The Speed of Trust

Covey’s book unlocks the nature of Trust and its critical value in life and leadership.

He explains that trust is about confidence in a person or relationship. To be trusted we need to be credible and he illuminates the four cores of credibility in two categories – our confidence in someone’s Character and our confidence in their Competence. The two core attributes of Character are Integrity and Intent. The two core attributes of Competence are Results and Credibility.

This clear explanation, and some of Covey’s diagnostics, have been very helpful to me in really understanding the notion of Trust… show more.

When our board chose me to be CEO, I felt lost at first.

I felt that there was a lack of basic trust in our company: I didn’t trust my predecessor, and I wasn’t so sure that my direct reports trusted me. This book deals with that very issue. Covey devotes his to why this happens, and how to fix it.

The book inspired my team to analyze our company, and to identify things our leadership team could do to change it.

Stephen Covey does a masterful job demonstrating how “trust” influences an organization’s success. If trust is present within all levels of leadership and management, then Covey maintains these organizations move with quick and productive efficiencies that otherwise bureaucratic organizations would labor through. But Covey also brings it to the next level, because he illustrates the connection between trust and character and integrity. This is important because without character, you cannot develop trust, which is the essential element for any relationship within high-performance, successful organizations.

Covey writes about the "taxes" of not having a trusting relationship, which is very poignant for me because trust is the foundation of any strategic collaborative relationship. He suggests distrust in relationships results in various "taxes,” including: redundancy, bureaucracy, politics, disengagement, turnover, churn, and fraud.

If you are structuring a strategic business deal, you should seek to understand these taxes and seek to avoid them by consciously creating trust with your future business partner.

I love this book because I am sucker for structure. When I hear that some critical skill is a “function of judgment, timing, and experience,” or that you have “put in the 10,000 hours” to master it, I rebel. Maybe I’m too impatient, but I immediately want to figure out what good looks like, so I can at least start heading in the right direction. So when Covey brought that kind of thinking to the topic of trust, I was intrigued; and he did not disappoint. Speed of Trust not only makes the case for building trust (which we all… show more.