Here’s an idea: Trust is more powerful than you think. It’s even quantifiable.  

Stephen M. R. Covey, co-founder of CoveyLink and the FranklinCovey Speed of Trust Practice, authored The Speed of Trust just over a decade ago to explore the topic of trust and how it relates to professional success. The book has sold nearly one million copies and has been published in 22 languages. As Covey asserts, “The ability to establish, extend, and restore trust with all stakeholders – customers, business partners, investors and coworkers – is the key leadership competency of the new, global economy.”

Covey will be a featured speaker at the upcoming 2018 BSCAI CEO Seminar in Los Cabos, Mexico, sharing his insights on how trust is a vital component of a thriving organization.

We spoke with Covey about why he wrote his bestselling book, the importance of self-trust, how trust is quantifiable, and what people can gain from his session at the 2018 BSCAI CEO Seminar.
 

Contractor Connections: You are the author of the bestselling book, The Speed of Trust. What got you so interested in the power of trust that you decided to author a book on the topic?

Covey: After many years in working with hundreds of leaders and client organizations all over the world, I had arrived at the conclusion that trust was the single, most powerful asset a leader and organization could have because of how trust impacts everything.

Yet I found that most of the literature on trust at the time tended to be either too academic or too simplistic. In most cases, the books tended to either complicate trust on one end or trivialize trust on the other. They didn’t reflect accurately (or at least didn’t communicate effectively) what I had become very clear about: namely, that trust had enormous financial impact (for most people that’s a paradigm shift), that trust literally changed everything and that trust was a learnable competency — an asset leaders and organizations could create on purpose.

I wrote The Speed of Trust to both make a case as to why trust matters and then to provide a tangible, practical approach to help leaders and organizations establish, grow, extend and (in some cases) restore trust intentionally.


You ask an interesting question: Do I trust myself? Why is this important for success? What does it look like when someone doesn’t trust him/herself, and how can self-trust grow?

Self-trust is the starting point for trust at every level. Self-trust precedes relationship trust, which precedes team trust, which precedes organizational trust, and so forth. When people don’t trust themselves, they find themselves insecure, often unsure of themselves and lacking in self-confidence. This can be paralyzing. It also makes it very difficult to build trust with other people because at some point that distrust of self will leak out into other relationships. So the starting point is self-trust. 

From there, it becomes easier, more natural and more abundant to build trust with others. When you build trust in relationships, it’s easier to build trust on teams. When you build trust on teams, it’s easier to build trust between teams. When you have trust on and between teams, it’s easier to build trust within the entire organization. When you have high internal trust inside the organization, it’s easier to build external trust with customers and partners. And when you have external trust (market trust), it’s easier to build trust in all society. I call this the five waves of trust: self, relationship, organizational, market and societal.

The key thing is that we build trust from the inside out, meaning that we look in the mirror first and start with ourselves. Self-trust always includes asking and answering two key questions:  First, “Do I trust myself?”; and second, “Do I give to my team a leader they can trust?” (In other words, is it smart to trust me?) Out of self-trust, all other trust can begin to be built. But for it to be sustainable, it needs to be built from the inside out.
 

How is trust quantifiable? How does it measurably affect both speed and cost?

There are “economics of trust.” Trust always affects the speed at which we can move and the cost of everything. When trust goes down in a relationship, or on a team, or in a culture, or with a customer/partner, you will find that the speed will go down with it and the cost will go up.

Why? Because you’ll need to take all these steps to compensate for that lack of trust, whether that be checking, verifying, validating, or dealing with the redundancy, bureaucracy, rules and regulations that tend to get put in place in lower trust environments. Or simply dealing with the politics, disengagement, turnover and churn that low trust produces. This is a tax, a low-trust tax. And when there is significant distrust, it can literally double the cost of doing business and triple the time it takes to get things done.

But thankfully the converse is true as well: When trust goes up in a relationship, team, organization or with a customer/partner, the speed goes up with it and the cost goes down. This is a dividend, a high-trust dividend. It’s that simple, powerful and predictable.


Do you have a story of your own that illustrates the power of trust or the detrimental effects of broken trust?

I saw firsthand the power of building a high-trust culture and organization when I helped to both build and run Covey Leadership Center. We ultimately experienced enormous dividends from building high trust. Then we merged with another excellent organization who happened to be our arch competitor, FranklinQuest. As we had been such intense competitors over many years, the beginning result of the merger was a combined company initially characterized by very low trust.  It was there that I saw firsthand the “high cost of low trust.”  Everything got politicized, every decision was interpreted, suspicion reigned, and we became internally focused on ourselves rather than on customers and markets. And our results suffered. 

Having become aware of this, we then deliberately focused on creating and increasing trust inside the team and organization — which we did — and which yielded far better economic results. I realized from all of this that trust mattered in tangible ways, that trust was measurable, and, most importantly, that trust was movable. We could move the needle on trust to achieve better outcomes and have a more engaged and energized culture.

What can 2018 CEO Seminar attendees expect to walk away with following your session?

I’m going to go deep into three big ideas.

1. I’m going to show how trust is an economic driver, not merely a social virtue. Put another way, I’ll make a business case for trust. 
2. I’ll show how trust is the No. 1 competency of leadership needed today, more than any other. How it’s the one thing that changes everything. I’ll call that the leadership case for trust. 
3. Most importantly, I’ll show how trust is a learnable skill, a competency that they can get better at and move the needle on. It’s this third big idea, trust being a learnable skill, where I’ll introduce some practical, tangible tools for building trust on purpose, and I will have each leader in the room develop a personal leadership action plan for building trust as a leader in their organization.

For more information on Covey’s session at the 2018 BSCAI CEO Seminar, watch this short video from Covey himself:

To learn more about leadership qualification and hear directly from Stephen M. R. Covey, register for the upcoming 2018 BSCAI CEO Seminar, taking place in Los Cabos, Mexico, on Feb. 1-3, 2018. The BSCAI CEO Seminar is your opportunity to connect with fellow building service industry leaders for three days filled with success-driven education designed to meet your needs and help you succeed regardless of the size of your organization. Secure the greatest savings by registering by Friday, Dec. 26.