Nothing Is as Fast as the Speed of Trust, page 3.
“If you’re not fast, you’re dead.” – Jack Welch
- You can do something about trust. In fact, by learning how to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust, you can positively and significantly alter the trajectory of this and every future moment of your life.
Getting A Handle On Trust
- So what is trust? Simply put, trust means confidence.
- The opposite of trust – distrust – is suspicion.
- When you trust people, you have confidence in them – in their integrity and their abilities.
- We have all had experiences that validate the difference between relationships that are built on trust and those that are not. The difference is not small; it is dramatic.
- Take communication. In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and people will still misinterpret you.
- We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviors. Because of this, one of the fastest ways to restore trust is to make and keep commitments – even very small commitments – to ourselves and others.
The Economics of Trust
- Here’s a simple formula that will enable you to take trust from an intangible and unquantifiable variable to an indispensable factor that is both tangible and quantifiable.
- Trust always affects two outcomes – speed and cost.
- When trust goes down, speed will always go down and cost will always go up.
- When trust goes up, speed will also go up and costs will go down.
- During a 360 feedback process, a group of leading organizations asked their employees, “Do you trust your boss?” These companies learned that the answer to this one question is more predictive of team and organizational performance than any other question they might ask.
The Trust Tax
- The serious practical impact of the economics of trust is that in many relationships and interactions, we are paying a hidden low-trust tax right off the top – and we don’t even know it!
- Unfortunately, low-trust taxes don’t conveniently show up on your income statement as a “cost of low-trust.” But just because they are hidden doesn’t mean they’re not there.
- Once you know where and what to look for, you can see these taxes show up everywhere – in organizations and relationships. They’re quantifiable. And they’re often extremely high.
- In some situations, you may have even had to pay an “inheritance tax” when you stepped into a role that was occupied by someone who created distrust before you.
- If you step in as a new leader in a low-trust culture, it’s possible that you’re being taxed 30, 40, 50 percent, or more for something you didn’t even do.
The Trust Dividend
- Just as the tax created by low trust is real, measurable, and extremely high, so the dividends of high trust are also real, quantifiable, and incredibly high.
- When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier, elevating and improving every dimension of your organization and your life.
- High trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation, strategy, engagement, partnering, and relationships with all stakeholders.
The Hidden Variable
- For most people, trust is hidden from view. They have no idea how present and pervasive the impact of trust is in every relationship, in every organization, in every interaction, and every moment of their life.
- Once a leader puts on their “trust glasses” and see what’s going on under the surface, it immediately impacts their ability to increase their effectiveness in every dimension of life.
- The traditional business formula says that strategy times execution equals results.
S x E = R
(Strategy times Execution equals Results)
- But there is a hidden variable to this formula: trust – either the low-trust tax, which discounts the output, or the high-trust dividend which multiplies it:
(S x E) T = R
([Strategy time Execution] multiplied by Trust equals Results)
- The ability to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust with all stakeholders – customers, business partners, investors, and coworkers – is the key leadership competency of the new global economy.
- As yourself: Is my organization paying taxes or receiving dividends? And what about me – am I a walking tax or a walking dividend?
