The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything

Well, there are actually examples all around us of how trust affects the speed at which things happen, but generally we don't link the two together. Take air travel post 9/11, for instance. Airlines have understandably implemented more detailed security checks since the attacks, so you need to check-in earlier. So the drop in trust caused by the terrorists has increased the overall time it takes to make a plane journey. And it's also increased the cost. Travelers pay more because airlines have to fund additional security staff, and business travelers' productivity is also reduced.

So, the book is really about the speed and financial benefit of trust, but we'll forgive the author for sticking with the catchier version of the title, The Speed of Trust.

Now, while we're talking about the author, it's worth clarifying exactly who he is. The name Stephen Covey may well be familiar to you as the author of the famous book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But that Stephen Covey, known as Stephen R Covey, is not the author of The Speed of Trust, he's the author's father. However, our author, Stephen M R Covey is an experienced businessman in his own right. Throughout the book, he cites many examples from his career in sales and management, and as a CEO, consultant, speaker and advisor. So he's more than qualified to write on the subject of trust.

The subtitle of this book is The one thing that changes everything, so as we go through it, we'll evaluate the extent to which its theories and advice can help you achieve things faster and more cheaply by establishing, maintaining, and even restoring trust. Are these ideas practical? Does the author explain where the dividing line lies between gullibility and trust? And can his approach to the risks involved in trust really be justified? Keep listening and see if you agree with our analysis.

The author starts by giving the whole loose concept of trust some structure by identifying what he calls the five waves of trust. These start with self-trust and extend out through relationship trust, organizational trust, market trust, and finally societal trust. Matching the structure of the book, we'll spend most of our time on the first two waves, discussing what underpins self-trust and the thirteen behaviors he believes you can adopt to 'behave yourself' out of problems in your relationships with others.

Self-trust, or being trustworthy, the author says, is built on what he calls four cores of credibility. These come up again and again throughout the book, so it's worth getting to grips with them right away. The first of these is integrity, which could also be described as honesty or walking the talk. Second is your intent, or the motives for your words and actions.

Next is your capability. After all, you couldn't really be trusted to design a road bridge if you hadn't been trained in engineering. And the final core of credibility is your results, or track record. While you might be able to design a bridge as soon as you leave college, others would have greater trust in you to do so if you've already worked on several other successful bridge designs.

This combination of the two character traits – integrity and intent – and the competencies of capability and results creates an excellent definition of trustworthiness. And the author's assertion that all four of these need to be present if you are to have credibility, also makes sense. After all, even if you had the capability to design good bridges, a track record of doing so, and the intent to do so, if you lacked integrity and this came out through cutting corners, you would hardly be trustworthy.

The author discusses the four cores further, giving insightful case studies from business and family life. There's a short but challenging questionnaire that will help you identify how good your personal credibility really is and, as a result, identify areas you need to work on regarding your character, competencies, or even both.

There are lots of practical tips for doing this, and some of them are so compelling, you really can't ignore them. For example, the author asks how you can expect to deliver on your commitments to others if you won't even deliver on commitments you make to yourself – such as getting up when the alarm clock goes off. If you repeatedly let yourself down, you feel like you're failing, and this can start a downward spiral toward a loss of self-respect and trust in yourself.

So, now you're aware that you need to show integrity, intent, capability, and results before you can start expecting others to trust you, how do you go about gaining that trust? In other words, how do you build the second wave of trust, relationship trust?

The answer, claims the author, lies in thirteen behaviors which, if shown consistently, demonstrate the four cores of credibility and encourage others to trust you. As he goes through each of the behaviors in turn, he gives illustrations of highly-trusted leaders demonstrating these behaviors. These examples provide a track record for the behaviors, encouraging us to trust that the author's right about their importance.

The first five of the thirteen behaviors are related to your character, like the 'integrity' and 'intent' cores of credibility. They are: talk straight, demonstrate respect, create transparency, right wrongs, and show loyalty. Now these are familiar ideas, and you're probably doing them already, but it's useful to have them spelled out clearly in relation to trust. There are some wise tips about how to show these behaviors – for example, when to apologize in order to right wrongs and what you can do to demonstrate respect.

One of the things to be aware of with these behaviors, says the author, is that failing to show them is often the quickest way to destroy trust. Sure, you need to show these behaviors to build trust, but their absence can often be more destructive than their presence can be beneficial. This is a really good point. It's easy to see how a lack of transparency in scandal-hit corporations like Enron and WorldCom destroyed years of trust in an instant, yet an organization with transparent accounting won't enjoy the benefits of high trust for that reason alone.

So the message here is that it's worth making sure you're doing these behaviors to some extent. But you can reap greater rewards by focusing on the next five behaviors, which the author claims are closely linked to the competence cores of credibility. These are: deliver results, get better, confront reality, clarify expectations, and practice accountability.

Once again, these all feel like good advice. But they also feel quite familiar, and as you read through each chapter, you're left wondering if all of these behaviors really are separate, or if some of them are really just aspects of others. There was a hint of this with the 'demonstrate respect' and 'show loyalty' behaviors in the first set, although these are subtly different. But the behaviors of deliver results and clarify expectations, listed in this section, seem to be too closely entwined to justify their separation. As the author talks about building trust by delivering results, he advises us to clarify expectations so that both you and the recipient can judge when delivery is complete. Yet this same, perfectly valid point is covered all over again in the clarify expectations section. And this leaves aside the fact that 'deliver results' was also one of the four cores of credibility.

