The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust

The more obvious ways to boost your credibility include: Develop deep expertise in your industry. Stay current with industry trends and business news. Offer your point of view when you have one.

Trust is much the same. People know when it exists and when it doesn’t, but cannot explain why or how it exists. And the concept of building trust seems even harder to describe, let alone implement.

An old Peanuts cartoon showed Charlie Brown observing two girls talking at a distance from him. After a while, he approaches and says accusingly, “You girls were talking about me, weren’t you!” The girls reply, “No, we weren’t.” Charlie Brown returns to his distant post, and the girls go on talking. After a while, Charlie Brown returns to them and

“It’s not what you hear by listening that’s important; it’s what you say by listening that’s important.” Friedman was talking about empathy.

Bona fide other-focus requires mindfulness, compassion, patience, and generosity.

Strategies to lower your self-orientation include: Taking the time to find the best solution. Sharing time, resources, and ideas. Asking lots of questions from a place of curiosity to figure out what success for your partner really looks like. Negotiating for a true win-win. Listening even when it is uncomfortable to be silent. Speaking hard truths

distinction between trusting and being trustworthy. Usually, leading with trust requires you to focus on being trustworthy. However you cannot avoid occasionally having to do the trusting.

self-orientation is about focus, more specifically, who you focus on—yourself or others.

characterized by reciprocity. If Person A trusts Person B, the odds are that Person B will behave in a more trustworthy manner than if Person A is suspicious of her. Leaders who are willing to trust their followers produce more trustworthy teams. Followers who are willing to trust their leaders invite them to live by a more trustworthy standard.