How Stephen Covey Taught Me to Trust
Normally when I check my voice mail I delete more than half the messages before I even finish listening to them. It’s part of the job. “Hi Dan, this is Jennifer from Fly By Night PR wanting to tell you about my new client…” delete. “Dan, I’ve got this great new software you just have to check out…” delete. “Dan, it’s your mother calling…” delete.
But the other day I got a message from a publicist saying she wanted to set up a meeting between me and Stephen Covey, to talk about his new book, "The Speed of Trust." The Stephen Covey, I thought? No, not exactly. When I returned the call I learned that my meeting would be with Stephen M.R. Covey, son of the highly effective motivational author Stephen R. Covey.
Well, it was too late by then, I had to take the meeting. So it was not without my usual dose of skepticism that I went into this meeting with the son of a really famous person. I figured he was trading on his father’s name, banking on some percentage of “name confusion sales,” that kind of thing.
But a funny thing happened during the meeting. This other Covey, Covey Junior, Covey Lite, convinced me, the world’s leading cynic, that he was legit. Then he convinced me that his business philosophies were worth listening to, even implementing. I don’t know, maybe I’m getting soft.
Covey’s point in the book is very simple: Trust in the business world is not a “soft skill.” It is a hard-edged economic driver with very real financial implications. When trust is in decline, so is productivity. He calls this theory the economics of trust.
Okay, so you may be thinking at this point, “C’mon, Briody, tell this guy to go back to Utah and sell crazy someplace else.” But I tested him. Questioned his motives. Doubted his credentials. And he passed all the tests. “You’re just trying to sell your book,” I said. “That’s true,” he replied. And just like that, I trusted him.
And he had real-world business examples of how trust works. For instance, outsourcing contracts. We’ve been told time and again to sign iron-clad service-level agreements when committing business to an outsourcer, and to follow those agreements to the letter. But Covey has research that shows that outsourcing contracts that relied too heavily on the SLA underperformed. That’s because there’s no trust there.
Similarly, in this flat world of ours, collaboration is supposed to be the answer to all of our labor problems. But the effectiveness of collaboration is undermined by a lack of trust between partners. “Otherwise, it’s just coordination,” Covey said.
The good news is, trust can be learned. And building trust can be perfected. For CIOs, Covey said, the first step is establishing credibility. “This is tough trust, filled with accountability,” he said. “A CIO must deliver the basic functionality. Results are the price of entry.”
Clarifying expectations is also crucial for the IT set. “The way to build trust quickly is to make a commitment, and then keep it. Make a commitment, keep it. Make a commitment, keep it,” said Covey.
So why doesn’t everyone operate with honesty and trust in the business world? “Counterfeit behavior is our prevailing culture,” Covey said. Look no further than Hewlett-Packard for your example. It’s a case where technology is forcing transparency upon us. But in the case of HP, individuals are not changing their behavior fast enough to keep up with the technological changes, resulting in Patricia Dunn’s great big gotcha.
HP had built up loads of trust over the years, most of it stemming from the impeccable reputations of its co-founders William Hewlett and David Packard. But the company has taken a mighty withdrawal from that bankable asset. And Covey made it clear that the company would have to confront these embarrassing issues head-on, and make restoring trust an explicit objective going forward.
The book’s got lots of examples of companies trading on trust. Even turning it into a marketing tool. And even though I haven’t read the whole thing, I trust that Junior knows what he’s talking about.
