We often ask the question: who do you trust? to organizational leaders and workers around the globe.  In both the public and the private sectors there is now an uneasy caution about who you can trust.  The more penetrating question is who trusts you?  Imagine if you could grow trust in an environment of ever decreasing trust.  What a competitive advantage that would be.  It is more important than ever for you to give people someone they can trust.  Starting with your self by behaving and leading in ways that inspire trust creates a ripple effect of influence.

Test this for yourself.  Think of the person you trust the most.  What is it like to work with or be with that person?  Do they have influence on you because you trust them?  Does it speed up business to work with them?  What IF?  What if, everyone on your team had that level of trust?  At worst it would be a lot more energizing to work together.  At best trust makes the playing field really fast and becomes a performance multiplier that has a ripple effect on your team and your organization.

So much talk about change.  Seems like change is like re arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Changing the contents rather than the context.  Change re arranges the contents of the BOX while true transformation takes place outside the box and expands the box.  The edge of what you don’t know you don’t know.  The Speed of Trust is a transformative influence not a intellectual one.  Your credibility is based on your behavior–your walk not just your talk.  Transformation is experiential and is a change of heart and behavior not just a change in thought.  Ultimately you transform your track record by behaving your way out of problems,  not talking your way out.  As with Susan Boyle’s dramatic example–RESULTS convert the cynics!

Fear and uncertainty can freeze and immobilize even the strong.  Confronting your resistance by taking on your “feared thing first” everyday is the secret to navigating perilous times.  This habit has allowed me to regain my sense of purpose for 2009.  
 
 We all can take advantage of the current economic uncertainty by contacting our most important stakeholders and looking for opportunities to grow our trust account with them.  Many people are frozen and afraid to call their customers and other key stakeholders for fear of hearing bad news.  Guess what? The bad news is there whether or not you hear it.  Much better to confront reality and give your customer a listening outlet to discuss challenges and feel understood than to abandon the relationship during difficult times. Now is the time to over communicate with your customers and other key stakeholders. Give them someone they can trust by behaving in ways that inspire trust.  
 
 Regain your momentum by doubling your contacts.  Call the ones you are afraid to call first.  Ask for business.  Ask for referrals.  Ask for favors.  They are as afraid and starved for meaningful dialog as you are. Go for it.  Then have the courage and monomaniacal discipline to follow up relentlessly.  Don’t take non responsiveness personally.  Others are frozen and need your consistent concern to unthaw them.  Stay with this relentless follow-up and you will be very glad you did.  One of two things will happen: 1. You will have the happy surprise of good news and will grow your business immediately or 2. You will be the first one they think of when things improve, as you were likely one of the very few that communicated with them during tough times. Make doing business at the Speed of Trust your unique competitive advantage this year.  Increase your credibility by doing your “feared thing first.” Everyday.
 

 

  

Scared and stressed out about the economy?  Start with yourself. 

In times of crisis we tend to panic and question everything.  Avoid freezing like a deer in the headlights, and do not wait for some grand strategy from senior management to turn the tide. The organizations and individuals that will thrive in this chaotic market environment know that leadership is a choice, not a position, and will immediately foster hundreds of moments of trust with their customers and other key stakeholders.  These moments of trust will be led by both formal and informal leaders throughout the organization behaving in ways that inspire trust.

I started by checking my trust account with my self. I reflected on my expereince in previous times of stress. I noticed that I have overcome tremendous adversity several times in the past and that I rebounded every time.  We need to keep the faith and know we are resilient and will prevail again by behaving in ways that inspire trust in ourselves and others.

No matter what your personal or organizational objectives are for 2009–Start with Trust!  Trust is the most overlooked, underestimated source of success in life.  Any attempt to change an organization overlayed on a low trust culture is destined to fail or at least be dramatically suboptimized.  The friction of low trust sabatoges even the most brilliant strategy.  On the career side even the most heart felt determination to change will be undermined by low self trust.  You must first keep commitments to yourself and build your credibility with yourself.   Your attempts to influence others when you have low credibility in thier eyes is risky.

I just had an interesting interchange with one of my associates who was shocked that I was not offended by her expression of an opinion that was the polar opposite of mine.  I was shocked that she did not realize that it was safe and healthy to respectfully express your true perspective with out sugar coating it.  A difference of opinion can be a great starting point for growing trust NOT the end of it.  Respectful straight talk confronting a different perspective adds to trust while walking on eggshells and concealing your true feelings while purporting to have a candid discussion is a counterfeit behavior that actually destroys trust.  Hidden agendas undermine authentic communication.  Listening to the opposing opinions with the intent to understand and empathize builds trust.  Remember empathy is not sympathy or agreement–simply understanding their perspective.  Test this from you own experience.  You trust people that authentically express their true opinions more than those that hide them and tell you what they think you want to hear. Your greatest high trust relationships are based on open communication.  It’s good to work with those that see things differently as that fuels innovation and invention.

