The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

by Stephen M. R. Covey

  One myth, for example, is that trust is “soft”—it’s something that’s nice to have, but you really can’t define it, quantify it, measure it. As I hope you can tell by now, the exact opposite is true. Trust is hard. It’s real. It’s quantifiable. It’s measurable. In every instance, it affects both speed and cost, and speed and cost can be measured and quantified. To change the level of trust in a relationship, on a team, or in an organization is to dramatically impact both time and money—and quality and value, as well. Another myth is that trust is slow. While restoring trust may take time, both establishing and extending trust can be done quite fast, and, once established, trust makes the playing field exceptionally quick. You don’t have to look far beyond these examples I’ve given or even the speed with which you communicate and get things done in your own relationships to see the reality that truly, nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.

  Below is a chart listing these and some of the other myths that get in the way of understanding and acting effectively on trust issues, along with their contrasting realities.

  MYTH

  REALITY

  Trust is soft.

  Trust is hard, real, and quantifiable. It measurably affects both speed and cost.

  Trust is slow.

  Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.

  Trust is built solely on integrity.

  Trust is a function of both character (which includes integrity) and competence.

  You either have trust or you don’t.

  Trust can be both created and destroyed.

  Once lost, trust cannot be restored.

  Though difficult, in most cases lost trust can be restored.

  You can’t teach trust.

  Trust can be effectively taught and learned, and it can become a leverageable, strategic advantage.

  Trusting people is too risky.

  Not trusting people is a greater risk.

  Trust can only be built face-to-face.

  Trust can be built on virtual teams and in digital environments.

  Trust is established one person at a time.

  Establishing trust with the one establishes trust with the many.

  Probably the most insidious myth of all is the one expressed by the senior leader of that investment bank I worked for briefly in New York City: “You either have trust or you don’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  You can do something about trust! For 30 years, I’ve been a business practitioner. I’ve been responsible for building and running organizations, for developing teams, for reporting to boards, getting results, and having to “hit the numbers.” During many of those years, I’ve also done consulting work with dozens and then hundreds of well-known companies—many of which had good strategies and good execution abilities, but fell short of being able to accomplish what they wanted to without being able to explain why. I have been a husband, a father, a grandfather, a member of a large extended family with many multifaceted relationships. I have served in community situations in which I have counseled individuals and families dealing with complex trust issues. And in all of my experience, I have never seen an exception to the basic premise of this book: Trust is something you can do something about—and probably much faster than you think!

  Once again, I affirm that nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. Nothing is as fulfilling as a relationship of trust. Nothing is as inspiring as an offering of trust. Nothing is as profitable as the economics of trust. Nothing has more influence than a reputation of trust.

  Trust truly is the one thing that changes everything. And there has never been a more vital time for people to establish, restore, and extend trust at all levels than in today’s new global society.

  Whether you approach the opportunity and challenge of increasing trust in relation to your personal life, your professional life, or both, I can promise you, it will make an enormous difference in every dimension of your life.

  YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!

  Trust has to be the highest value in your company. If it is not, something bad is going to happen to you.

  —MARC BENIOFF, FOUNDER & CEO, SALESFORCE

  If you are familiar with my late father, Dr. Stephen R. Covey, and his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you may remember the story he tells about trying to teach his son how to take care of the yard. He labeled the story “Green and Clean.” My father used the story as an example of teaching principles of stewardship and responsibility to a young child.

  Well, I’m the son in that story, and I’d like to tell you my side of it! It’s true that I did learn about stewardship and responsibility from that experience, but I also learned something I have come to believe is even more important—something that has had a profound effect on me my entire life.

  I was seven years old and my father wanted me to take care of the yard. He said, “Son, here’s the yard and here’s your job: It’s ‘green’ and ‘clean.’ Now, here’s what I mean by that.” He walked over to our neighbor’s yard, pointed to the grass, and said, “That’s green.” (He couldn’t use our own yard as an example because under his stewardship it was rather yellow at the time.) He said, “Now, how you get our yard green is up to you. You’re free to do it any way you want except paint it. You can turn on the sprinklers. You can carry the water in buckets. You can even spit on it if you want. It makes no difference to me. All I care about is that the color is green.”

