I was lucky enough to be in New York this week doing a workshop for a big pharma business and took the opportunity to catch up with Mark Raheja, founder of the brilliant August. In our conversation Mark mentioned a formula that he'd come across (which comes originally from this book by Charles H Green) that was a useful way of thinking about trust relationships in business. The equation is based on four variables (paraphrasing from here): Credibility (is credible on the subject); Reliability (is dependable, someone who delivers, does what they say they will do); Intimacy (referring to the safety or security that we feel when entrusting someone with something); and self-orientation (referring to the person’s focus and whether, in particular, their primary focus is on themselves and what they can get out of it, or on the other person).
I rather like this as a way of demonstrating the factors that can empower not only trust between vendor/consultant and client, but also a culture of trust within an organisation (that can generate greater agility. As Green and co point out, this equation has one variable in the denominator and three in the numerator, and increasing the value of the factors in the numerator increases the value of trust whilst increasing the value of the denominator (self-orientation) decreases it. This makes sense since (as every good sales person will tell you) great selling or consulting is based on listening rather than telling. But it's also important since in the modern organisation trust is critical to building the culture to move fast. It's the difference between fixed and growth mindsets or, put another way, pie-eaters and pie-bakers.
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