Most of the people we rely upon to get us through our daily lives are strangers to us. But we have to trust that they are doing the right thing.

Topic – The importance of ‘trust’

Mentor – Sue Barrett

• Do you trust the banks anymore?
• What happens when trust is lost?
• Trust building elements

Here is a link to today’s feature blog by Sue

Get Social with John Hellaby – How to be eye catching and thumb stopping

Transcript:

Kevin Turner: Sue Barrett returns with us again this morning. Sue is our guest all week, from http://www.barrett.com.au, a wonderful organisation. You’ll find out a lot more about them by using the link on any one of the pages that’ll take you straight to their home page. It tells you a lot about the organisation. Sue, I want to talk about TRUST this morning. We talk about trust a lot in this show, but you say in the article that we published for you today on our blog site, trust is the heartbeat of business, sales, and society. If it’s that important, how do we go about building it?

Sue Barrett: Well, we have to start off not just with rules. We have to actually have an underpinning of core principles that guide and direct us. When we’re dealing with people, as I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of us are feeling a bit anxious about when we’re meeting new people. One of the things we have to be able to do is actually establish very quickly, particularly as salespeople, that we’re not there to threaten anyone. We’re here to help, we’re here to serve, and how we create space and environments for people to feel safe with us. It is our most … we’re wired for risk. And so we’re always going to be looking and be wary of someone who may harm us.

Sue Barrett: So how do we create a safe space for people? Some of the key elements of that is by being able to establish very clearly upfront, Who we are and Why we’re there, and What our intention is for our meeting. Also, to be able to create space to ask questions and listen with sincerity to the people and not interrupt them, and actually really hear what they’re saying. And then how we repeat back to them what we just heard and then how we show our intention of how we’re going to help them solve any problems that they may have, that we can support them with. When we …

Kevin Turner: Yeah, no, you … please go.

Sue Barrett: No, yeah, when we do things like that, then people start to be able to relax with us. They start to feel calmer with us. But we’ve got to be clearer about our intentions from the get-go. Don’t try and hide what you’re doing behind other things. So, clear, direct, open, candid, welcoming. These are the sorts of things that really help us build trust.

Kevin Turner: We’re living through an excellent example of how easily trust can be broken in an organisation that we used to trust quite highly, and that is the banking institution with the Banking Royal Commission that’s currently on the … that’s a great lesson for us, isn’t it, on how easily it can be broken down and how much damage it’s going to create in the years to come?

Sue Barrett: Well, that’s right. I think what’s been happening over the last 20, 25 years, not just in banking but across many businesses is this win at all cost attitude. Which means that when you take that approach, basically, your customers become targets. They can become, at worst, victims. And that is where we’ve lost complete sight of what good business is. And Peter Drucker, the father of business management, was always saying that when we help customers and satisfy them that incremental profits will flow. So profit isn’t the center of business. It’s about the servicing of customers and working together in a collaborative win-win situation that is the heartbeat of business and good business.

Kevin Turner: In the blog article that we published today, you give us 12 elements to building trust, or the trust-building elements. I’d recommend that anyone should go and have a quick look at those. Are there any in there that stand out, that you think are absolute cornerstones of this?

Sue Barrett: Well, they’re all important, but I think underpinning it all is our intentions. What principles do we stand by? What purpose are we working towards? Being very clear about that, defining our value proposition, how we intend to help people, and sticking to that. Because, essentially, at the end of the day, we need to make promises that we can keep and then keep the promises that we make.

Kevin Turner: These are not rules, are they? This is something that is so deep inside us that it becomes a culture.

Sue Barrett: It is part of our culture. And this is what the problem is with the banking sector at the moment, is that they have had rules and they turned to compliance for keeping them in check. But people find ways around rules all the time. But if you are a genuinely sincere and honorable person, your world is guided by principles, not rules.

Kevin Turner: Wonderful. Very well said. Sue Barrett, my guest. And Sue, back again tomorrow. We’re going to tackle a very compelling question. Would you listen to you? And how to handle the – ‘NO’ in a conversation. Sue Barrett, back again tomorrow. Thanks, Sue.

Sue Barrett: Thanks, Kevin.