As a leader in business, you are familiar with the fact that you have risks that need to be managed or avoided completely. But let me ask you this – have you ever considered a breakdown of trust as the greatest risk to your business?

If you’re shaking your head, you’re in the majority – but if you truly want to outshine and outstrip your competitors, if you want to significantly increase what I call the 3 R’s of trust – Results, Retention and Relationships, then listen up!

Your greatest challenge and opportunity in 2011 is to join the growing number of leaders who are focusing on a breakdown of trust as the greatest risk, and creating a “Building Trust Plan” to address it.

Watson Wyatt concluded in a 2003 study that organisations with high levels of trust delivered shareholder returns 3 TIMES that of organisations with low levels of trust. We’ve seen similar results from businesses that apply a concerted effort on understanding where trust is breaking down inside and outside their business and leading with trust as the foundation of doing business.

One of the issues “trust” has in playing a significant role in the business world has been its complexity and a reputation as being a “soft skill” that “we don’t have time to really focus on – we’re trying to make money.”  Trust has taken a back seat to a host of culture development programs and, over the past few years, cost cutting measures to survive the global financial crisis have eroded trust even further.

In a study Vanessa Hall’s organisation conducted in 2006, they asked over 600 people “What is trust?”  And guess what?  They got over 600 different responses!

How can you build something if you don’t even know what you are building?

But when they asked business leaders around the world “How important is trust to your organisation?” what did they say? “It’s critical” was the most common response. Great, so then they asked, “So, what do you do, then, to build trust? How do you know when you have it and when you don’t? How do you measure it?” The response – lots of blank stares, red faces, drained faces, and less than 5% could actually say what they did to build trust.

So, we have a lack of understanding of what trust is, a recognition of how important it is, with no clue as to what to do! Is it any wonder trust has taken a back seat all these years?

As a leader, this is your chance to lead with trust, and reap the rewards.

First, what is trust?

Our ability to rely on:

1. A person (or group of people),
2. A business or organization,
3. Products and/or Services

…to deliver an outcome to us.

So, when your staff trusts you, they’re relying on you and your business to deliver an outcome to them.

When your customers/clients trust you they are relying on you, your organisation, and your products and/or services to deliver an outcome to them.

The problem is unless you’ve been asking, you don’t know what outcome they are relying on you for.  And, I can tell you this for certain, if you think you know, you don’t. Assume nothing!  There will be things that they are relying on that will blow your mind.

There are 3 core components to the Trust Wall, a revealing model for trust that explains quite a bit about human behaviour.

• Their previous experience with you
• Things they’ve seen about you
• Things others have told them about you
• Things they’ve experienced with people/organisations/products and services that are like yours, but are not you

That means your customers, your staff, your shareholders, all have a range of expectations that they are relying on you to deliver.

These three things, what Hall call’s ENPs®, are what we all rely on others for, and our trust sits on a balance of those. Keep them all in check, and trust flourishes and Results, Retention and Relationships all improve. Fail to meet them and trust breaks down, and all those things that you see in your business that cause you sleepless nights – the lack of performance, slow sales, high turnover, customer complaints, infighting, shareholder selling out, all take hold and destroy everything you are trying to achieve.

A breakdown of trust is the greatest risk to your business – building trust is your greatest challenge. That is the truth about trust.

Can you handle the truth?

Source: Vanessa Hall, author of The Truth About Trust in Business