Intelligently Brief Insights™ on The Speed of Trust posted occasionally from the wild wild west of North America.

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.

Posted in Careers/Talent, Self Trust--Credibility, Speed of Trust | No Comments »