Effective Communication Styles Part Five: Speed of Trust

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Gash** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. We are continuing our dive into communication techniques today by exploring the speed of trust. This is sort of communication adjacent, I would say. I'm Stephen Gash here with Julio Zaragoza and Ash Maher. Hey, guys.

**Ash Maher** (0:35)
Hello.

**Julio Zaragoza** (0:36)
Dive in.

**Stephen Gash** (0:38)
Yes, let's dive in. Specifically, we're going to be exploring the insights from Stephen MR. Covey's book, The Speed of Trust. He is the son of the author, Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of the Highly Effective People. His premise is that trust isn't just a nice to have feeling, it's an economic engine, it's the hidden factor that influences how quickly we can move forward, how efficiently we can collaborate, and ultimately how successful we are as teams and organizations. In our work as digital media advisors and marketers, it's pretty much essential. It goes hand in hand, like I said, with some of the communication topics we've been covering. Covey says that trust, when it's high, we work faster and spend less. Less time second-guessing, less money on bureaucracy, fewer misunderstandings to untangle, and conversely, when trust is low, every decision is slower, every project is more expensive, and every partnership more fragile. In today's conversation, we'll uncover what makes trust so vital, how to build and rebuild it, and what tangible steps we can take to integrate trust-building behaviors into our daily business lives. Tulio, kick us off here. Let's dive into the speed of trust. Yeah.

**Julio Zaragoza** (1:59)
It's just something very interesting there. I just want to quickly say, many companies, when a leader comes in, let's say you're in technology, the vendor that's serving that company is always worried, oh, they're going to bring his or her own people, because what happens is you bring in the people you trust. You work with the same group of people over and over because you build trust with them over the years. So there's definitely a lot to it. So it does impact not only the speed on how things get done, but the cost on how things get done. So Covey's key insight is that high trust accelerates everything. Decision making, communications, project execution, and all these result in greater efficiency and lower cost. You know, you've probably seen yourself in a situation working with a group of people you've worked with many times in the past. You're like, remember how we did it over there? Let's do that. So it's like in a second, you know exactly what you're saying to each other. So there's that speed. In a low trust environment, you've got to have a lot more checks. You got to have approvals. So there's steps to build checkpoints and validation to make sure that things are going to go the right way. And there's a lot of second guessing that happens. And all that slows things down. It slows down progress and inflates expense because things take longer. So when you compare high versus low trust scenarios, just imagine like two teams, you know, launching the same exact initiative. One operates in a culture of high trust and the other one doesn't. The high trust team shares information very openly, deals with challenges directly and very openly and they adapt very quickly to changes.
They just trust each other. There's no double checking, triple checking and just get things done. The low trust team hesitates. You know, you ever heard that saying, doubt kills the warrior? This is where it happens, right? There's a lot of hold back of information. I don't know, can I trust this person? There's a lot of multiple reviews that take place over every decision. It drags out the timeline and increases overhead. So it's not hard to see the role that trust plays in efficiency effectiveness, as well as the speed of how things get done.

**Stephen Gash** (4:24)
Yeah, Ash, I know, like, I can see this, and you probably have when you're working on a team, when you've got that one individual or something, right? Where, okay, is this going to get done? Is it going to get done right? And then, okay, it didn't get done right, but now I have to help try and make sure it's going to get done right. There's just all this energy and coaching and things that go around that, right, that just really slows things down.

**Ash Maher** (4:49)
No, absolutely, Steve. You have to imagine when you're working on a cross-functional project where multiple departments have to give their feedback and work together, that trust isn't there. And let's just say there's a little bit of, I don't want to use the word incompetence, but let's just say someone has broken the trust. Well, now we're adding all these different checks and balances, as Tulio had just mentioned. The micromanaging then kicks in, and yes, it is a more inefficient process. We do run into challenges where it's like what things are being dragged on, and it's just not fun. It's a little bit more stressful when you're taking on a project and you just don't trust the members around you. But when you have that trust, things just pass on by. And I have worked, I had the privilege of working with teams where everyone does trust each other and things get done super smoothly. We don't need to go ahead and send a Friday report on productivity because everyone knows what was completed, right? The project, the result of that project would show. So this not only helps in those scenarios, but it's also as a real life application, take it into sales, right? When someone trusts you, that sales closes a lot faster than someone still trying to figure out, you know, if you're the right person, you know, if you're giving the right information, if there's some conflict of interest going on, they'll go get a second opinion, they'll go shop around, because you just didn't establish that level of trust. But when someone is able to trust you, that sales typically goes through. There's an element of qualifying trust, though. You know, trust may seem intangible, but consider how reducing, so this is what we're going back to, we were talking about earlier, consider how reducing duplicative processes without having to be so super redundant because you built in that trust. Speed reduces labor hours spent on verification, conflict resolution, turning trust into a measurable ROI. So if you have this trust built into your system, there is an actual ROI attached to it, so we're able to cut costs and not have to have extra steps in the process.