Trust Fund

At some stage you'll need to work and collaborate with others to create a shared success. The hand dimension is about how you behave, how you conduct yourself in order to achieve your personal goals; in particular, it relates to how you create effective relationships to help achieve the outcomes you desire. The core driver for the hand function is the ability to develop and maintain trust-based relationships with other people.

Trust is the oil that lubricates relationships. With relationships grounded in trust, the relationship will be open, transferable and often celebrated. Where a relationship is grounded in distrust, power bases and back-biting, success will be token, short-lived and sour. Low-trust relationships are characterized by face-saving, setting out boundaries, and the creation of power positions. Furthermore, this emphasis interferes with, and distorts the perceptions of problems, causing it to seem insurmountable, or creating problems that do not exist.9

Trust is the fulcrum that can effect different degrees of leverage in a relationship. By shifting the fulcrum towards the high-trust direction, you can quantify the reduction in time taken to solve problems and work effectively. Within an organization the transaction costs reduce if less money is spent on monitoring and control processes. If people don't have to worry about making mistakes and protecting their turf, they're more willing to open up and share learning and knowledge. Correspondingly, as the fulcrum shifts the other way, trust diminishes, power battles erupt, tribal camps form and the flow of knowledge is attenuated.

However, trust isn't a simple switch that can be turned on and off at will. The giving and taking of trust can vary considerably in its fragility and resilience, and can change quickly or slowly depending on the circumstances. Trust associated with a close personal friendship is resilient and durable, and can be regarded as thick trust. Once established, it's not easily disrupted, but once shattered, it isn't readily repaired or restored.10 In casual or short-term relationships, we see thin trust. This is the type conferred on a project group or product team, where people only tend to commit part of themselves.

Trust funds

It took me a long time to realize that I can't really achieve anything successful in my life without the help of others. To deliver something in life that has value and is sustainable it must be achieved by working in partnership with others, people who have a shared goal and will work towards the same or shared outcome.

How do you build and maintain such productive relationships? What are the critical factors that you put in place both to identify people you can work with and to maintain the relationships over a satisfactory time? They are all centred on the notion of trust. Without trust there is just a cold contractual relationship, one where the overheads required to maintain the relationship use more energy than any benefit derived from the association. Just think about a manager who has a team of ten people. If the manager doesn't really trust a number of people in the team, a large percentage of their personal time is spent on low-value activities -- putting control systems in place, running audits and checking all the work flows and outputs. Conversely, where a manager has a trust-based relationship with all members of the team, the vast majority of the manager's time will be spent adding value and developing the capabilities of the team members.

No real surprise there. This is a common theme, but how do you learn to develop and manage trust to actively manage relationships?

The problem with trust is that it's like a good partnership -- you know it when you see it, but it's hard to define the individual contribution factors. As an example, think about someone who you know well and trust implicitly. What is it that makes you think of that person? What do they and you do to maintain the relationship? Now think of another person you know just as well but don't trust. Consider what it is that each of you does to create a relationship lacking in substance and value. What's the impact of such a relationships and what overheads does it impose? If you ask them to do a job or help you out, to what extent do you have to give up valuable personal time to check and oversee the work? Do you lose sleep because there is a fear in the back of your mind that they might not deliver on time or to standard.

In many ways, the time you spend building relationships with others is an investment process, where you choose to offer and invest your personal time and capital. If you end up spending a large chunk of your time with people who actually turn out to be untrustworthy, it feels auful. Do you have relationships where this might happen? Just think, would you take a big chunk of your wages each month and place it into an account that only promised to waste your money with the result that your return is less than your investment. For me, the abuse of my personal time is as big a waste as loosing money and is something I consciously guard against. Relationships are like saving accounts -- we put time and energy into them in the hope that the shared success will grow and multiply, in the same way that investments in a trust fund will produce compound growth over time. Measuring your relationships might seem artificial but, like your finances, you should be aware of the amounts that you've invested in different places, monitor the levels of performance each supplier is offering and where necessary make changes to improve the return.

I have a simple definition of trust that I use to measure and manage relationships:  

For any relationship it's very easy for us to move the account sliders on the account into credit or debit. When I run a training session I only have to tell a lie about something to weaken the truthful slider; ignore a question by someone for them to feel that I'm not being responsive; tell two people different things to upset the uniform balance; tell a story about someone else to raise concerns about how safe people feel; or appear not to be a competent trainer to reduce the value in the trained sub-account. Slippage in any one area of the trust fund erodes my personal value and even worse reduces my chance to create a shared success with the delegates on the course.

By managing trust, your trust fund becomes attractive to other people with a result that your account can be transferred in real time. Think about the last time you sat round a dinner table with a group of friends or went for a drink with some work colleagues. Inevitably, group conversation turns to people's opinions of absent colleagues or friends. I guarantee that if you hear two or more people describe their experience of the same person in positive terms, their trust account will look attractive and you'll be more prepared to make an investment if you happen to meet the person.

(c) Mick Cope