Where There Is No Trust

Part 3: Trust = Speed: How to Give Permission with Confidence

As Stephen M. R. Covey notes, “The first job of any leader is to inspire trust; the second job is to extend it.”1 Aviad Goz relates the story that, “Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, sometimes acquired companies after getting to know their managers for just a few hours.

Yet saying trust is great, and actually having trust in your business are two different things. For example, James Heskett, Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, observes in an article entitled, “Why Is Trust So Hard to Achieve in Management,” that “only 30 percent to 69 percent of employees agreed with the statement, ‘In my office, management is trusted,’ in the organizations I studied. That strikes me as a pretty wide and low range of levels of agreement. The numbers coincided with the financial performance of each organization, by the way.”⁴

In the first two parts of this “How to Give Permission with Confidence” series, I talked about the two keys that you must instill in your team, and insist on in your company:

1. Insist on an accurate, fact-based problem statement, which I discussed in my previous blog. This allows your team to demonstrate competence.
2. Instill in your culture that trust is built on a series positive, repeated experiences, which is my focus in this blog. This allows your team to demonstrate character.

But as a leader, you need to put in place the systems and processes that nurture trust. In the absence of a trusted process, fear-based paralysis prevails. At DBI Software, we see that with some of our new customers. As we take them through the proof of concept stage and they discover all the problems our software is bringing to light - problems they didn’t know about and problems that require fixing, they have to go through paperwork hassles and headaches because the trust isn’t built yet with their leadership.

Yet as they use our software and work the process, the database gets measurably better, and the leadership gets increasingly comfortable granting permission to make changes. In other words, trust grows, speed grows, and profit grows - all because DBI Software provides a trusted process.

What You Must Know
You need trusted processes to accelerate success.

Take the 15-Second Challenge. In 15 seconds, our patented, award-winning systems will tell us exactly where the problem is, and if you give us the greenlight, we typically have the problem fixed in two hours or less. Click or call us toll free (866) 773 – 8789.

¹ http://www.myspeedoftrust.com/how-the-speed-of-trust-works/business_case
² http://www.newsnavigation.org/index2.php?id=55&lang=ENG
³ http://www.myspeedoftrust.com/how-the-speed-of-trust-works/business_case
⁴ http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7034.html

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