In an ethics study  released today of nearly 30,000 high schoolers entitled The Ethics of American Youth by the Josephson Institute in Los Angeles, 83% of teens report lying to their parents about something significant. 64% say they have cheated on an exam in the last year and 30% say they have stolen something from a store in the last year.  The shocker is that 93% say they are satisfied with their personal character and ethics revealing an alarming gap in their perception of their self trust. 

These are our future workers and leaders and we desperately need to change their perception of the importance of trust and ethics or our global crisis of trust is destined to deepen. 

I agree with what Michael Josephson, the institute’s founder and president had to say about the results: ”What is the social cost of that–not to mention the implication for the next generation of mortgage brokers? In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else does it.’”

Clearly as a society at large it is critical for us to teach that trust is paramount to a global economy.  We must all make growing trust an explicit objective and behave accordingly to set the standard for the next generation.

Stephen and I really relate to this as we are not the most tech savvy members of our team.  Thank you Steve Jobs for giving us a fighting chance with our iPhones and MacBooks.

As I see it, the ultimate value of the Social Networks is still up for grabs even though it is growing worldwide.  The potential fatal flaw is that rather than enhancing your reputation you may damage it by loosely giving access to your most trusted relationships.   Consider this: Do you have a multiple year, deep trusted relationship with your social network friends or a 1 year acquaintance repeated multiple times?  With Trust depth matters.

Social networks are filled with loose mutual acquaintances but rarely our most trusted influencers.  Why?  Because it would violate the very level of trust the relationship is based on to openly expose your most influential high trust relationships to random access from others you barely know!  This is the same reason customers are reluctant to risk their reputation by referring their trusted colleagues and friends to salespeople.  The speed of your trust and reputation, your social capital and influence, resides in your carefully nurtured “Trustwork”™ not your loose network of acquaintances.  Mix the two haphazardly and you risk your reputation with your most trusted friends.  Many of the acquaintances in your social networks, are simply “potential” candidates for you to up-level and earn deep mutual respect with, and they with you,  by demonstrating consistent behavior over time that inspires each person’s trust.   Facebook,  Linkedin and others provide a rich opportunity to meet new friends trusted by people you trust.  This  is the ultimate value of networking. In fact research shows that loose acquaintances were more likely to lead to a job referral. So social networks do have value.  Just be sure to extend smart trust and check new friends track records before introducing them to your Trustwork™ of long nurtured high trust relationships until they earn that extraordinary level of trust.

The game of friending anyone and everyone to show a large network number also seems risky.  Clarify your expectations and think of how you would like others to access you. Build your network strategically based on your objectives.  The intent of the network providers is to attract eyeballs and mindshare any way they can and find ways to monetize that attention.  The jury is still out on how they will do that.  Meanwhile, we are trusting them with considerable information so be smart out there.

Think about your own experience. Who do you trust?  A friend? A work associate? Your boss? Your spouse? A customer? Why do you trust this person? What is it that inspires your confidence in this particular relationship? Ask people what they say behind your back, about you, about your company. 

Test it with your own experience: what are your conversations like with people who trust you? You can say the wrong thing, and they still get your meaning. Conversely, what are conversations like with someone when trust is low? You can be precise and measured, and they still interpret it the wrong way.

Now consider an even more provocative question: Who trusts you? People at home? At work? Someone you’ve just met? Someone who has known you for a long time? What is it in you that inspires the trust of others? 

Think about it—people trust people who make things happen. They give the new curriculum to their most competent instructors. They give the promising projects or sales leads to those who have delivered in the past. From a line leader’s perspective, results round out what trust really is and helps give trust its harder, more pragmatic edge. 

Ethics is the foundational dimension of trust, but by itself is insufficient. You can’t have trust without ethics, but you can have ethics without trust. Trust, which encompasses ethics, is the bigger idea and is career critical to you in this new “Flat World” economy.

June 2007

Chief Exeuctive Magazine this month has an article entitled The Business Case for Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey

Almost everywhere we turn, trust is on the decline. We find low trust in our society at large, in our institutions and in our companies. Research shows that only 51 percent of employees trust senior management, and only 28 percent believe CEOs are a credible source of information. This compels us to ask two questions. First, is there a measurable cost to low trust? Second, is there a tangible benefit to high trust?

Few argue with the notion of trust.

Everybody is in favor of it and nobody is against it. But at the end of the day, many CEOs don’t really believe that internal organizational trust is directly connected to their company’s bottom line. Instead, they believe that trust is merely a soft, nice-to-have, “social virtue.”

The Speed of Trust, is already in its 5^th printing less than three months after publication!  BusinessWeek just selected it as one of the top five career books of 2006 along with Jack Welch’s new book.  This is particularly impressive given that The Speed of Trust was only published for the last two months of 2006.