Trust a key factor in business (and in everything else)

“There is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, family, organization, nation, economy, and civilization throughout the world — one thing which, if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love. On the other hand, if developed and leveraged, that one thing has the potential to create unparalleled success and prosperity in every dimension of life. Yet, it is the least understood, most neglected, and most underestimated possibility of our time. That one thing is trust.”

— Stephen M.R. Covey
The Speed of Trust: The One
Thing that Changes Everything (2008).

Mr. Covey, former CEO of the Covey Leadership Center and adviser to leaders of Fortune 500 companies as well as medium-sized and small-sized organizations, spoke to business executives, government leaders, corporate leaders, and human resources professionals at a conference organized by ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC) on June 19, 2018 at Dusit Hotel in Makati.
“Trust is the new currency,” Mr. Covey said. “Is your company’s main concern trust, or profits? If anything trumps Trust, you are in trouble.” He said, “Trust is an economic driver, and not merely a social value — it is financial: the greater risk is not trusting.”
Mr. Covey pointed out that there is a “Trust tax” to management calls and decisions. Components of the Trust Tax are Speed and Cost. “When Trust goes down, Speed goes down, and Costs go up.”
The costs of low Trust are from bureaucracy, redundancy, politics, employee disengagement, among some negative results that managers do not want to affect their profits. If a culture of Trust is cultivated within the organization, the welcome effect happens: “When Trust is up, Speed goes up, and Costs go down.”
Mr. Covey said that the Global Trust Index ranking of companies is two-thirds of the criteria for Fortune-100 selection of the best companies to work for. Companies with high internal and external trust outperformed the low-trust companies 288%, proving that Trust earns profits. The trust rating company Great Place to Work that does the Global Trust Index similarly said that “companies who score the highest on creating an equitable, consistently high-trust culture for all employees had 3x higher annual revenue growth than companies at the bottom ().
“Trust can be learned,” Mr. Covey encouraged. “Start with a high propensity to trust. If you trust someone, he/she will tend to trust back. Ninety-five percent of the time, it works. Do not let the five percent risk cause you to distrust.”
He cited the example of Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a collateral-free micro finance test project whose payback rate was 99%, compared to the 85% for regular collateralized micro credit. The ancient philosopher Lao Tzu said, “No trust given, no trust received.”
“If we don’t trust people how will we engage them, innovate, create, inspire, be a team? You can trust too much and get burned but you can also not trust enough and you wouldn’t see other possibilities,” Mr. Covey said. You can look at any leadership failure, and it’s always a failure of one or the other,” Mr. Covey said. “Both must be sustained — you have to keep your word and your commitments, and you must maintain your leadership track record of dependable, efficient and cooperative delivery of mission and objectives.”
Mahatma Gandhi said, “The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted.”
But why is it that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior, Mr. Covey asked? The formula is “Trust is equal parts character and competence…a person has integrity when there is no gap between intent and behavior…when he or she is whole, seamless, the same — inside and out. This is the ‘congruence’ that will ultimately create credibility and trust,” he stressed.
Mr. Covey said government and business leaders should consider his “Smart Trust” matrix of “See, Speak, Behave” in the introspective full transparency urged by the four cores of credibility: Integrity (Are you congruent?); Intent (What’s your agenda?); Capabilities (Are you relevant?); and Results (What’s your track record?). Earning trust must start with trusting yourself and being confident that you are doing the right thing in conscience. Commitments must be honored, and accountability must be owned.
It might have been an interesting segue to recognize persistent reports worldwide that people have been losing trust in government and government leaders. News abounds of scams and anomalies in government plunder of the people’s money, and dictatorial ways of newly risen strongmen leaders emasculating democracies and trashing human rights. The OECD has observed that “only 43% of citizens trust their government” ( 2015 report). “Lack of trust compromises the willingness of citizens and business to respond to public policies and contribute to a sustainable economic recovery.” (Ibid.).
“But haven’t writers, poets, satirists and stand-up comedians been telling us for three thousand years that we can’t trust politicians and governments?” (OECD Observer No 310 Q2 2017). As a compromise, “people tend to trust a system that reliably improves their wealth and are apt to distrust any system that cannot seems intuitively correct” (Ibid.). Yet “prosperity isn’t in itself a sufficient indicator of trust in government,” the OECD admits.
Dependency is a word separate and distinct from Trust.
Yet “trust surveys” drumbeat trust and approval, satisfaction, and happiness as achievements of populist leaders who have capitalized on position and power to keep and increase influence and control over those dependent on them. The greatest damage that inaccurate survey instruments can do against the common good is to establish and perpetuate fake trustworthiness for un-trustworthy leaders who can justify evil means towards an end.
In business and in government, as well as in everything else: can you trust someone who lies, cheats, steals, kills, degrades women, and violates common decencies?
You must examine your own intent as the one who trusts — why and what for do you trust the other? Stephen M.R. Covey says there must be Integrity and Honesty in yourself and in the other, as basis for all Trust.
 
Amelia H. C. Ylagan is a Doctor of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines.
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