It all Begins with Trust

As we all know, we are living through a time of political and economic upheaval. Reputations of people and organizations change very quickly these days. Because of that, I want to talk with you about TRUST.

Becoming trustworthy, and finding out who you can rely on, is a lifelong process.

Who do you trust?

I’ve decided to name names: Schroeder…Pigpen…Peppermint Patty…Linus & Lucy Van Pelt …Snoopy…who are these folks???

Have I left anyone out? (Charlie Brown)

Do you remember when Charlie tried to kick off each year and Lucy always took the ball away? (Demonstration)…That disaster was an annual failure of trust. I always felt so badly for Charlie Brown, because he wanted to believe that Lucy would do the right thing.

Joe Paterno is a master college football coach. He nailed it when he said “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.”

What is it that makes you trust another person? It requires 2 things – Character & Competence.

Let me tell you what happens when you have one of these without the other:

A couple of years ago my wife and I were sitting in the family room, when her eagle eye spotted a dark stain on the stucco ceiling above. Visions of dollar signs danced in my head. Who could we get to investigate and fix this? Fortunately the elderly widow across the street, Mrs. Fruitman, had been employing a handyman named Luke to make a number of improvements to her house, and she was very happy with him. So we hired Luke – the price was right and word of mouth is always best, right? He said he could fix it in a day or two.

Two days later, we had established wonderful rapport with Luke – he was like a member of the family. He had diagnosed the cause of the problem, tracing it to a leaky bathtub upstairs. But in terms of fixing it, he hadn’t even started --- Luke had character, but he lacked competence.

Another time a friend hired Tony to do an assignment. Tony got it done in half the time. The trouble was that afterwards my friend just had the nagging feeling that his business with Tony was not over, that he still owed him something. Maybe it was Tony’s last name…Soprano, I think it was. Tony was highly competent, but he came up short in the character department.

You couldn’t fully trust either Luke or Tony.

What is Character? It’s the way you behave, your integrity, and your ability to keep commitments to yourself and to others. A person of character “walks the talk”; they share with others what they are going to do, and then they do it. They don’t rely on someone else’s rules to tell them what to do; they have internalized their values and principles. A businessman named Roy Disney said it best: “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”

Bernard Madoff cheated just about everyone he knew, and many other unfortunate people lost thousands/millions because of him. Talk about a reputation that was lost overnight.

The other side of Trust is Competence, which in turn has two parts – Capabilities & Results. Your Capabilities are what you use to produce Results – the combination of your strengths and your attitudes, along with your ability to stay up to date. Even the peerless Tiger Woods scrapped his golf swing at the peak of his success in order to become even better in the future.

Results, of course, are your track record, both in objective terms and in the eyes of the other party in a business or personal relationship…and they consist not only of what you accomplish but how you go about doing it. Dick Cheney may have saved the United States from attack by terrorists for seven years, but in the process he was ultra-secretive, and he sponsored methods of torture, by waterboarding and at Guantanamo Bay.

This book, The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M.R. Covey, is the masterwork on the subject. It explores Character & Competence, and goes on to explain how high levels of trust lead to better relationships, better leadership and better organizations.

When I was just 6 years old my parents gave me a key to our flat in England. They were both working, and I arrived home from school before they did. They gave me that responsibility, and I lived up to it. That lesson - that I was a trustworthy human being - has stayed with me ever since. Stephen Covey tells a similar story about his father giving him the responsibility to keep his yard ‘green’ & ‘clean’ at the age of 7. I think that was the beginning of his book.

So Trust requires both Character and Competence, and we learn about Trust from a young age.

Ask Charlie Brown. Read Covey’s book. And on the world stage, watch and learn from Barack Obama.