Trust is the most important ingredient

Whether at work, at school or at a bar, our trustworthiness is among our biggest assets.

• “[T]here is one lesson I learned early and then relearned over and over: Trust is the coin of the realm,” the late George Shultz, former secretary of state and adviser to presidents and CEOs, wrote in The Washington Postin 2020 — just days before he turned 100, and two months before he died.
• “When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.”

Why it matters: Taking away trust is one of the quickest ways to tank a project or erode a relationship.

• Here are examplesof how trust works in all parts of life, gleaned from leaders and experts.

At work: “There are two flavors of trust,” says Heidi Gardner, a business and leadership expert at Harvard Law School.

• There’s trust in competence, which is believing that someone has the capability to get something done. But that’s not enough, she says.
• Arguably more important, there’s also interpersonal trust — which boils down to being an honorable person. For example, one of the biggest red flags in a workplace is an employee who takes credit for others’ ideas and work, Gardner says.
• “If you think I’m the biggest guru in the world, but you think I’m a jerk, you’re still going to shut me out.”

At home: Shultz spent his career in negotiation rooms with some of the highest stakes in modern history. But he wrote in The Post that he learned his first lessons about trust at home.

• “[I observed] how my parents treated one another and their friends and family. One hundred years later, I can still sense the steadfast love that my parents had for each other and for me, their only child.”
• “My early boyhood memories underlined the joy of family closeness and how it creates powerful bonds of trust.”

In yourself: “I often tell friends: When you don’t know what to do, do nothing,” Oprah Winfrey writes in her magazine. “Get quiet so you can hear the still, small voice — your inner GPS guiding you to true north.”

• “I’ve trusted the still, small voice of intuition my entire life. And the only time I’ve made mistakes is when I didn’t listen.”

Πηγή: axios.com