The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

by Stephen M. R. Covey

  Whatever other purposes this parable may serve, it is a good reminder to us all of the importance of developing the talents we’ve been given and of the credibility we create and the trust we inspire when we do. In the end, our greatest work and contributions flow from our talents.

  ATTITUDES: What are my attitudes about work? About life? About learning? About myself, my capabilities, and my opportunities to contribute? Are there more productive attitudes and paradigms I could embrace that would help me create better results?

  With regard to attitudes, consider the extraordinary way Eugene O’Kelly, former CEO of KPMG, chose to see the last 100 days of his life. Diagnosed at age 53 with incurable brain cancer, O’Kelly was told he had three months to live. How he approached his imminent death is a tale of courage and inspiration, described in his book, Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life. He said:

  I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live . . . . The verdict I received the last week of May 2005 . . . turned out to be a gift. Honestly . . . . In short, I asked myself to answer two questions: Must the end of life be the worst part? And, Can it be made a constructive experience—even the best part of life? No. Yes. That’s how I would answer those questions, respectively. I was able to approach the end while still mentally lucid (usually) and physically fit (sort of), with my loved ones near. As I said: a blessing.

  O’Kelly died on September 10, 2005, but not before being able to “beautifully resolve” personal relationships and experience an abundance of what he called “Perfect Moments” and “Perfect Days.”

  Consider the difference the following attitudes might make in your personal enjoyment of life and your ability to perform:

  I have to go to work.

  or

  I’m genuinely excited to go to work, where I can use my talents and skills to contribute and add value.

  I work like crazy and live for the weekends. I can hardly wait until I can retire and do what I want to do.

  or

  I have a balanced life in which work, recreation, and rich relationships are all important parts. I expect to have this kind of balance throughout my life.

  My partner isn’t meeting my needs in this relationship.

  or

  What can I do to help my partner be happy and fulfilled?

  I can hardly wait until my kids are grown.

  or

  I enjoy each day with my kids because I know we’re building meaningful relationships that will last throughout our lives.

  As well as the difference these attitudes might make in your own life, consider the difference it would make over time in the lives of your children. What would happen if they were to grow up constantly hearing comments like the ones on the left? How would their lives be different if they constantly heard comments like those on the right?

  One attitude I believe we especially need to beware of is the “entitlement” mentality: “I’m the manager, I’ve got this position, so I can just coast while everyone else does the work.” This depletes credibility fast and is a huge trust buster. When the manager coasts, the competence of the reports rapidly exceeds his/her own, and this creates dramatic tension that often leads the manager into a downward cycle of mediocrity. As former Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs said, it’s B grade managers hiring C grade reports and C grade managers hiring D grade reports.

  Keep in mind that A grade managers (without such an “entitlement” mentality) hire A+ reports, which leads to greater capabilities, greater credibility, greater trust, and greater results all around. This practice demonstrates a leadership philosophy espoused by many excellent managers: Always surround yourself with people who are even more talented and competent than you. It takes tremendous self trust to do this—a confidence born of high integrity, positive intent, and an attitude of continuous improvement—but the results are incomparable.

  SKILLS: What skills do I currently have? What skills will I need in the future that I do not currently have? To what degree am I involved in constantly upgrading my skills?

  NBA superstar LeBron James is a great example of the power of improving by continuing to hone and develop skills. While the average NBA player’s prime is in his 20s and often rapidly declines as he moves into his 30s, James—now in his mid-30s—clearly demonstrates that it’s not just his tremendous talent that separates him from almost all other players; it’s also his commitment to and investment in improvement and skill development.

  Ranked among the top few best professional basketball players of all time and a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, you might wonder why James wants to continue to improve his game. For him, it’s his desire to be the best, and continuing to increase his skills is a clear path to achieving legendary greatness. To achieve his goal, he takes incredible care of his body. During the off-season he exercises and practices sometimes up to three times a day. During his summer workouts, he focuses on honing and expanding his repertoire of skills: strengthening his three-point shooting, dishing assists, improving his shot selection, and developing other dimensions of his game.

  At the time of this writing, James is in his 15th year of professional basketball and shows few signs of slowing down. What’s truly amazing is that as he has aged, his game has actually improved. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, who coached LeBron in the Olympics, put it this way: “The thing I love about LeBron is that he’s a lifelong learner. He continues to want to learn about his craft.”

  LeBron James demonstrates the kind of commitment to skill-building in his craft that is vital to success for all of us in today’s disruptive, shifting economy. Unless you’re continually improving your skills, you’re quickly becoming irrelevant. And when you’re irrelevant, you’re no longer credible. And without credibility, you won’t sustain trust—which will dramatically impact both speed and cost.

  The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.

