The Speed of Trust - Page 3
4Cores
Capabilities – Are you relevant?
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4Cores
4 Results – What’s your track record?
Your capabilities are your unique personal blend of talents, skills, knowledge, capacities and abilities which enable you to perform with excellence. Capabilities inspire trust and generate self-confidence. To remain credible over the long haul, you should anticipate your personal capabilities will need to be upgraded and enhanced on a regular basis. A good way to think about the different dimensions of capabilities is to use the acronym “T-A-S-K-S”:
Results matter. They give you clout and classify you as a “producer” rather than a “good talker”. Unless and until you have a solid track record of reaching your milestones and tangible goals, you will have little or no credibility and almost certainly no meaningful trust. The two critical questions to ask yourself are:
What tangible results am I generating day-in and day-out?
How am I getting those results?
Talents – your natural gifts and strengths. This will be those things that just come naturally without any great effort or input on your part. Attitudes – your ways of getting things done. The paradigms and mental models you habitually use will influence the way you see the world and yourself. Skills – your proficiencies or the things you do exceptionally well. Skills can and should be overhauled and upgraded periodically to remain relevant. Knowledge – your learning, insights, understanding and awareness levels. Obviously increasing knowledge is vital and profitable in today’s global knowledge economy. Style – the way you approach challenges combined with your personality traits. There is wide variance in the most effective styles in business, which is good.
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If you’re hitting your numbers but in the process have fallen into the habit of cutting corners or acting against your values, then your success is likely to be short-term at best. To deliver great results over the course of a career, you need to be doing so within a spirit of abundance and collaboration. How you generate your results this time around can either create significant roadblocks for the future or it can figuratively grease the skids. Great leaders get results in ways which will inspire and enhance trust. Outstanding companies build trust by being completely open, transparent and honest with everyone. They also create a culture where it is safe for people to grow and make mistakes as long as they learn. To improve your results: 1. Always take personal responsibility for your results rather than your activities – and apply your own creativity in finding the best ways to achieve the desired results. If you don’t get the results you want one way, try something different. Never use the excuse: “Well, I did what you told me to do!” Taking personal responsibility for results builds your credibility even when things don’t go entirely to plan and is always well worth doing. 2. Expect to win each and every time – and prepare accordingly. People always tend to get what they expect. If you expect to win and everyone on your team believes the same, then you actually help bring that about. 3. Learn how to be a strong finisher – because results are always all about finishing. There will always be plenty of reasons to quit but the simple fact is all achievers finish what they start. They stay the course and find a way to get through, even in the face of unforeseen difficulties. This is what character, credibility and ultimately trust is all about. “It’s no use saying, ‘We are doing our best’. You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” – Winston Churchill “You can’t create a high-trust culture unless people perform.” – Craig Weatherup, former CEO, PepsiCo “Clarity around values and behavior is not much good unless it is backed up. To make values really mean something, companies have to reward the people who exhibit them and ‘punish’ those who don’t. Believe me, it will make winning easier. I say that because every time we asked one of our high-performing managers to leave because he didn’t demonstrate the values – and we said as much publicly – the organization responded incredibly well. In annual surveys over a decade, employees would tell us that we were a company that increasingly lived its values. That made people even more committed to living them too. And as our employee satisfaction results improved, so did our financial results.” – Jack Welch, former CEO, General Electric
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The key to increasing your personal credibility is to develop your T-A-S-K-S and to match them to the tasks at hand. If you can create the best possible alignment between what you do and your natural gifts, passions, skills, knowledge and style, you will have the credibility you need to excel. This requires ongoing and continuous improvement to avoid becoming obsolete and ultimately irrelevant. To increase your capabilities: 1. Identify your strengths and work hard at leveraging those areas – so you end up feeding your opportunities for excellence and starving your potential for mediocrity. It’s always better to build on your strengths rather than spending time and effort attempting to compensate for your weaknesses. 2. Keep yourself relevant – by engaging in lifetime learning. Think of your formal education as a crash course in how to keep learning for the rest of your life and then put that ethic into action. The more you know, the greater your career options and opportunities will be. 3. Know exactly where you’re going – so others will fell confident about following you. Credible leaders inspire others by demonstrating their competence coupled with character. People always want to be inspired rather than compelled. Find ways to make this happen. “The complacent company is a dead company. Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.” – Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft “While character is constant, competence – at least most competence – is situational. It depends on what the circumstance requires. Your technical capabilities are taxed dramatically – sometimes even becoming irrelevant – in direct relation to your trust abilities.” – Stephen M. Covey
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