Growing Your Trust Account (Part 2)

Sometimes the fastest way to build trust is to stop making withdrawals.

When I assumed the challenge of turning the Covey Leadership Center around, we had five different businesses, four of which were profitable. The fifth was losing money, taking 20 percent of my time and providing only 2 percent of our revenue. Although this business had been popular with some of the company's leaders, I recognized that the quickest way to improve the overall profit was not to focus on improving the other four, but to eliminate the fifth. So we sold it, and that made a huge difference in turning the center around and restoring the trust of bankers and others who were involved.

As this experience affirms, to raise the level of performance (or, in this case, trust) you not only need to strengthen the driving forces, you also need to remove the restraining forces. If you don't, it's like trying to drive a car with one foot on the gas pedal and the other foot on the brake. Sometimes the fastest way to achieve results is to simply take your foot off the brake.

Recognize that each relationship has two trust accounts.

The way you perceive the amount of trust in a relationship and the way the other person perceives it may be different. So it's generally wise to think of any relationship in terms of two accounts -- not one -- and to try to be aware of the balance in each account.

I've often thought it would be helpful if we could see "signal bars" over people's heads (like those in the Cingular cell phone commercials showing the bars going up and down to reflect varying cell phone reception). Instead of cell phone reception, these bars would show the effect of every interaction-whether it made a deposit or a withdrawal, and the resulting balance.

But without such graphic help, it's best to make a sincere effort to understand what makes a deposit or withdrawal to another person and always try to act in ways that build trust.

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An excerpt from my book, The Speed of Trust. Copyright (C) 2006 by CoveyLink, LLC.  Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a divison of Simon and Schuster, Inc.  To read my previous post, "Growing Your Trust Account," click here.

To read Gather member reviews of my book and my Q&A transcript, join the discussion at The Speed of Trust group.