For Sales and Leaders: What Do Trust and Transparency Have to Do With Success?

November 12, 2010

Whether you are a leader or a sales professional, you will only get people to gravitate to you when they feel trust with you. This trust has to be transparent. That means they have to see what you are saying and doing as congruent at all times.

The concept here is an easy one to mentally grasp but I see people violate it every day without realizing the impact it will have on their execution and relationships.

For example:

Parents that say they want their children to show more respect, yet they yell at their children and tell them to shut up.
Leaders that say they want their team to take more accountability but they reverse any decisions their team makes.
Sales people that say they want build trust with a client but then let the client order something when in reality you should steer them away from that expense at this time.

In order to have trust they have to see transparency in all you day and do. You have to be congruent. When you aren’t you need to admit to it.

I remember a day my husband and I were going to talk to our children about using the phrase “in just a minute.” We felt that when we called them to dinner they should come right away. It felt like a respect issue.

Then we decided to listen to ourselves for a few days. Well, talk about humble pie. We found that daily we said “in just a minute” to them. When we came home from work they would come running to show us their latest drawing or ask us to play. We would say, “in just a minute” because we needed to talk to the nanny first or get dinner on. Then they would ask us to play after dinner and we would say, “in just a minute” because we had to clean up the dishes.

We realized that when they said “in just a minute” to us, they weren’t being disrespectful, they were only repeating a phrase they heard us use with them. If we could say it, why couldn’t they?

So we had a family chat about getting rid of that phrase. We explained that at times we can’t do what they want in the moment they want it, hence why we used the phrase “in just a minute.” So we agreed instead to be more factual and they in turn agreed to help out more so we could have the time to do the things they wanted.

Now when they come running to ask us to do something they hear, “I would love to do that. I first need to get dinner ready. If you want to help me do that we should be able to have 15 minutes to play your game.” They have choices and decisions to make and we are congruent with who we are and how we want them to act.

Trust and transparency- make sure that what you say and what you do match at all times or you will lose trust that you have worked hard to build.