theedge: How leaders can rebuild trust

Written by Aznita Ahmad Pharmy
Monday, 15 March 2010 12:38

THE dust from the global financial crisis may have settled, but one consequence is that many companies have lost the trust of their customers and corporate leaders are going to have to work hard to regain it.

“Think about all the bank failures that we’ve seen. We’ve seen huge institutions like Lehman Brothers fall apart. Who would have thought that? So people don’t have a lot of confidence and trust in the things that they depended on in the past,” said David M R Covey, COO of global operations at FranklinCovey, a leadership development organisation.

According to Covey, companies and people can rebuild trust and the way for them to do so is by “performing their way out of it”.

“The only way to get out of the current low trust environment is to behave your way (out of it) — start being trustworthy, start exhibiting actions and behaviour that will cause people to trust you,” said Covey, whose father is leadership guru Stephen Covey. The younger Covey was in Kuala Lumpur and Penang in December to meet business leaders in sessions organised by Leadership Resources (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd.

In order to develop trustworthiness, both character and competence are needed. Character includes values such as integrity while competence is a company or person’s skills and abilities.

According to Covey, trust-building is a long-term process and people need to change their mindsets, especially since it was a different sort of mindset that contributed to the global financial crisis.

--Covey. The only way to get out of the current low trust environment is to behave your way (out of it)--

“I think part of the problem was because of short-term ‘let’s-just-make-a-quick-buck-now’ mindset,” he said.
“But if you want to build a trusting relationship, you have to build for the long term. Warren Buffet said it this way, ‘It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to lose it’.”

One point worth noting, said Covey, is that cover-ups never work and what leaders need to do is achieve congruence between their public and personal life.

“What we teach is that you need to live your life as if there’s a camera on you all the time, so that there’s no disconnect between your private and public life. A great example of that is Gandhi, whom I admire as one of the great leaders. You know, he had congruence between his private life and his public life. There was no secret, there was no disconnect.”

Covey told the story of a woman who approached Gandhi for help in getting her sugar-loving son to stop taking it. Gandhi told her to come back and see him in 10 days. The lady agreed and came back 10 days later and Gandhi sat down with the son and explained to him why sugar was bad and why he should stop consuming it. The son finally committed to give up sugar.

The lady asked Gandhi why he couldn’t have done that 10 days ago. Gandhi’s reply was that 10 days ago, he himself was still consuming sugar and therefore, he could not have taught someone else to give it up.

“That just shows you the kind of person he was. He wouldn’t teach a principle that he himself hadn’t lived,” Covey said.


This article appeared on the Management page, The Edge Financial Daily, March 15, 2010.