You Can Do Something About This!, page 27.
“As you go to work, your top responsibility should be to build trust.” – Robert Eckert, CEO, Mattel
How Trust Works
- Trust is one of the most powerful forms of motivation and inspiration.
- People want to be trusted. They respond to trust. They thrive on trust.
- Trust is a function of two things: character and competence. Both are vital.
- Character includes your integrity, your motive, and your intent.
- Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, your results, and your track record.
- You might think a person is sincere, even honest, but you won’t trust that person fully if he or she doesn’t get results.
- And the opposite is true. A person might have great skills and talents and a good track record, but if he or she is not honest, you’re not going to trust that person either.
- While it may come more naturally for us to think of trust in terms of character, it’s equally important that we also learn to think in terms of competence.
- Recognizing the role of competence helps us identify and give language to underlying trust issues that are otherwise hard to put a finger on.
- Character is a constant; it’s a necessary ingredient for trust in any circumstance.
- Competence is situational; it depends on what the circumstance requires.
- Once you become aware that both character and competence are vital to trust, you can see how the combination of these two dimensions is reflected in the approach of effective leaders and observers everywhere.
- People might use different words to express the idea, but if you reduce the words to their essence, what emerges is a balance of character and competence.
The 5 Waves of Trust
- If you think the problem is “out there,” that very thought is the problem.
- Your boss, your division leader, your CEO, your board, your spouse, your children, your friends, and your associates may all have problems as far as trust is concerned, but that does not mean that you are powerless!
- You probably have no idea how powerful you can be in changing the level of trust in any relationship if you know how to work “from the inside out.”
- The key is in understanding and learning how to navigate the “5 Waves of Trust.” The 5 Waves:
- Illustrate the interdependent nature of trust.
- Illustrate how trust works from the inside out.
- Define the five levels in which we establish trust.
- Form the structure for understanding and making trust actionable.
The First Wave: Self Trust
- The key principle underlying this wave is credibility.
- Deals with the confidence we have in ourselves:
- Our ability to set and achieve goals.
- Our ability to keep commitments.
- Our ability to walk our talk.
- Our ability to inspire trust in others.
The Second Wave: Relationship Trust
- The key principle underlying this wave is Consistent Behavior.
- Shows how to establish and increase the “trust accounts’ we have with others.
- Introduces the 13 Trust Building Behaviors common to high-trust leaders around the world.
- The net result is a significantly increased ability to generate trust with all involved to enhance relationships and achieve better results.
The Third Wave: Organizational Trust
- The key principle underlying this wave is alignment.
- Alignment helps leaders create structures, systems, and symbols of organizational trust that decrease or eliminate seven of the most insidious and costly organizational trust taxes, and create seven huge organizational trust dividends.
The Fourth Wave: Market Trust
- The underlying principle behind this wave is reputation.
- It’s about your company’s brand (as well as your personal brand), which reflects the trust customers, investors, and others in the marketplace have in you.
- This material will help you not only improve your personal brand and reputation as an individual, but it will also help improve your organization’s brand and reputation in the marketplace.
The Fifth Wave: Societal Trust
- The principle underlying this wave is contribution.
- This wave is about creating value for others and for society at large.
- By contributing or “giving back,” we counteract the suspicion, cynicism, and low-trust inheritance taxes within our society.
See/Speak/Behave
- The purpose of this book is to enable you to see, speak, and behave in ways that establish trust, and all three dimensions are vital.
- This book will give you a pair of “trust glasses” that will allow you to see trust in an entirely different and exciting way – a way that will open your eyes to the possibilities and enable you to increase trust on every level.
- It will give you the language to speak about trust.
- This book will give you the language to name the underlying issues and describe those issues and talk about and resolve them.
- This book will help you develop the behaviors that establish and grow trust – particularly, the 13 Behaviors of high-trust people and leaders worldwide.
- These three dimensions are interdependent, and whenever you affect a change in one dimension, you affect a change in all three.
