{"id":26956,"date":"2021-09-27T10:54:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-27T10:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.franklincovey.de\/2021\/09\/27\/3-things-every-leader-needs-to-know-about-trust-the-1-leadership-competency\/"},"modified":"2023-03-13T11:39:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T11:39:36","slug":"3-things-every-leader-needs-to-know-about-trust-the-1-leadership-competency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.franklincovey.de\/de\/2021\/09\/27\/3-things-every-leader-needs-to-know-about-trust-the-1-leadership-competency\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Things Every Leader Needs to Know About Trust- The #1 Leadership Competency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In his 1996 book\u00a0Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of the Social Order<\/em>, Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama described the difference between high-trust and low-trust societies. In a nation or community with a low-trust culture, people take all sorts of extra steps to compensate for that lack of trust. Often people use the legal system as a substitute for trust\u2014but that approach is a slow and costly alternative to collaboration based on trust. \u201cWidespread distrust, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay,\u201d he wrote.<\/h3>\n

Fukuyama\u2019s insight is just as relevant to organisations and teams. High trust is the ultimate accelerator and performance multiplier, while low trust is a tax on every project, initiative, and relationship.<\/p>\n

Case in point: One of our clients, a large company that invests heavily in research and development has focused on building a high-trust culture for more than three years. Senior leaders report that higher trust increased their speed to market for a lucrative product by a full year\u2014a stunning result in terms of revenue and profitability.<\/p>\n

Numerous studies have linked trust within organisations to greater innovation, employee engagement, and financial performance. But in the United States and around the world, people have become less trusting in recent years. A 2019 Pew<\/a> study found that 71 percent of Americans thought people were less confident in each other compared to twenty years earlier.\u00a0Such interpersonal distrust extends into the workplace\u2014many are equally sceptical of organizations and institutions. Yet, despite the decline, 71 percent of Americans said it\u2019s better in most situations for people to work together with others, compared with 29 percent who said it\u2019s better to work alone.<\/p>\n

In an era when trust is hard to come by\u2014and more important than ever, as we work to solve vital and unprecedented problems\u2014leaders at all levels need to understand three fundamental truths about trust.<\/p>\n

1. Trust is an economic driver.<\/h2>\n

Indeed, it\u2019s no exaggeration to say that trust is the economic driver\u2014in fact, today it has become the coin of the realm. A recent study by Accenture, which studied 7,000 companies over two and a half years, found that if trust declines in an organization, the organisation will experience a material decline in both revenue and EBITDA. The reality is that most organizational performance issues are actually trust issues in disguise.<\/p>\n

Leaders\u2014from first-time managers to C-suite executives\u2014must understand that trust is inextricably tied to all the success metrics they care about. If you have a low-trust culture, you can force people to coordinate, and you might even be able to get them to cooperate to some extent. But you can\u2019t force them to\u00a0collaborate\u2014and without trust, they couldn\u2019t do it if they tried. High-trust organizations are more profitable because trust fuels collaboration, which translates into far greater speed and innovation. An\u00a0LRN<\/a>\u00a0study showed that employees in high-trust organizations are 32 times more likely to take responsible risks that might benefit the company\u2014and 11 times more likely to innovate.<\/p>\n

When you stop paying the low-trust \u201ctax,\u201d your organization becomes more efficient. One of our clients, a technology company, credits higher trust with a 30 percent decrease in operating costs.<\/p>\n

2. The trust problem is not \u201cout there\u201d\u2014it starts with you.<\/h2>\n

Trust works from the inside out. This means that as a leader, you must examine yourself\u2014and change your own behaviour\u2014first. We have fifteen-plus years\u2019 worth of data to back up that statement.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a leader, especially a senior leader, you can\u2019t \u201cPR\u201d your way into a position of trust relative to your employees. It just doesn\u2019t work. Study after study has shown that people don\u2019t leave organisations\u2014they leave bad bosses. If employees don\u2019t trust their immediate supervisor, it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019ll trust senior leadership or the company as a whole.<\/p>\n

Trust has to be part of the culture and part of how leaders and managers operate on a daily basis. Most of the time, it\u2019s not monumental ethics violations that destroy organisational trust; it\u2019s small, seemingly inconsequential acts and behaviours that erode trust over time. Thankfully, the converse is also true: Employees who trust their team leader are 14 times more likely to be fully engaged at work (ADPRI<\/a>). And since trust is reciprocal, employees also need to feel that their leader trusts them. This starts with you.<\/p>\n

3. Your first job as a leader is to inspire trust. Your second job is to extend trust.<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve said for years that trust is the #1 leadership competency. That\u2019s a bold statement. There are a lot of important leadership competencies out there. However, if you\u2019re able to inspire trust, it will make you better at every other leadership competency. If not, the lack of trust will dilute and diminish every other leadership competency you develop.<\/p>\n

To inspire trust, you have to be credible. Part of your credibility comes from your professional expertise and track record of results. But those things don\u2019t matter unless you\u2019re also modelling the personal attributes that make people see you as trustworthy: integrity, humility, courage, and authenticity as well as vulnerability, empathy, and caring.<\/p>\n

Your second job as a leader is to extend trust. Again, trust is reciprocal. Almost everybody understands what it means to be trustworthy; very few understand the importance of being\u00a0trusting. We see this every day in our client engagements: two trustworthy people working together with no trust between them. The reason? One of them is not willing to extend trust to the other.<\/p>\n