The source of being a great leader, a successful salesperson or an effective team member…just about any role in an organization (or life) requires building a strong foundation of trust. There are several ways to look at building trust, but one of my favorites is to look at it through the lens of source credibility.
Source credibility is basically when you trust someone so much that you don’t even question his or her intention or honesty. For example, I’m sure that everyone reading this column has someone in their life who, if the phone rang right now and they said, “I need you here right away,” you would just hang up the phone and go immediately — that is someone with extremely high source credibility in your life. To help you understand this idea more deeply, here is an equation that describes the core elements of source credibility.
In this equation, C stands for competency — you must be very good at what you do and highly skilled or what I like to call “towering competence.” The R stands for “reliability”; people have to know that if you give your word, you’re always going to keep it and they can count on you — you always deliver what you promise. The I stands for “intimacy,” which focuses on “tie strength.” This refers to the strength of our relationship: do we know each other outside of business, have we known each other a long time, do we talk to each other about important and personal things and do we have a strong, close relationship? And the SO in the equation stands for “self-orientation”; in other words, how much is the relationship all about “me, me, me”?
If you filled it in with numbers, you would want it to be 10+10+10 divided by 1. This means that you want to show a very high level of competence, 100 percent reliability, have a very strong personal relationship, and, throughout the entire relationship, you remain focused on the other person. When you build this kind of relationship, people know that they can trust you because you’re really good at what you do, you keep your promises, they know you well and they know that you always act with THEIR best interests at heart. Now, think about this idea as it relates to a leader, or salesperson, or anyone else you work with; when they have high source credibility with you, you are going to extend to them a tremendous amount of trust. So, the challenge in building that level of trust is in increasing your competence every day, demonstrating high levels of reliability over time and finding ways to increase the tie strength and intimacy of your relationship, while always working hard to help the other person and do what is only in his or her best interest.
One more thing on trust: the best way to build trust is to extend it first. For many people, this is a very hard concept to grasp, as it is their belief that, “I will only give someone trust after they have earned it.” However, if you wait until the other person clearly shows you that you can trust them, it can take a very long time. Effective leaders extend trust first and then take it back if warranted, but they always lead with trust so that they can build a stronger bond and create more trust immediately.