Integrity is crucial for building a culture of trust. Your ability to maintain and grow trust is impacted by how you act when nobody would know what you are doing. If you understand this dynamic, you have mastered a key component in the journey toward high trust that others have in you.
Have Personal Integrity
Integrity is as much an internal process as it is external. If you have a habit of always doing the right thing, then you don’t need to worry about whether or not other people can witness your actions.
Make it a habit to have the highest standard of ethics and follow up. Have a mental process that imagines every action as being witnessed by several other people. This mindset impacts how you view yourself.
Believe it or not, the most important person in your life is you, so having absolute internal integrity results in a kind of body language and congruency that enables others to trust you more.
People Do See You
People will observe and take note of all your actions over time. As you pass the “Trust Test” without fail, you build a positive balance of trust in your “Trust Bank.” Over time, the equity builds to a high level, and other people will forgive an occasional apparent lapse without loss of trust. They have complete faith in your integrity.
Nobody is perfect. There will be situations when what you intended to do comes out wrong. If the trust account with other people is high enough, a rare unintended slip up will not cause a loss in overall trust.
Admitting Mistakes
Another good way to make deposits in the trust account is how you act when something went wrong or you made a mistake. Admitting a mistake is normally a trust-building event. The only times it is not is if the same mistake has been made in the past or the mistake reveals that you were not paying attention.
Summary
Having an attitude that you do the right thing whether other people are watching or not is about personal integrity. You are responsible to yourself to do the right things. Other people will observe this in you, and you will enhance the level of trust people have in you over time.
Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow, Inc. an organization dedicated to growing leaders. Website www.leadergrow.com BLOG www.thetrustambassador.com He is author of the following books: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind