Do you trust me?
How would you decide, do you go with your gut?
It’s not uncommon that we make decisions on whether we trust on some instinctive level which is difficult to articulate. If we go with our gut this makes it difficult for us to then establish what we can do to ensure that we can in turn be trusted.
Trust is important, not just in our personal relationships but also in business.
I am sure you are familiar with the old saying, ‘trust takes years to build and seconds to break’ but in today’s business world we don’t have years, we might only have moments.
As gut instinct provides no clear definition of trustworthy behavior or attributes, how do we learn about trust and how can we apply this to ensure that people will be willing to trust us?
Skillsoft’s course “The Building Blocks of Building Trust” breaks this down into some basic tools that we can use in any business setting to help understand and build trust.
Recognizing Trust Factors
Skillsoft outline some key indicators that will help you evaluate a person’s trustworthiness.
Are they: truthful, honest, accountable, respectful, authentic and competent?
Being able to identify these factors will help you recognize people with whom you can build trust and in turn exhibiting these attributes will increase your chances of being trusted by colleagues and associates.
With these basic building blocks, we can then look to demonstrate and develop trust with our colleagues, simple right?
It’s never that simple!
We go on to learn that whilst you might think it’s the complex cognitive brain that would assess a person’s trustworthiness, on first interaction it’s not. It’s actually the primitive brain that first decides if they are a threat or danger. What this teaches us is that to make a trust connection body language and demeanor are also essential, or that gut does play an unavoidable part on the trust assessment.
An objective of this module is to provide you with strategies that you can adopt which should help people open up and engage with you. Once the connection has been made, you’ll have a foundation from which you can build trust.
The course covers concepts on building and demonstrating trust. It looks at how trust can be broken and what you can do to rebuild trust in a business environment.
I am not going to give it all away as I do recommend that you take the course.
I will say that whilst some are basic concepts sometimes it’s the simplest things that are the most difficult to define and the great thing about e-learning is the repetition and reminding us about important elements of business that we can often forget to use.
If you struggle with developing business relationships or would like to 30 minute refresher on what’s important in developing trust it’s worth setting aside 30 minutes of your day to complete ‘The Building Blocks of Trust’ by Skillsoft and let us know if you feel it added value to your working relationships.
