My November 7th blog asked the question, are you trustworthy? I wrote about Yvonne “Missy” Woods, a former employee of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) who simply put, destroyed the trust people and the organization had in her.
Steven Covey said, “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.”
In my book, The Furnace of Leadership Development, I wrote that trust, credibility, and integrity “form a triad” and “they coexist, grow, and develop in unison. Remove one or the other and the triad collapses.”1
The issue of trust is a matter of sound and impeccable character. Think about the people you work with, work for, or associate with. What is it about their character that allows you to trust them, or what is missing in their character that makes you distrust them? Create a list and label one column ‘trust’ and the other column ‘distrust.’ What do you see?
Now examine your life.
- Which characteristics in the ‘trust’ column do you exhibit?
- Which characteristics in the ‘distrust’ column do you demonstrate?
- Which column is longer?
What steps are you going to take to strengthen the ‘trust’ column and shorten the ‘distrust’ column? I recommend that you not do this on your own but seek out a trusted mentor or coach to help and hold you accountable. Preferably, this should be someone outside of your organization. Someone who knows what they are doing, someone who is safe, and someone who is certainly not in your chain of command.
Are you interested in learning how you can strengthen your trust with others? Drop me a note at [email protected].
1 Rick Davis, The Furnace of Leadership Development, (Loveland, CO: Java House Publishing, 2019), 23
