I wouldn’t tell them unless I trusted their judgment with it. Then I’m not really telling them a secret as much as I’m testing their wisdom on sharing information. Over time I know who I can trust and who I can’t, and like many people the list of who I can trust isn’t really a huge circle. Ironically, sometimes as a I say the phrase, “I trust your judgement with who…” I am actually realizing as I say it that I actually do not trust their judgement on that info, and I change what I tell them.

3. I’ve begun asking people to stop sharing secrets with me. Often times people come and start a conversation by saying, “Now, I have something to tell you, but you can’t tell anyone.” I’ve begun to simply say, “You know, do I really need to know this info? Could we get by without using names or by talking in generalities?” I’ve wondered if the sheer amount of meaningless secrets one has to keep increases the likelihood that one will leak out. So I’m trying to limit the amount of secrets I have to keep that aren’t truly important. 

4. Defending a leader in an organization is a great way for me to build loyalty. The person I’m defending may discover I defended them, and certainly the one that I had to defend against knows that I’m being loyal. The top leader in an organization, they say, is usually the one with the arrows in their back. A loyal person is one that is pulling the arrows out or deflecting them with a shield. 

How to spot & reward someone who is loyal and keep secrets

Loyal secret-keepers are fairly easy to spot, and those that aren’t are fairly easy to foil. Often times a senior leader will have an instinct about who is most loyal, and if you look into it they will be proven right. And when you think about who you truly trust in an organization that is often a true feeling as well. But there are more concrete ways to discover this: ask people who they think is most in alignment, most loyal to the mission of your organization. They’ll often pick someone that is loyal to the leadership and is selfless about their work.

Likewise, if you ask who is the best at keeping secrets there will likely be unanimity, everyone knows who can be the “vault” with information. And they also know who will spill the beans at the first opportunity.

Rewarding those who are loyal secret-keepers is also easy: just get them more and more in the loop on sensitive information. They’ll be invaluable sounding boards for decision making processes that involve highly sensitive information. They’ll be the ones that help communicate the rationale behind decisions once they are made. They’re the best people to be in the know first. And sometimes when you tell them something very important you won’t be the first one who told them. Of course you won’t know this because they’ll never tell you who already told them.