Trust makes for great leaders. Bad trust advice makes for great failures.

Stephen Covey’s book on trust – 'The Speed of trust’ – is far better than most. However, the same can’t be said about the 13 behaviours the book says build that trust. Here they are:

1. Talk Straight
2. Demonstrate Respect
3. Create Transparency
4. Right Wrongs
5. Show Loyalty
6. Deliver Results
7. Get Better
8. Confront Reality
9. Clarify Expectation
10. Practice Accountability
11. Listen First
12. Keep Commitments
13. Extend Trust

Covey and we, at mext, believe that trust is the most powerful driver of performance. In our opinion that is, because the ability to trust is so immensely valuable to our audience – be they employees, customers, the public or corporate stakeholders.

But we differ very much in 2 key aspects:

1)     Explaining what trust actually is

Only if we understand what trust is and how it forms in our minds, how it affects us physiologically, we can seriously develop recommendations that go beyond generic statements.

2)     How to analyse and build trust
We are not saying that Covey’s behaviours don’t impact trust. But they don’t allow for meaningful analysis, nor do they support anyone in meaningfully and practically building trust.

A few examples:

1. Talk Straight

Talk what straight? Talking the wrong stuff straight is immensely damaging or falls on deaf trust ears. Talking the right stuff straight is immensely powerful to building trust.

3. Create Transparency

Be transparent with what? As practitioners we see this parroted over and over again – and leaders merrily creating distrust by being transparent with the wrong things in the wrong manner.

7. Get Better

Get better with what? Golf putting in the office?

12. Keep Commitments

If you commit that you will always deliver me the sweetest tasting apples, you can keep your commitment as much as you want. I will not trust you. In fact, I may distrust you, because I am much more interested in you paying your workers fairly and not using insecticides.

Building trust is not a random collection of behaviours. First and foremost, trust is about ‘what you can be trusted for’. Is what you can be trusted for appealing to me and how well can I trust you for these things?

To be able to build trust leaders need to be able to identify ‘what they need to be trusted for’. Many trusted leaders intuitively do this well within the context of what they have to achieve. The majority of us is not that great at it. We have to learn how to do this – even if we are already quite good at it. That’s exactly what HuTrust® helps doing. Scientifically correct and practically proven.

Only when we know what exactly we need to be trusted for, is it worth looking at how you can bring these qualities to life through the behaviours like the ones Covey describes. Only if you can consciously manage trust, you can, for lack of better words, operationalise trust building on an individual and organisational level.

Stefan Grafe is the Managing Director of mext, an internationally operating consultancy that specialises in performance improvement by building trust. He is the co-developer of HuTrust®, the only scientifically, statistically and practically proven approach to analysing and building trust and the author of ‘More trust. More sales.’, ‘More Trust. More Human Resources’ (out soon) and ‘Boost your work performance’.

HuTrust® is globally licensed to leading organisations like Sales Performance specialists, Huthwaite International, and Global market research company, Psyma.

Covey leadership article: http://www.leadershipnow.com/CoveyOnTrust.html