  Then he said, “And this is what I mean by clean.” He got two sacks and together we cleared the papers, sticks, and other debris off half the lawn so that I could see the difference. Again, he explained to me that how I accomplished the goal was up to me—the important thing was that the lawn was “clean.”

  Then my father said something very profound. He said, “Now you need to know that when you take this job, I don’t do it anymore. It’s your job. It’s called a stewardship. Stewardship means ‘a job with a trust.’ I trust you to do the job, to get it done.” He set up a system for accountability. He said we would walk around the yard twice a week so that I could tell him how things were going. He assured me that he would be around to help me when I asked, but he made it clear to me that the job was truly mine—that I would be my own boss and that I alone would be the judge of how well I was doing.

  So the job was mine. Apparently, for four or five days, I did nothing. It was during the heat of the summer, and the grass was dying fast. Remnants of a neighborhood barbecue we’d had a few days ago were all over the lawn. It was messy and unkempt. My father wanted to take over the responsibility or scold me, but he didn’t want to violate the agreement we’d established.

  So when the time came for an accounting, he said, “Son, how’s it going in the yard?” I said, “Just fine, Dad.” Then he asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?” I said, “No, everything’s just fine.” So he said, “Okay, let’s take that walk we agreed to take.”

  As we walked around the yard, I suddenly began to realize that it was neither “green” nor “clean.” It was yellow and it was a mess. According to my father, my chin began to quiver and I broke down into tears and wailed, “But, Dad, it’s just so hard.”

  He said, “What’s so hard? You haven’t done one thing.” After a moment of silence, he asked, “Would you like me to give you some help?”

  Remembering that his offer of help had been part of our agreement and sensing a glimmer of hope, I quickly replied, “I would.”

  He said, ‘What would you like me to do?”

  I looked around. “Could you help me pick up that garbage over there?” He said he would. So I went inside and got two sacks, and he helped me pick up the garbage just as I had asked him to do.

  From that day forward, I took responsibility for the yard . . . and I kept it “green” and “clean.”

  As I’ve said, my father used this story as an example of stewardship delegation or win-win agreements. But, as a seven-year-old, I was too young to understand what all those big words even mea
nt. What I remember most about this experience was simply this: I felt trusted! I was too young to care about money or status. Those things didn’t motivate me. What motivated me was my father’s trust. I didn’t want to let him down. I wanted to show him that I was capable and responsible. My father had extended trust to me, and that inspired me and created a sense of responsibility and integrity that has stayed with me throughout my life.

  Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

  —BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

  HOW TRUST WORKS

  As I learned that day with my father (and have relearned on almost every level since), 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. Whatever our situation, we need to get good at establishing, extending, and restoring trust—not as a manipulative technique, but as the most effective way of relating to and working with others, and the most effective way of getting results.

  In order to do that, we first need to understand how trust works.

  In my presentations I often ask audiences to consider the question, Who do you trust? Think about your own experience with regard to this question. Who do you trust? A friend? A work associate? Your boss? Your spouse? A parent? A child? Why do you trust this person? What is it that inspires confidence in this particular relationship?

  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?

  Most of us tend to think about trust in terms of character—of being a good or sincere person or of having ethics or integrity. And character is absolutely foundational and essential. But as I suggested in the previous chapter, to think that trust is based on character only is a myth.

  Trust is a function of two things: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, your motive, your intent with people. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, your results, your track record. And both are vital.

  With the increasing focus on ethics in our society, the character side of trust is fast becoming the price of entry in the new global economy. However, the differentiating and often ignored side of trust—competence—is equally essential. 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. For example, I might trust someone’s character implicitly, even enough to leave him in charge of my children when I’m out of town. But I might not trust that same person in a business situation because he doesn’t have the competence to handle it. On the other hand, I might trust someone in a business deal whom I would never leave with my children—not necessarily because he wasn’t honest or capable, but because he wasn’t the kind of caring person I would want for my children.

  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. 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. Recognizing the role of competence helps us identify and give language to underlying trust issues we otherwise can’t put a finger on. From a line leader’s perspective, the competence dimension rounds out and helps give trust its harder, more pragmatic edge.

  Here’s another way to look at it: The increasing concern about ethics has been good for our society. Ethics (which is part of character) is foundational to 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.

