BOOK REVIEW - THE SPEED OF TRUST

In “The Speed of Trust”, Steven M.R. Covey gives us a comprehensive look into the key issue of trust in a team. Trust can be defined as having confidence in a person’s willingness and ability to act in your best interests. Trust has a direct correlation to a team’s performance. Covey leaves us with little doubt, prioritise trust and reap the rewards of a high functioning team, ignore trust and run the peril of your team stagnating. Covey links trust to the speed at which the team performs. Jack Welch maintained that, “If you're not fast, you're dead”.  Trust has a direct impact on a team’s agility: the team’s ability to adapt to change and seize opportunities. Trust is at the heart of a team’s exponential growth.

The Four Cores of Trust

Covey identifies the four core factors of trust: integrity, intent, capability and results. Integrity and intent speak to the soft skills at the heart of trust. Trust is essentially rooted in the heart and character of a leader. George Fischer puts it well: “Be value-based and principle-based. Know what stand for and live by those standards”. Being congruent, humble and courageous. By adding intent to integrity, Covey is essentially saying, “let your light shine”. Live your values. Be emphatic and explicit about your values. Let your actions validate and prove your authenticity. Integrity and intent tells your team that you are very willing to act in their best interests, but they need to know that you are willing and able. This means being capable, having a proven skill-set and getting results, making things happen.

The Trust Ripple-effect

Covey uses the poignant analogy of the ripples in a pond to describe the flow of trust through a team. The character of the leader is at the centre of the ripple, the causative power generating the concentric ripples of trust. The integrity, intent, capability and results of the leader is the catalyst driving relational trust, organisational trust, market trust and societal trust.

Relational Trust

Covey’s book delves into relational trust very comprehensively. In a nutshell, relational trust grows from:

• A leader who has proven that he has every intention and capability to act for the mutual benefit of each of the team members and the team itself.

• A leader who inspires confidence, that when he sets a goal for the team, they rally behind the goal, expecting to succeed.

• A leader who prizes transparency and confidentiality.

• A leader who harnesses the power of clarity: strategies are clear, roles are clear, expectations are clear.

• A leader who puts the team first, building and empowering the team members and co-owning their journeys of mastery and achievement.

• A leader who sees his team members as investments, pouring into them, developing them to be better than they thought they could be.

• A leader who has the wisdom to know when to encourage and when to chastise, when to sit back and when to pull in the reins.

• A leader who intuitively knows how to leverage the passions and skill-sets of his team, so that not only are goals achieved, but team members thrive.  

• A leader elevates the trajectory of each member of the team, and the team itself.

• A leader who knows that nothing worth gaining is gained without pain and sweat and hard work.

• A leader who knows that to embrace creativity, ingenuity and innovation, means to embrace the possibility of failure, and works to mitigate the effects of failure on the team, using setbacks to learn and grow and develop.

In conclusion

The key take-away from Covey’s book is that the central tenant of a high functioning team is relationships of trust. A team’s performance is not based on transactional obligations or compulsion or fear, but on relationships rooted in mutual care, mutual respect and mutual trust.  In a trust-driven team, the members have the freedom to pursue the best version of themselves and add unique value that compliments the value of other members, resulting in a slick machine that pushes the limits of excellence and performance. Essentially, “Transcendent values like trust and integrity literally translate into revenue, profits and prosperity” (P. Aburdene).