  —WILL SMITH, ACTOR

  One thing to be careful of with regard to skills is what author Jim Collins calls “the curse of competence.” It’s the idea that sometimes we become good at doing something we’re not really talented in or passionate about. As my father often says, “Your current skill-set may or may not correspond with your natural talents.” We need to make certain that the skills we develop don’t limit or define us. At the end of the day, talent provides a deeper well than skills.

  KNOWLEDGE: What is my current level of knowledge in my specific field? What am I doing to stay current? What other areas of knowledge am I pursuing?

  Education is the most powerful weapon with which you can change the world.

  —NELSON MANDELA

  I’ll never forget what one CEO said about the risk of investing in a focused training initiative for his company. Someone asked him, “What if you train everyone and they all leave?” He responded, “What if we don’t train them and they all stay?”

  Clearly, increasing knowledge is vital in today’s global economy, where the world’s fund of information now doubles every two to two and a half years. One way to accelerate the rate of learning, both individually and organizationally, is to learn with the intent to teach others what you learn. As Peter Drucker has observed, “Knowledge workers and services workers learn most when they teach.” When leaders structure opportunities and processes so that people teach what they learn to others within the organization, it dramatically increases individual and organizational learning and knowledge transfer. Mentoring, coaching, and other training processes can facilitate such learning, and becoming a teacher of whatever you learn becomes a new life paradigm for many individuals who have experienced the power of such a process.

  This point is well illustrated in the story told by Marion D. Hanks of an obscure woman in London. After attending a lecture by the distinguished naturalist Dr
. Louis Agassiz, she complained that she never had a chance to learn. In response, he asked her what she did. She replied that she helped her sister run a boardinghouse by skinning potatoes and chopping onions.

  He said, “Madam, where do you sit during these interesting but homely duties?”

  “On the bottom step of the kitchen stairs.”

  “Where do your feet rest?”

  “On the glazed brick.”

  “What is glazed brick?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  He said, “How long have you been sitting there?”

  She said, “Fifteen years.”

  “Madam, here is my personal card,” said Dr. Agassiz. “Would you kindly write me a letter concerning the nature of a glazed brick?”

  She took him seriously. She looked it up in the dictionary. She read an article in the encyclopedia and discovered that a glazed brick is vitrified kaolin and hydous aluminum silicate. Not knowing what that meant, she looked it up. She went to museums. She studied geology. She went to a brickyard and learned about more than 120 kinds of bricks and tiles. Then she wrote a 36-page treatise on the topic of glazed brick and tile, which she sent to Dr. Agassiz.

  He wrote back, offering to pay her $250 if she would allow him to publish the article. Then he asked: “What was under those bricks?”

  She replied, “Ants.”

  He said, “Tell me about the ants.”

  She then researched ants in depth, after which she wrote 360 pages on the subject and sent it to Dr. Agassiz. He published it as a book, and with the proceeds she was able to travel to places she had always wanted to see.

  In commenting on this experience, Hanks asks:

  Now as you hear this story, do you feel acutely that all of us are sitting with our feet on pieces of vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate—with ants under them? Lord Chesterton answers: “There are no uninteresting things; there are only uninterested people.”

  STYLE: How effective is my current style in approaching problems and opportunities and interacting with others? Does my approach facilitate or get in the way of accomplishing what needs to be done? What can I do to improve the way in which I go about doing things?

  Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage.

  —JOHN GARDNER, AUTHOR OF EXCELLENCE AND SELF-RENEWAL

  In the midst of the dot-com boom, Candice Carpenter, cofounder, chairman, and CEO of iVillage, implemented a style of what she called “radical mentoring”—a hard-line, no-nonsense approach to teaching and training young employees. According to an article in Fast Company during that time, Carpenter liked to compare herself and business partner, Nancy Evans, to “drill sergeants who are running a boot camp for young leaders.”

  Every few months, Carpenter and Evans choose a different rising star to coach. There are lunches, private meetings, occasional late-night phone calls. More important, they give the staffer feedback—direct, sustained, brutally honest: “People don’t grow if you’re soft with them.”

  Operating in what some might consider the opposite end of the leadership universe is John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods, which has become the world’s largest natural foods chain and is now a part of Amazon.

  According to Fast Company, Mackey wears shorts and hiking boots to work. He closes every business meeting with a round of “appreciations” or nice expressions about those who attend. He publicly posts everyone’s pay. He makes decisions by majority vote (including decisions concerning new hires), and he rarely overrules the majority decisions.

  [John Mackey] doesn’t just delegate; in fact, he can seem almost diffident about his company. Asked how 140 cashiers can function as a single team . . . he looks like an anthropologist who has just had a student ask a great question.

