Building Sustainable Trust: A Leadership Skill.

There are twelve steps to building sustainable trust. People count on leaders and depend on them. These steps will help you build trust with followers and with your co-leaders.

The Steps

1. Clear, mutually agreed upon vision

2. Clear, mutually agreed upon expectations

3. Clear, mutually agreed upon roles of all key players

4. Honest, transparent communications

5. Agreed upon financial, accounting, and administrative provisions

6. Mutual promotion of creativity and productivity of all involved

7. Agreed upon processes for publication, branding, creation of marketing material, website content, and creating “voice” in all employees

8. Mutual and ever increasing sense of respect for the other person even when there are strong disagreements

9. Agreed upon, brilliantly executed conflict resolution processes with a clear time frame for all adjudications

10. No unresolved conflicts

11. Consistent collaboration or terminate the relationship

12. Giving of credit to others and acknowledging others on a regular basis.

Conclusion

This article is outlines twelve key steps to build and maintain trust. Trust, as preached by Steven Covey and his son, Steven, M.R. Covey, is essential for organizations to be successful. Similarly, at the societal level, as Ian MacDougall from LexisNexis has often stated publicly, trust must be established through adherence to the rule of law with broad access to justice and broad access to remedies when a wrong occurs.

Trust is hard to create and easy to break. This article gives leaders a clear sense of the breadth of activities needed to build trust.