10 Laws of Trust
Joel Peterson has run a variety of organizations and is well connected within the educational community.
His latest book "The 10 Laws of Trust" goes on to explain how trust is at the foundation of all human relationships. In order to get around in this world, let alone succeed or hope to lead, you need to understand the importance of trust.
Trust lies at the foundation of all organizations, countries, communities, families and friendships. Peterson believes fundamentally that you should give trust freely. You will inevitably get burned and have your trust violated. However the alternative, namely to live a life of solitude, not trusting anyone is relatively bleak.
After numerous mistakes, he believes that as long as you focus on the Character, the Competence and the Authority of the person you are in an interaction with, you will not go wrong.
Having never met the gentleman, I am impressed by his ability to translate 1000s of different experiences into a short 117 page read. His book is structured around the concept that Trust is extremely powerful.
If you believe that someone who trusts 20% right now might help you more if they trusteed you 80%, this book will be beneficial to you. Joel has written this book from the perspective of a highly successful CEO and teach, and gearing it mostly towards the US Management community.
His 10 laws of trust are:
1. Start with Personal Integrity
2. Invest in Respect
3. Empower Others
4. Measure What You Want to Achieve
5. Create a Common Dream
6. Keep Everyone Informed
7. Embrace Respectful Conflict
8. Show Humility
9. Strive for Win-Win Negotiations
10. Proceed with Care
They all make a lot of sense.
Personally, the one I struggle most with is #7. Showing Humility. Having been “Successful”, I struggle to know where to set my sights. I do agree that starting with Personal Integrity is a good place to start.
Integrity is a tough place to start personally. I’ve lied, cheated, stolen, been arrested, been depressed. I hope I've learned from those lessons. I do catch myself every now and then exaggerating when I deeply believe that lying and exaggerating are one and the same.
Yet my Integrity has led to a variety of good moments too. My younger brother had his first son Sammy earlier this month, and I couldn't be prouder of him. Despite my attempts as an older brother to intimidate him, he stood by me and I hope that he trusts I will always stay true to my word.
My 2 cents. Integrity = if you say you are going to do something, do it. And never lie.
With regards to Respect, I would argue common decency should apply to everyone. Why should you or I treat anyone our superior? There are a lot of things you will never know about the random homeless person you pass in the street. Why judge?
Empowering Others – I deeply believe it is the only way of getting anything done. I got extremely fortunate to work for two leader who empowered me. They let me have a go at something, let me fail. And they let me grow into the leader I wanted to be.
Measure What you want to achieve – Get some goals. Annual, Quarterly, Daily. Mine annoyingly keep starting and stopping. But I do think its good to take stock of where you are. Pick a new course based on the information you have and set some targets with which to proceed.
Create a Common Dream – So this is the fun part. Imagine you have $1m. Now $900,000 of that will need to go to your team and for all the overhead costs. Then you will need to put 50% aside for a rainy day. You have $50,000 left to have an amazing experience with your team when you reach your common goal.
Keep Everyone Informed – If you are all rowing towards your $50k goal, make sure everyone knows what’s happening.
Embrace Respectful Conflict – Everyone is not always going to be on the same page. When you disagree with someone, stop worrying about what you want. Take a step back and start asking questions. What is the other person trying to achieve. What's their bigger goal? Let them have a win.
Show Humility - Everything you have you owe it to other people. You were born because of your parents, you survived this far because of some basic human infrastructure from roads to schools. You had that one break because of someone else. You are still safe or alive because of that one other person. Never forget how much you owe to others.
Strive for Win-Win Negotiations - Seems easy to say. I can't claim to have any idea how to do this on a regular basis. The couple of times I made decent progress in life be it from a monetary perspective or romantic perspective was when I figured out how to create a big enough pie where my smaller stake didn't matter as much and I was still happy with the outcome.
Proceed with Care – Trust is ultimately one of the deepest human emotions. I crave it. It is depressing to think about all the cool ideas I have that will never get done because I haven’t developed sufficient trust in someone, a team or even in a document to enable something to happen. But make sure you know what you are trying to do and be clear with the other party.
Joel Peterson seems like a Rockstar. I hope I get to meet him someday. He brings up an extremely important point in a day and age where the sources of information are infinite. I am not 100% sure how we will get our information in the future.
But being able to trust where the information comes from will be paramount.