speed of trust

Drawn from “Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey. The Collier Companies Fall 2013 Conference of Champions featured a two day “Speed of Trust” seminar by FranklinCovey

Behavior #7: Get Better

If you are not growing, you are dying.  Kaizen is the concept of continuous and never-ending improvement and is the best way to meet the challenge of a rapidly evolving world. Change is inevitable, survival is not guaranteed. It is best to begin to adapt now, to change gradually before a crisis forces brutally abrupt change.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler

Resting on your laurels, and you quickly become irrelevant. Two failure paths to avoid

– The “eternal student”: always learning, never producing.

– Seeing the world through a fixed paradigm: I.e. He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail. Or when a given approach is not working, simply trying more and more of the same: “What we need here is a bigger hammer.”

Behavior #8: Confront Reality

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin

“We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them.” ― M. Scott Peck, “The Road Less Traveled”

It is the duty of a leader to force an organization to confront the small pain of change before the market place imposes even greater pain. Procrastination, staying in our comfort zones, doing what we are good at instead of what most needs to be done: these are common ways to avoid confronting reality. It is all too easy to talk endlessly about the challenge but fail to take effective action. Frequently it takes courage to speak up, to rock the boat, to shake up the comfortable status quo.

A leader must blend the paradoxical roles of being both a “merchant of hope” and an occasional bearer of bad tidings: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end— which you can never afford to lose— with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”– Admiral James Stockdale, survivor of 8 years as POW