Who Can You Trust?
A couple of months ago one of my colleagues wrote about the importance of trust to business. As business relationships become more fluid, and dynamic collaborative engagements emerge as the norm, new methods of establishing, maintaining and quantifying trust must emerge.
But before you can know your partner, or your competitor for that matter, it might be best to know yourself.
Charles H. Green has just posted a nifty online self-assessment tool to calculate one’s own Trust Quotient. While I was taking it, I wondered if the kind of unsavory folks you likely shouldn’t trust would lie on the test and thus score well.
Does that make me devious or simply curious?
In his blog today, George Ambler offers a neat summary of some work that social psychologist Robert Hurley published on the topic of trust in Harvard Business Review .
Clearly there are a lot of dimensions to trust, and with the help of some of these tools you might be better able to adjust your approach to an important meeting or collaborative engagement to achieve better results.
Roger W. Farnsworth
Tags: charles s. green, Collaboration, executive thought leadership, George Ambler, HBR, Robert Hurley, self-assessment, trust, Trust Quotient
May 1, 2008 at 9:00 am
I wonder if in addition to improving one’s trust quotient, a quick spray of oxytocin would also help: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0601_050601_trustpotion.html
Seriously, this is an interesting assessment. My results came out very similar to how I perceive myself. Is this because the assessment is accurate for how others trust me, or because it accurately portrays how I perceive myself? I’m thinking that for a more viable score, I would need to have others take the assessment for me. But I don’t think I’m that brave.