Trust makes for great leaders. Bad trust advice makes for great failures.

Stephen Covey’s book on trust – 'The Speed of trust’ – is far better than most. However, the same can’t be said about the 13 behaviours the book says build that trust. Here they are:

1. Talk Straight
2. Demonstrate Respect
3. Create Transparency
4. Right Wrongs
5. Show Loyalty
6. Deliver Results
7. Get Better
8. Confront Reality
9. Clarify Expectation
10. Practice Accountability
11. Listen First
12. Keep Commitments
13. Extend Trust

Covey and we, at mext, believe that trust is the most powerful driver of performance. In our opinion that is, because the ability to trust is so immensely valuable to our audience – be they employees, customers, the public or corporate stakeholders.

But we differ very much in 2 key aspects:

1)     Explaining what trust actually is

Only if we understand what trust is and how it forms in our minds, how it affects us physiologically, we can seriously develop recommendations that go beyond generic statements.

2)     How to analyse and build trust
We are not saying that Covey’s behaviours don’t impact trust. But they don’t allow for meaningful analysis, nor do they support anyone in meaningfully and practically building trust.

A few examples:

1. Talk Straight

Talk what straight? Talking the wrong stuff straight is immensely damaging or falls on deaf trust ears. Talking the right stuff straight is immensely powerful to building trust.

3. Create Transparency

Be transparent with what? As practitioners we see this parroted over and over again – and leaders merrily creating distrust by being transparent with the wrong things in the wrong manner.

7. Get Better

Get better with what? Golf putting in the office?

12. Keep Commitments

If you commit that you will always deliver me the sweetest tasting apples, you can keep your commitment as much as you want. I will not trust you. In fact, I may distrust you, because I am much more interested in you paying your workers fairly and not using insecticides.

Building trust is not a random collection of behaviours. First and foremost, trust is about ‘what you can be trusted for’. Is what you can be trusted for appealing to me and how well can I trust you for these things?

To be able to build trust leaders need to be able to identify ‘what they need to be trusted for’. Many trusted leaders intuitively do this well within the context of what they have to achieve. The majority of us is not that great at it. We have to learn how to do this – even if we are already quite good at it. That’s exactly what HuTrust® helps doing. Scientifically correct and practically proven.

Only when we know what exactly we need to be trusted for, is it worth looking at how you can bring these qualities to life through the behaviours like the ones Covey describes. Only if you can consciously manage trust, you can, for lack of better words, operationalise trust building on an individual and organisational level.

Stefan Grafe is the Managing Director of mext, an internationally operating consultancy that specialises in performance improvement by building trust. He is the co-developer of HuTrust®, the only scientifically, statistically and practically proven approach to analysing and building trust and the author of ‘More trust. More sales.’, ‘More Trust. More Human Resources’ (out soon) and ‘Boost your work performance’.

HuTrust® is globally licensed to leading organisations like Sales Performance specialists, Huthwaite International, and Global market research company, Psyma.

Covey leadership article: http://www.leadershipnow.com/CoveyOnTrust.html

What drives bank trust? Update on slideshare now.

First, why would you care? We all know that the banks are not trusted, right? All 4 major banks are, on average, not trusted or just sit on the trust threshold. In business banking none even comes close to an average trust rating.

Trust is the link between customer behaviour and company performance.

If banks could shift their average trust rating by just 5-10%, they would double positive predisposition. A shift of 20% would increase positive predisposition by 400%. On the company performance side, trust, satisfaction and propensity to recommend (NPS) always measure the same and the causality is obvious. So, if you can precisely build trust, you drive business results.

Looking at the facets of trust with HuTrust®, all major banks have a similar HuTrust® Profile. There is no differentiation (we all know that).  Banks are trusted for their stability and they are trusted for being there in the future. Our qual research repeatedly showed that this is partly perceived to be a result of tight regulation –‘being  kept on the leash by the government’. Considering that all banks say they are heavily investing into relationship building, they appear to miss the point and don’t understand what relationship customers actually want to trust them for.

On trust in a vision or purpose, none gets even close to the trust threshold. Vision is a curious one. Constituting one sixth of trust, it is totally overlooked as a driver of trust and customer engagement. Aside from knowing your strengths and weaknesses, which of the HuTrust® facets actually drive trust the most and provide the biggest opportunity? What facets should banks invest into to increase trust – and thereby their KPIs and positive customer behaviour?

In NAB’s case vision trust is not only the worst performing trust facet, it is also the most important one to drive trust and engagement. For NAB it is also the one facet through which it could differentiate substantially and provide more meaning to 'breaking up' than minuscule rates and fees differences. 

Conversely, for Westpac it is competence trust. Interestingly, neither bank really appears to invest into either of these. Maybe that is the reason why none of the banks make any significant shifts in their satisfaction and NPS scores?

BTW - HuTrust facets account for 63-80% of trust variation & 52-88% of variation in propensity to recommend (NPS).

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HuTrust® proves itself in politics

Every politician would agree that it is all about trust. 

This study, with 1500 respondents, employed our HuTrust® IP to also analyse trust in Canadian politicians. Apart from the interesting results for the Premier of British Columbia and the Mayor of Vancouver, the 6 drivers of trust in the HuTrust® methodology were statistically proven to fully explain trust. We were able to analyse the HuTrust® Profiles and the politician’s specific drivers to understand what they would have to do to build more trust.

Analysing Trust in Politicians

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