So what's going on here? Is the author being transparent, or does he have a hidden agenda to maximize the number of apparent behaviors because it looks more impressive that way? Has he lost a little of the readers' trust by doing this? He possibly has, but it also seems unlikely that he's deliberately spinning out material to make it look more substantial than it really is. After all, his career as a speaker and consultant rely on his integrity.

However, there's a practical point here too. Books like this are only valuable if it's easy to remember the advice in them, so that you can implement it in your day-to-day work without having constantly to refer back to the book itself. And, inevitably, the more points there are to remember, the harder it is to do this. In the long term, the success this book achieves in increasing trusting behaviors in businesses and families may be limited by the sheer number of behaviors the author recommends.

So, reeling a little under the weight of ten or so behaviors that we need to show to avoid destroying trust and to start building it, we come to the final three which we're told are related to both character and competence.

The first of these is listen first, and this is valuable advice. Both words matter here: Listen and first. Time spent listening is usually a good investment, and the time to do some listening is at the beginning.

But while listen first is great advice, behavior number twelve, keep commitments, seems rather like deliver results again. The list finishes strongly, though, with extend trust. Now, at first glance, it seems a little simplistic to include 'extend trust' in a list of behaviors to help build trust. It's rather like including lead well in a list of things you should do to be a good leader. But as you read on, you realize there's more to it than that. Research quoted by the author shows that when people don't trust their leaders, one of the main reasons for not doing so is that the leaders don't trust them. And when you treat people like they can't be trusted, they will behave like they can't be trusted. On the other hand, if you trust them, they will be trustworthy.

The author cites one organization that was suffering from high staff turnover and absenteeism as a result of stress. The management decided to trust the employees to choose their own hours and work wherever they wanted, either in the office or from home, so long as they got their work done. Not only did turnover and absenteeism plummet, but productivity actually increased by thirty-five percent. Classic proof of the speed and cost benefit of trust.

Having looked at the thirteen behaviors that build relationship trust, the book moves on to consider trust in broader contexts: first, organizational trust; then market trust; and finally societal trust.

Organizational trust is fascinating because it's very easy for the trust that people inspire and build to be imprisoned by organizational systems and structures. Internally-created bureaucracy is one of the worst problems: Creativity is stunted if you have to fill in forms and get signatures just to get a piece of software on your computer that would help you get something done.

And it doesn't help the company either. When the rules say that a form needs to be read and approved by three different people, the company is paying for those people's time, yet receives no benefit.

The author discusses several other costs of low trust, as well as dividends that can be gained when systems and structures are designed with the assumption that people can be trusted. This is a very thought-provoking section for anyone with control over designing systems and processes in their organization. So much speed and financial benefit can be released when systems and behavior are aligned in their levels of trust!

At the beginning of this podcast, you heard how most people are probably not familiar with thinking about trust in terms of the speed and financial benefits it can bring. However, most of us are already familiar with the financial benefits of the next 'wave' of trust: market trust. Another way of saying 'market trust' is 'brand', and its contribution to the bottom line is widely recognized. Clearly, if your work has any influence over branding, you'll find it useful to think about the four cores of credibility and the thirteen behaviors as you plan your marketing mix. But for others, the concept of market trust or brand is still useful because you can apply it to the earlier waves of relationship trust and self-trust. What is your personal brand? How do others perceive your team's brand within your organization? Could you apply the thirteen behaviors to get your perceived brand value closer to what you want it to be?

The section on societal trust provides several worthy examples of individuals and organizations doing charitable works that benefit society. Yet it doesn't really discuss what this has to do with trust, or speeding things up, or creating financial benefit. So with trust in the author slightly diminished through his failure to deliver much that you can actually implement here, it's good that the final chapter gets practical again.

It starts by pointing out that what the author calls "smart trust" lies between two hazards. At one end, there's distrust, and at the other end, there's blind trust or gullibility. He recommends doing two things to ensure you always stay within the boundaries of smart trust. One is to analyze the situation correctly. This means checking whether a person is worthy of trust by considering the four cores of their credibility. The other is simply to have what he calls a propensity to trust people, rather than to distrust them. Ultimately, smart trust is an application of risk management. It involves deciding how much risk is acceptable, while remembering that the opportunities available to you reduce rapidly the more cautious you are. The author sums this up particularly well with a quote from the founder of IBM who said, "To increase your success rate, double your failure rate."

The book ends with some clear steps you can take when trust has been lost, either when you have lost your trust in others, or when they have lost their trust in you.

At over 300 pages, The Speed of Trust is a substantial book, but reading it isn't a long hard slog at all. The discussions are practical, and every point is well-illustrated with examples drawn equally from work and home situations, keeping it relevant for a wide readership.

So we encourage you to use this truly original book to polish up your four cores of credibility – that is your integrity, intent, capability, and delivery. Then go out and display the thirteen behaviors that build relationship trust, and start reaping the rewards of working at the speed of trust. We're sure you can.

The Speed of Trust by Stephen M R Covey is published in paperback by Simon and Schuster.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.