HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER
Title: The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything
Competency: self-development
Who benefits: everyone
Consultant Usage:one-on-one coaching, teambuilding
What’s it about? This morning I gave a woman an envelope with a lot of cash in it. I asked her to distribute the money over the next 8 months to a college student who could not go to school without the added income. I barely know the woman and hardly know the college student. They don’t even live in the US. Am I good person or a fool. For sure I am entrusting them with a lot of my money.
An appropriate opening for the most important book I have read in years. Not the best written book, not even the most interesting book, although I found it hard to put down. But definitely the most important.Â
It is a book about trust. It’s funny in a perverse way. I look around and I see a world where almost no one trusts anyone. I read alarming statistics about how little Americans trust their government, big business, lawyers and, yes, even the clergy. The list of “who don’t you trust” seems infinite. Individually we seem to have a lot of trouble trusting our bosses and our spouses (ask a divorced person!). I don’t even trust myself sometimes…ask my closest friends.
So along comes Covey #2 to write about TRUST. I expected another soft-skill piece that would I chew on a bit, swallow most of it, digest some of it, eliminate the rest of it.Â
But you know what. This guy is on to something. He ties trust to bottom line business results in a very credible way. And he does it through a simple formula that is critical to productivity: speed and cost. If there is no trust, things take longer to get done and costs go up. Covey calls it the Hidden Trust Tax.Â
“Mistrust doubles the cost of doing business†– Professor John Whitney, Columbia Business School.Â
With trust present, things go faster and costs go down. Read that chapter for more details. Very impactful.
According to Covey, organizations that do 360 feedback and include the question: “Do you trust your boss?†have learned that that the answer to that one question is the most predictive of team and organizational performance. I believe it.
In the end, what makes the book so important are the 13 behaviors he says are characteristics of trust-inspiring leaders. You will certainly find something of interest among these behaviors and supporting narratives. Trust me.
Catch you later.
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[tags]trust, mistrust, covey, 360 feedback, trust tax, hidden costs of business, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
The author got it right . . . when you are a leader of anything, it all boils down to trust. Without it, you may get the job done but not as well as it will get done when people trust you and each other.
As a veteran who served in a combat zone, I can tell you that trust is the key ingredient of success or not in battle. If the soldiers trust you (and you them) you can get a hell of a lot done, efficiently, with less loss of life.
The same is true as a coach, a manager, a leader of any sort. An executive team trying to map out a corporate strategy is not going to be as successful if there is a low level of trust on that team.
I’ve found that people often come at trust from two widely differing perspectives . . . I learned this will coaching two executives in Boston back in the 80’s. They just couldn’t agree on much; even if they should go to lunch with each other. When individually interviewed the matter of trust arose. One said, “with me trust is like a bank account. Over time you make deposits and I learn to trust you.” The other defined trust similarly, however he stated, “with me, you start with a full bank account and over time you make withdrawals until I cannot trust you anymore.”
Is it any wonder that these two executives were having problems working with each other?
Trust is the cornerstone of most all relationships; we need to focus more development capital on the building trust to build more effective organizations.