Pay As You Drive car insurance blog

By Roger Grobler, CEO PAYD Insurance

This blog is focused on providing information on Pay As You Drive car insurance in Australia. If you find any information, papers, news articles or websites that we should add, please let us know!

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Friday, October 09, 2009

Trust

At Real Insurance we also have an internal blog for our team. The following blog post had such a positive response that I thought it is worthwhile to repeat here.

Trust
I am in trouble with quite a number of people for not updating the blog regularly. I am grateful for that. It would be much worse if it just stayed un-updated with nobody even noticing.

I have been meaning to write this blog entry for a long time. It is a very important subject to me personally, and I hope I do it justice.

What does it mean to trust someone? Who do you trust?

Typically when we think of trust, we think of people we know, and we think of their honesty or integrity. Trust goes a bit further than just that though. I may for example trust my wife more than anyone else, but would I trust her to perform surgery on me? Never.

So what does that mean? Trust must be about more than just character or integrity. It must also be about ability. So if my wife was a surgeon (i.e. she had the capability to perform surgery on me), plus I trusted her integrity and character, I would trust her to perform surgery on me.

I trust her with a lot of things, like my children. Why? Because I trust her integrity, character, but also her ability to be an amazing mother.

Why is trust so important?

Trust means confidence. It means that when we deal with one another, we do not have all the friction of managing the distrust. If I trust someone and they say something slightly wrong, I trust that they meant the right thing. If I distrust someone, they may say entirely the right thing, but because of my distrust I think they mean something sinister. If I trust the people that work around me, and they trust me, then we will do things faster and significantly better than a team that do not trust each other. The principle applies to any relationship, work or private.

So for someone to trust me, what does it take?

Trust can be broken into two components: Character and Ability.

Character is the traditional thing that people think of when they think of trust. But it is useful to look at character just a bit further. Character can further be broken up into Integrity and Intent.

Integrity is your roots. It is not always visible, but it is always there. People with strong integrity do the right thing even when other people are not watching, and when it is very difficult to. Integrity means honesty with courage. People with poor integrity will always find it difficult to build trust.

Intent is your motive or your plan. There is a really good story that illustrates it:

A husband and wife were driving interstate. The wife was driving and the husband sleeping in the back of the car. The wife got tired and asked if he could take over the driving. They swapped places. As she was about to get into the back of the car she remembered she left something on the front seat. She closed the back door. Her husband, who was already behind the steering wheel, assumed the slamming door meant she got in, and he drove off, leaving her by the side of the road.

Another driver traveling in the opposite direction saw this happening. He immediately assumed a case of domestic abuse, with a husband abandoning his wife on the side of the road. He called the police. The police picked up the wife, who immediately said that her husband drove off unwittingly. Not for one moment did she even think he did it maliciously, because she has been married to him for 30 years, and she trusted his intent implicitly. The husband on the other hand was quite confused getting a call on his mobile phone from the police, asking where his wife is. He answered "in the car with me". Much to his surprise the police man handed the mobile phone to his wife.

In this story, something happened which looked to the outsider like something completely different to what really happened. The wife saw it for what it is, because she trusted her husband's intent.

How many times has one of your colleagues or team mates said something and you took it the wrong way because you did not trust their intent? They may have said something completely innocently, but you took it the wrong way. This has happened to all of us. And distrust makes it a lot worse.

The second leg of Trust is Ability. And ability again can be explained by Capabilities and Results.

Capabilities are easy to understand. It is the ability and talent to do what needs to get done. My wife (even though I know she has the talent) never studied to become a surgeon. So she does not have the skills and knowledge to perform surgery, and therefore not the capability.

Results is what gives you credibility. Results are the past performance where you proved to people you can do the job. You can do the job and you can do it well. Who are you going to trust more? The surgeon that has the perfect track record and that has been recommended to you by a few people, or the surgeon that lost his license due to malpractice, or a bad set of results?

Building trust
At a personal level trust is incredibly important in all your relationships. Not only at work, but also in your personal life. The higher the levels of trust, the more fulfilling and productive your relationships are going to be with those around you.

Trust is not like falling in love. You have control over it. The good news is that you can improve and grow the extent to which people trust you. And the more people trust you, the more they will behave in a way that engenders trust, so that you will end up trusting them more.

Act with high integrity. Always. It takes acting with integrity consistently over a long time to build trust. It takes a single instance of not acting with integrity to destroy trust.

Declare your intent. Make sure people know what your plan is, so that they don't see one thing and experience another. Check your intent. Are you being selfish, or selfless?

Build your capabilities. Focus on your strengths. Become better and better.

Produce results. Consistently.

Real Insurance
Now taking all of that at a personal level, and apply it to our business. Trust is incredibly important for Real Insurance. We will not thrive if people do not trust us.

I don't want to make this post longer than it already is, and will write some more about trust in Real in a next post.

In the mean time, please share some thoughts with me on how we can act as a company to create trust amongst ourselves and with our customers. I will include feedback received in the next post.

The thoughts above are based on an amazing book called "The Speed of Trust", by Stephen M Covey. I highly recommend it.

Posted by Roger Grobler

10:02 AM | 0 comments View/add comments

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