Making Trust Tangible

Lina M. Echeverría's book, Idea Agent, published at the end of last year, looks to provide insight on how to 'liberate creativity and accelerate innovation', and from this comes a sense that Trust is a (if not the) key component for leaders and organisations in making this happen

An impassioned culture of innovation thrives when guided by leaders who can resonate with team members — leaders capable of managing with passion and creating energised organisations while staying true to themselves and making their own work meaningful. Innovation thrives under a leader who internalises and lives by the belief that to excel you must start with a group; to excel you must create a culture; and to excel you must manage one by one — one person at a time, one situation at a time, one project at a time, one group at a time — by staying in the present, undistracted.

Trust is that fragile and vital value that must underlie every activity but that cannot be tangibly created. Trust is also essential to high performance. Expressions of trust are recognised by everyone's willingness for open, honest communication, dialogue and “feedback. They are at the core of the courage of taking intelligent risk and they underlie a sentiment of mutual respect. The utmost expression of trust is the willingness to place our future in somebody else's hands, to follow his or her guidance into unknown territory, to pursue a trail that we had not charted or even envisioned ourselves

This analysis reflects FranklinCovey's experience that Trust can be a key ingredient / catalyst / accelerator for innovation and creativity, but where our perspective differs is on the comment that trust 'cannot be tangibly created'. 

We do recognise that, while many people have a sense of when Trust is present or absent, not many people are able to define what Trust is, and in the absence of this definition it is then difficult to measure, assess, develop and reward for Trust. In contrast, FranklinCovey's approach starts by providing a definition of what Trust is (and the commercial benefits it can bring) and then builds on this by identifying 5 levels (or waves) of Trust which can be codified and developed at a personal, team, organisational, market and societal level. Given the focus that exists on increasing levels of Trust in many organisations and industries at the moment, it is this very practical approach to tangibly increasing Trust levels which many find attractive about the FranklinCovey approach.