  After I presented the Speed of Trust at a national conference, the head of sales of a major pharmaceutical company came up to me and said, “Thank you for reinforcing what I’ve been telling our group—that results are vital to establishing trust and that we have to hit our numbers every month. When we achieve them, the organization trusts us more, our leaders trust us more, our peers trust us more . . . everyone trusts us more. When we don’t, we lose trust and budgetary support. It’s that simple.”

  Again, character and competence are both necessary. Character is a constant; it’s necessary for trust in any circumstance. Competence is situational; it depends on what the circumstance requires. My wife, Jeri, recently had to have some surgery. We have a great relationship—she trusts me and I trust her. But when it came time to perform the surgery, she didn’t ask me to do it. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have the skills or the competence to do it. Even though she trusts me in most arenas, she knows I don’t have the skills to perform surgery.

  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 balancing of character and competence.

  Consider the following:

  • Jim Collins—author of Good to Great—talks about a Level 5 leader having “extreme personal humility” (character) and “intense professional will” (competence). In Built to Last, he speaks of the need to “preserve the core” (character) and “stimulate progress” (competence).

  • Warren Buffett—CEO of Berkshire Hathaway—prioritizes “integrity” (character) and “intelligence” (competence) as the qualities he looks for in people.

  • Cheryl Bachelder—former CEO of Popeye’s—encourages leadership of “selfless service to others” (character) combined with “delivering superior performance results” (competence).

  • Ram Charan—author of numerous books and consultant to several Fortune 500 CEOs—emphasizes the need to be a “leader of the people” (character) and a “leader of the business” (competence).

  • Saj-Nicole Joni—noted expert on trust—writes of the importance of “personal trust” (character) and “expertise trust” (competence).

  • Gino Wickman—entrepreneurial expert and author of Traction—describes the importance of getting the “right person” (character) in the “right seat” (competence).

  • The Better Business Bureau (BBB) highlights two evaluation dimensions: integrity (character) and performance (competence).

  • Leadership theory deals with what a leader is (character) and what a leader does (competence).

  • Performance modeling considers the primary outputs as “attributes” (character) and “competencies” (competence).

  • Ethics theory says, “Do the right thing” (character) and “Get the right thing done” (competence).

  • Decision-making approaches focus on balancing the “heart” (character) with the “head” (competence).

  The list could go on and on, consistently emphasizing the importance of both character and competence as vital to sustained success and leadership. On a personal note, you might find it helpful to reinforce these two dimensions in your mind by employing a fun little mnemonic device we have used in our family. We have two family values that are very important to us, two things we keep coming back to time and time again. To help my younger children remember these values, I decided to tell them, “Just think of the sound made by two bongo drums: Boom—boom! Boom—boom!” As I would “hit” the imaginary bongo drums, I would repeat the two values over and over.

  Sometime later, we had to deal with a very tough family issue. We were all gathered together struggling with how we should handle it. I began asking each of the children, “What do you think we should do?”

  Suddenly, my six-year-old looked at me and he started beating “bongo drums” on the living room table. He said esse
ntially, “This is what you taught us, Dad; let’s go back to our values. These are what will help us solve this problem.” And they did.

  Since I have been working on trust, other words to those bongo drum beats keep ringing in my ears: “Character—competence. Character—competence.” The bongo drum idea helps me remember that it’s not just a function of character, though that is clearly the foundation. Trust is equal parts character and competence. Both are absolutely necessary. From the family room to the boardroom, you can look at any leadership failure, and it’s always a failure of one or the other.

  THE 5 WAVES OF TRUST

  Several years ago, some of my associates and I were working with a small group of people from a major multinational corporation. Their initial response was, “We love this leadership content! It’s right on. But our division leaders don’t understand this. They are the ones who really need to hear it.”

  A short time later, we presented the content to their division leaders. Their response was, “We are in full agreement with everything you’re saying. This approach is great! The problem is that the people who really need it are our bosses.”

  When we presented it to their bosses, they said, “We are enthusiastic about this content! It’s very insightful and helpful. But our counterparts in the five divisions don’t understand this. They are the ones who need to hear it.”

  Their counterparts said the problem was the executive team who supervised and managed the divisions. The executive team said the problem was the CEO. When we finally reached the CEO, he said, “This content is great, but I’m powerless. I can do nothing. It’s all in the hands of the board.” I am certain that, had we gone to the board, they would have said the problem was Wall Street!