Covey’s Speed of Trust 14: 7th & 8th Behaviors of Wave 2

This continues our review of Stephen M. R. Covey’s book The Speed of Trust. Please get the book and study it.

Today we discuss two behaviors for building relationship trust: Get Better and Confront Reality. Covey highlights that the older we get, the more our cautious nature wants to prevent mistakes. We get better if we learn from our mistakes. Confronting reality also builds trust in relationships, especially when we demonstrate trust. “Solutions come much faster and better, and are implemented with the understanding, buy-in, and often the excitement of others involved in the problem-solving process.”

Behavior 7: Get Better

“Get better is based on the principles of continuous improvement, learning and change. It is what the Japanese call kaizen, and it builds enormous trust.”

• “When people see you as a learning, growing, renewing person—or your organization as a learning, growing, renewing organization—they develop confidence in your ability to succeed in a rapidly changing environment, enabling you to build high-trust relationships and move with incredible speed”
• “The opposite is entropy, deterioration, resting on your laurels or becoming irrelevant”
• The counterfeits are
  • “The “eternal student” always learning but never producing”
  • “It’s trying to force-fit everything into whatever you’re good at doing”

The author recommends two ways to get better: seek feedback—and listen to it—and learn from mistakes

Behavior 8: Confront Reality

Covey continues ”When you Confront Reality, it affects speed and cost in at least two important ways. First, it builds the kind of relationships that facilitate open interaction and fast achievement. Second, instead of having to wrestle with all the hard issues on your own while trying to paint a rosy picture for everyone else, you actually engage the creativity, capability, and synergy of others in solving those issues.”

• “Confront Reality is based on the principles of courage, responsibility, awareness and respect”
• “The opposite is to ignore it, to act as though it doesn’t exist”
• “The counterfeit is to act as though you’re confronting reality when you’re actually evading it. It’s focusing on busywork while skirting the real issue.”

Saturday we review behaviors 9 Clarify Expectations & 10 Practice Accountability