Covey’s Speed of Trust 8: 3rd Core of Credibility—Capability

This continues our review of Stephen M. R. Covey’s book The Speed of Trust. I still suggest that you get it and read it repeatedly.

Self-trust (trust you place in yourself and the trust others place in you) is the first wave of trust. Credibility remains the foundation of self-trust. The four cores of credibility are integrity, intent, capability, and results. Integrity and intent enhance your character. Capabilities and results increase your competence. 

TASKS Describes Technical Abilities

Covey writes “One way to think about the various dimensions of capabilities is to use the acronym ‘TASKS’.”

• T=talents: “’Talents’ are those things that come to us naturally…As we think about our talents, we need to realize that we may have talents within us that we cannot currently know we have.”
• A=attitudes: “Consider the difference attitudes might make in your personal enjoyment of life and your ability to perform.” He warns you to beware of an attitude of entitlement. Entitlement depletes credibility fast.
• S=skills: “Unless you’re continually improving your skills, you’re quickly becoming irrelevant. And when you’re irrelevant, you’re no longer credible.”
• K=knowledge: “Increasing knowledge is vital in today’s global economy, where the world’s fund of information now doubles every two to two and half years.
• S=style: “Clearly there is a wide variety of effective styles. The challenge is to match the style to the highest effectiveness for the task. The problem comes when you have a ‘style’ that gets in the way and creates distrust.”

The author continues “The end in mind here is to develop our TASKS and to match them to the tasks at hand—to create the best possible alignment between our natural gifts, our passions, our skills, knowledge, style and the opportunity to earn, to contribute, to make a difference.”

How to Increase Your Capabilities

You can increase credibility by increasing capabilities:

• Run with your strengths (and your purposes) and then focus on engaging, developing, and leveraging what is distinctly yours
• Keep yourself relevant through life-long learning
• Know where you’re going demonstrates competence

Friday we will review the results, last core of credibility, in the 1st wave of self-trust