Put Your Trust In The People You Work With

Sid Raisch use this oneIn a business, trust is everything. Customers have to trust the merchant. Employees have to trust the owners. Owners have to trust their customers and employees.

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While there is always some trust, the degree is highly variable. The higher trust we have, the better business we have, and the more marketable it is to customers and to the next owners — if you think you’ll be looking for either of those anytime soon.

Friends, you don’t have to fear for your life to be afraid of people. But it is pretty much the same.

Whether your life is taken suddenly or in small bits over a long time, it’s still taken. We lose a little of our life at a time from distrust.

It has always amazed me how little information some employers are willing to share about their business with their associates. This is not always because they don’t trust them. Some take the attitude, “Why give employees more than exactly what they need to know to do their job, because they may leave?” And others look at the situation with a different attitude: “Employees will do a better job and will stay longer if they learn how to do more, and contribute more to accomplishing our goals.”

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If a lack of trust is an issue for you, my advice is probably not going to be well received, but let’s try anyway, and you can prove me wrong, okay?

A lack of trust is sometimes due to embarrassment about how bad things are financially, or with family relationships. Other times owners don’t know how it might help them to share more information. Both of these are rooted in fear. What happens when we’re afraid of our people? When we lack the trust necessary to trust people with our business concerns and desires, we become immobilized and incapable of moving our business very far forward, or at least as far as it might have grown had we been more trusting.

The Ten Commandments Of Trust

There are many other good reasons for not trusting people. People have been known to lie and to steal. You may have heard stories of these problems, or maybe you’ve had your own bad first-hand experiences with them. These are only two of the Ten Commandments, but they’re enough to stop trust in its tracks.

Maybe we need a Ten Commandments of Trust for our industry? Here are my nominations for the “Thou Shalt Trust Our People” list.

1. Trust with Numbers — People who understand and measure what matters do more of what matters.

2. Trust with Customers — Trust your people to take care of customers as well as you do, and customers will trust them and their advice as much as they trust yours, or more.

3. Trust in Their Community — Trust your people to be your highest ambassadors in their community.

4. Trust to Care About Their Company — When we trust people to care about the company they work for as if it is their own, they will.

5. Trust to Learn —When we expect people to continue to learn and grow, they do.

6. Trust to Improve — When we expect people to improve the business, they improve the business.

7. Trust to be Honest — When we expect a full measure, we get a full measure.

8. Trust to Keep Our Trust — When people know we expect them to keep our trust, they do.

9. Trust to Make Mistakes — Nobody is perfect, and when someone makes a mistake it doesn’t mean they can’t be trusted to learn from it and improve.

10. Trust to Trust Us —Trust is a two-way street. When we mutually trust and are trusted, we can expect the best from each other.

Please allow me to encourage you to become more trusting of your people. Give them the information, understanding, tools and training they need to do more, and you’ll be amazed at what can be accomplished. There is no other way.

Trust is earned, and must also be granted. When we give our people the benefit of a little doubt, we get the benefit of being considered a reliable and trustworthy employer, supplier, partner, spouse, parent and human being. Well, it’s worked for me at least.

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