The High Speed of High Trust - Conversations At C-Level

We were recently joined in London by Stephen MR Covey, author of The Speed of Trust, and some meetngs we organised with 3 Chief Executive level clients served as a strong affirmation of the 3 'big ideas' that we focus on in this area

1. Rather than just being a 'social virtue', trust is a hard edged driver of economic performance
2. Trust is a key leadership competency, as it can be an accelerator of all other competencies (ie 'the tide that lifts all boats)
3. Trust is a learnable skill ie you can both measure it and then 'move the number'

Given FranklinCovey's heritage of developing large scale developmental initiatives, this 3rd idea is a key area of focus for us, and while the context of the 3 conversations was different, all required the development of a strong culture based on trust across a large number of people.

One of the conversations, with the Vice President of a large IT services organisation, identified the key skills they look for in employing 800-1,000 people a year. While a technology based organisation, he described the IT skills required as 'a commodity'. Where the real skills shortage came was the ability to establish trusted relationships not just at an executive level, but (critically) at the level of the 100's and 1000's of weekly transactions, so that they can access, and respond to, real time data from the client organisation, thus continually flexing to the client's needs.

Another conversation, with the Managing Director of business process outsourcing firm, focused on their goal of 25% growth on (net) revenues of £100m pa. Here again, he had identified trust as the key skills gap needed to increase renewal and referral rates with clients and was looking to employ and develop 200 relationship managers who were both 'trustworthy' and able to 'extend trust'.

The final conversation was with the chief executive of a 10,000 person organisation, going through a period of great change which was likely to reduce overhead and headcount. A key challenge was how to maintain engagement levels and (importantly) getting individuals to take increased levels of responsibity in a culture that defers responsibility. At the end of the meeting a bold move to make increasing trust levels a stated objective was agreed and the specific behaviours we focus on as a way of extending Trust considered.