  “That does sound like a problem,” he says. “A team that large could confound the basic operating principle. But I’ll tell you, I don’t have the faintest idea how they’ve solved that problem. That’s not my job anymore. But call them up, ask. I guarantee they have found a solution. I’d be curious to know what it is.”

  Obviously, Candice Carpenter and John Mackey have totally different “styles,” but both have been enormously effective in creating credibility and trust.

  Clearly there is a wide variety of effective styles. The challenge is to match the style to the highest effectiveness for the task. The problem comes when you have a “style” that gets in the way and creates distrust. For example, many years ago, Al Dunlap—called “Chainsaw Al” by some and “Rambo in Pinstripes” by himself—gained the attention of Wall Street with his “slash and burn,” “flatten the structure, fire half the company” approach. While he was a hero for a while on Wall Street, he was never a hero with the people. His “style”—getting short-term results in a way that destroyed trust—also destroyed long term-sustainability and morale.

  MATCHING T-A-S-K-S TO TASKS

  The end in mind here is to develop our TASKS and to match them to the tasks at hand—to create the best possible alignment between our natural gifts, our passions, our skills, knowledge, and style and the opportunity to earn, to contribute, to make a difference.

  According to the research from the Gallup organization, only 20 percent of employees working in large organizations surveyed feel their strengths are in play every day. Thus, eight out of ten employees surveyed feel somewhat miscast in their role.

  In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about the importance in successful companies of having “the right people on the bus” and also of having “the right people in the right seats” on the bus. As a leader, you want to have capable people in your organization, but you also want to create the right match between a person’s specific capabilities and the job you’re asking that person to do.

  More and more, organizations have become aware of the impact of the Peter Principle. Smart companies engage in practices such as competency modeling, training, mentoring, and coaching to help ensure that those who are promoted have the TASKS that will help them establish the credibility they need to succeed.

  On the individual level, the problem is that many people aren’t into the idea of continuous improvement. So they’re working in a company—maybe they’ve been there for ten or fifteen years—but instead of having fifteen years of experience, they really have only one year of experience repeated fifteen times! They’re not adapting to the changes required by the new global economy. As a result, they don’t develop the credibility that would inspire greater trust and opportunity. Often they become obsolete. Their company and/or the external markets outgrow them.

  The same is true of corporations that simply rely on what has been successful in the past and fail to respond to the needs and challenges of the new global economy. If corporations aren’t engaged in continuous improvement, and in some cases radical improvement, they risk becoming irrelevant and obsolete. They demonstrate the truth of the words spoken by the great historian Arnold Toynbee: “Nothing fails like success.” In other words, they keep doing the things that made them successful in yesterday’s market, but those same things don’t create success in today’s global economy.

  If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

  —GENERAL ERIC SHINSEKI, FORMER U.S. ARMY CHIEF OF STAFF

  Companies that do invest in continually learning, growing, and reinventing themselves have a different story to tell. They pay close attention to customers and markets, and they pivot quickly to match their offerings to shifting customer needs.

  Consider Netflix. The company was founded in 1997 by software engineers Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, who initially experimented with a new medium for movies—DVDs. They bought a used CD and mailed it to Hastings’s home to see if a disc could be safely sent by mail. When it arrived without a problem, they knew they were on to something.

  Hasting
s and Randolph launched the first DVD mail rental service and then worked to continually tweak their business model and offerings. Within two years they began to offer a subscription service allowing customers to rent as many films as they wanted each month. As a result, Netflix grew from 700,000 subscribers in 2002 to 5 million by 2006.

  As technology and customer needs continued to evolve, Netflix evolved as well. In 2007, the company created an alternative to DVD-by-mail service by utilizing a new technological platform that made it posible to stream movies over the Internet.

  Netflix continued to evolve and expanded its reach beyond the U.S. until anyone anywhere in the world who wanted to access Netflix could do so. Global subscriber growth has since increased to more than 118 million customers in more than 190 countries.

  The importance of matching TASKS to tasks can easily be seen by contrasting what Netflix did to what their major competitor at the time—Blockbuster Video—failed to do. In 2000, Netflix approached Blockbuster with an offer to become their online distribution channel. Blockbuster chose to pass. Much later Blockbuster tried to compete online, but it was too late. Their business model had been built on physical stores—and, very significantly, on charging late fees to their customers—and they had not been willing to disrupt their store business model or sacrifice the profits from those late fees. As a result, they missed a huge window of opportunity and were instead seriously disrupted by Netflix. From a peak of 9,000 stores in 2004, Blockbuster Video went bankrupt in 2010, and only one surviving store remains in place today.

  The attitude and habit of continually improving is one of the prime differentiators between companies that remain relevant and succeed and those that fall by the wayside in today’s global economy.

  The complacent company is a dead company. Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.