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Mar
07

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It’s Week #10 of 2016. This latest article is part of a series drawn from our 3rd annual 2016 Trust Poster….now hanging in hundreds of offices around the world. Get yours today!

52 Ideas That You Can Implement to Build Trust

Carol Sanford, one of our 2016 Top Thought Leaders in Trust, a Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and a member of the Trust Alliance offers this:

“Trust comes from fostering personal agency in others, that is the drive to contribute, not always be the one who leads the way.” 

A natural human propensity to contribute exists in all of us. Research reaffirms it now. It is often called Personal Agency. i.e. Taking up action to change something, especially on a significant level. People don’t always act on this inclination. Sometimes it is as a result of a low confidence in their ability to control unexpected challenges and low certainty they can produce outcomes. To have personal agency we have to activate our own Will to act and manage ourselves to figure our way through challenges. In other words, we first have to trust ourselves to be able to act and achieve.

Those in our lives who encourage and build this capability in us come to be the ones we trust. They are not “in it” only for themselves, but mentoring and developing others into managing their own path to significant contribution. It is how trust bonds are built, with everyone from children, to students and employees, to customers. The magic sauce is building others agency to make that difference and doing it again and again to build a “trust muscle, so to speak.”

Thank you Carol. We hope our readers heed your advice.

It’s not too late to catch up on our weekly series…..

Week #1 Kouzes & Posner 

Week #2 Bob Vanourek

Week #3 Barbara Kimmel

Week #4 Mark Fernandes

Week #5 Doug Conant

Week #6 Roger Steare

Week #7 Nan Russell

Week #8 Stephen M.R. Covey

Week #9 Bill George

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. Now in its sixth year, the program’s proprietary FACTS® Framework ranks and measures the trustworthiness of over 2000 US public companies on five quantitative indicators of trustworthy business behavior. Barbara is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine.

Copyright 2016, Next Decade, Inc.

 

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One Response to “To Build Trust, Foster Personal Agency in Others”

  1. March 8th, 2016 at 12:33 | #1

    Great post, Carol. Thank you.
    Good leaders are mature enough and self-confident enough to know they should not lead all the time. They realize one of their key tasks is to unleash other leaders primarily by letting them lead and coaching them along the way.

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