The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

by Stephen M.R. Covey

Because of his character and his competence, Stephen was trusted. Also, he extended trust to others. The synergistic effect of being trusted and giving trust unleashed a level of performance we had never experienced before, and almost everyone associated with those events looked on the transformation as the supreme, most exhilarating, and inspiring experience of their business careers.

the greatest trust-building key is “results.”

the ability to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust is not only vital to our personal and interpersonal well-being; it is the key leadership competency of the new global economy.

Simply put, trust means confidence. The opposite of trust—distrust—is suspicion.

Take communication. In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.

Because there was such low trust, the feeling was, “There’s got to be some kind of hidden agenda going on here.”

The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted. —MAHATMA GANDHI

I learned that I had assumed way too much. I assumed I had trust with people, when in fact I didn’t. I assumed that people were aware of my track record and Covey Leadership Center’s track record, which they were not. I assumed that because I was teeing up the tough issues in my private meetings and making decisions based on objective business criteria, this was being reported down line, but it was not.

The most significant mistake I made was in not being more proactive in establishing and increasing trust. As a result, I experienced firsthand both the social and the hard, bottom-line economic consequences of low trust.

Whether you’re on a sports team, in an office or a member of a family, if you can’t trust one another there’s going to be trouble. —JOE PATERNO, HEAD FOOTBALL COACH, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY

The irony of who made this quote!

Relationships of all kinds are built on and sustained by trust. They can also be broken and destroyed by lack of trust. Try to imagine any meaningful relationship without trust. In fact, low trust is the very definition of a bad relationship.

Society, organizations, and relationships aside, there’s an even more fundamental and powerful dimension to self trust. Often, we make commitments to ourselves—such as setting goals or making New Year’s resolutions—that we fail to fulfill. As a result, we come to feel that we can’t even fully trust ourselves. If we can’t trust ourselves, we’ll have a hard time trusting others. This personal incongruence is often the source of our suspicions of others.

we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior. This is why, as we’ll discuss later, one of the fastest ways to restore trust is to make and keep commitments—even very small commitments—to ourselves and to others.

Truly, we are in a crisis of trust. It affects us on all levels—societal, institutional, organizational, relational, and personal—and it has a perpetuating effect. While many of us may be fairly resilient, with each new violation of trust or corporate scandal, we tend to recover a little more slowly. We wonder what else is out there. We become increasingly suspicious of other ...

Trust always affects two outcomes—speed and cost. When trust goes down, speed will also go down and costs will go up.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws. —G. K. CHESTERTON, BRITISH AUTHOR

The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow. —RUPERT MURDOCH, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, NEWS CORPORATION

A company can have an excellent strategy and a strong ability to execute, but the net result can be either torpedoed by a low-trust tax or multiplied by a high-trust dividend.

Robert Shaw, has said, “Above all, success in business requires two things: a winning competitive strategy, and superb organizational execution. Distrust is the enemy of both.” I submit that while high trust won’t necessarily rescue a poor strategy, low trust will almost always derail a good one.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“If you think the problem is out there, that very thought is the problem.”

As we eventually taught the people on each level of this major corporation, your boss, your division leader, your CEO, your board, your spouse, your children, your friends, your associates may all have problems as far as trust (or anything else) is concerned. But that does not mean that you are powerless! In fact, 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.”

Depending on our roles and responsibilities, we may have more or less influence as we move out through each successive wave. However, we all have extraordinary influence on the first two waves, and this is where we need to begin.

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.

Leadership is getting results in a way that inspires trust. It’s maximizing both your current contribution and your ability to contribute in the future by establishing the trust that makes it possible.

to build trust with others, we must first start with ourselves.

it basically boils down to these four issues: your integrity, your intent, your capabilities, and your results.

Little things count. Like when someone calls in to talk to a manager and his assistant says he is in a meeting when he is not. It’s the little things that your employees notice. —FRANK VANDERSLOOT, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF MELALEUCA

You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers, because without trust they won’t fight. —PETER DRUCKER

There are no moral shortcuts in the game of business—or life. There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character. —JON HUNTSMAN, CHAIRMAN, HUNTSMAN CHEMICAL

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

A great example of congruence is Mahatma Gandhi. At one point in his life, he was invited to speak before the House of Commons in England. Using no notes, he spoke for two hours and brought an essentially hostile audience to a rousing standing ovation. Following his speech, some reporters approached his secretary, Mahadev Desai, incredulous that Gandhi could mesmerize his audience for such a long time with no notes. Desai responded: What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same. He does not need notes. . . . You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.

these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

A humble person is more concerned about what is right than about being right, about acting on good ideas than having the ideas, about embracing new truth than defending outdated position, about building the team than exalting self, about recognizing contribution than being recognized for making it.

Being humble does not mean being weak, reticent, or self-effacing. It means recognizing principle and putting it ahead of self.

Courage is the first of the human qualities because it is a quality which guarantees all the others. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

There is absolutely nothing you can do that will increase integrity faster than learning how to make and keep commitments to yourself.

The more experience I’ve had, both personally and professionally, the more convinced I have become of the importance of making and keeping commitments to ourselves. These can be big commitments, like my great-grandfather’s, or they can be small commitments, even very small commitments, such as getting up when the alarm clock goes off, not overeating, or speaking respectfully to others, even when provoked to do otherwise. Every time we make and keep a commitment to ourselves—large or small—we increase our self-confidence. We build our reserves. We enlarge our capacity to make and keep greater commitments, both to ourselves and to others.

First, don’t make too many commitments. If you do, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Second, treat a commitment you make to yourself with as much respect as you do the commitments you make to others.

Third, don’t make commitments impulsively.

I learned to be careful about making commitments and to make sure they were made out of humility, and not pride.

Finally, understand that when keeping your commitment becomes hard, you have two choices: You can change your behavior to match your commitment, or you can lower your values to match your behavior. One choice will strengthen your integrity; the other will diminish it and erode your confidence in your ability to make and keep commitments in the future. In addition, that shift in direction with regard to values—even if it’s slight—will create a change in trajectory that will create a far more significant difference in destination down the road.