The role of the leader has evolved. Tom Feeney, president and CEO of Safelite Auto Glass, recently validated that point for me. He stated, “It is not longer enough to merely direct action; today we must inspire and empower belief which requires us to build more trusting relationships with people than ever before.”
Excerpt from The Relationship Engine by Ed Wallace
Available this fall at Amazon and AMACOM
Credibility
Until you are credible, your clients will not be interested in trusting you or exploring how you can help them.
Integrity
Establishing credibility can help you work toward displaying your integrity. As your clients learn to trust you, they begin to share their goals, passions, and struggles, and they ask you to deliver on various commitments. facebook down .
Authenticity
Finally, after you’ve delivered on those commitments, authenticity comes into play. During this stage your client welcomes your help, even when it is unsolicited or when you have been honest about not having all of the answers.
When you make worthy intent your going-in principle in your business relationships, then credibility, integrity, and authenticity—the three essential qualities for creating relational capital—will be more easily and readily expressed, and you will be well on your way to advancing every business relationship.
Integrity is, quite simply, being trustworthy in our actions and character.
Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching, like leaving our business card on the windshield of a car we just bumped in the parking lot.
It is saying what we are going to do and then doing it. Integrity is the quality of having honest and truthful motivations for our actions. This translates directly into applying the principle of worthy intent in all of our interactions in the business world.
Everyone wants to believe they can be trusted and can trust others in life and business. Many clients gauge our integrity by the way we make our commitments and deliver on them. After we have established that we are credible, our clients will begin to ask us to make commitments to them in the form of contracting for goods, services, and solutions.
When we deliver what we promised, we display our integrity and reinforce the client’s trust. In doing so, this opportunity further advances the business relationship and increases the distinctive value of our relational capital.
Integrity is also about expectations, making sure we set them appropriately and then consistently delivering on them.
The old phrase about commitments, “under promise and over deliver,” actually contradicts the worthy intent that we should strive to bring into our business relationships.
BUSINESS EFFECTIVENESS TIP
Trust begins with commitments which are the promises we make in business. Don’t make promises you can’t keep during business discussions. Even if they are made casually, somewhere along the line you’ll be held to your word. Failing to produce what you’ve promised will create atrophy in the relationship and close the door to any future opportunities.
It’s simple, JUST KEEP YOUR PROMISES!
