With Thanksgiving upon us, it’s important to remember to trust in the people around you. Both you and your organization will benefit.
For many, the Thanksgiving holiday is a time to enjoy family and give thanks for the joys in their lives. For others, it’s a time to be endured, not enjoyed, peppered by awkward conversation around the dinner table.
In every personal relationship, there’s the equivalent of a trust account, said Stephen M.R. Covey, CEO of training company CoveyLink Worldwide and author of the business best-seller The Speed of Trust.
“Just like a bank account, you grow the account when you make a deposit and you deplete it if you take a withdrawal,” he said. “What’s a deposit and what’s a withdrawal for trust? It’s your behavior. It’s how you act, how you work together, how you exchange. There are certain behaviors that will grow trust fast and others that will cause you to lose it.”
Covey said there are four basic ways to grow the trust account:
a) Demonstrate respect and show others that you care.
b) Listen with the intent of understanding, rather than with the intent to reply.
c) Show loyalty and speak about people as if they’re present, even if they’re not.
d) Give others an advance of your trust.
That’s not to say that you should enter relationships blindly, but rather extend trust until it’s proven you should do otherwise. People will often act as they are treated.
“Too often we get wrapped in a vicious cycle of distrust and suspicion and it goes down the drain,” he said.
Family badmouthing is a key example of this – people know that you’re probably talking about them behind their back too. Rather than join in the behavior, try to understand the other perspective and be fair. “It tells everyone that is present that I’d do the same for them too,” Covey said.
In relationships, just as with bank accounts, bankruptcy happens because people make too many withdrawals or withdrawals are too big. Words are helpful and apologies sometimes necessary to rebuild the trust account, but they need to be followed up with action.
“You can’t talk yourself out of a problem that you behaved yourself into,” Covey said. “The only way is you’ve got to behave your way out of it. It’s through behavior that we restore trust.”
Covey said there are four principles to change behavior and create lasting trust:
a) Take responsibility and practice accountability.
b) Right wrongs and make restitution, if necessary.
c) Clarify expectations and declare your intent by letting people know what you plan to do going forward.
d) Most importantly, keep the commitments you just made and do what you said you were going to do.
“If you follow those four steps, it’s remarkable how, as a process, that will enable you to build, rebuild, restore and regain the trust that’s been lost and build that account to where it is positive,” Covey said.
The basics of relationship trust are the same, whether it’s personal relationships at home or professional relationships at work.
“It’s always about credibility – giving them a person they can trust – and behavior – interacting in ways that grow the trust,” Covey said. “It’s just that the context may change. Certain behaviors may be important in some settings more than others.”
In professional settings, it may be more important to practice behaviors such as talking straight, delivering results and showing competence. In personal relationships, people may be more forgiving of shortcomings; after all, you can’t fire your brother because he’s acting like a jerk. That focus changes in professional relationships.
“You don’t have to have competence to be a member of a family,” Covey said. “In a business setting, it’s very important that people have competence and they deliver or else you can’t trust them.”
Covey recommended that CLOs make the creation of trust an explicit goal and objective. Trust is a competence – one with direct impact on performance.
“Help the organization see that trust is not just a nice, soft social virtue,” he said. “This is about us being able to perform better, faster, with less cost, greater speed and more profitability.”
CLOs can start by modeling it themselves with their team, engaging the executive team in developing it and creating a framework, process and methodology for implementing trust building. Covey said it’s pivotal to include measurement. Without that, it’s just another nice thing to have, not a business necessity.
“To really elevate trust, make it an explicit goal, just like there are goals around market share or goals around profitability and growth,” Covey said. “Trust is not just a sideshow. Trust is of its own deserving of that type of stature.
“If you can start anything in a climate of trust, your profitability of success has gone up and the speed of success has gone up. If you do any other initiative, no matter what it is, in an environment of low trust, the profitability of success goes down, as does the speed. The CLO is the key driver, in partnership with the CEO, of building and creating a culture of trust.”
The creation of that culture would indeed be something to be thankful for.
by Mile Prokopeak | Chief Learning Officer
[About the Author: Mike Prokopeak is editorial director for Chief Learning Officer magazine.]
Related posts:
