Often one of the most serious ongoing challenges to building trust and ensuring positive relationships with customers, allies, colleagues, government, and employees is what it takes to establish trust in the first place.  It is by far easier to recognize the pattern of those behaviors and attitudes that damage trust, or at least bring credibility into question.  Put in a more interesting way, trust is a fragile magical substance like the lignin in trees – it’s the glue that holds the fiber of relationships together.  Trust is the most fragile and vulnerable agent in a relationship.

Here is the Lexicon of Trust Building Concepts:

• Trust:  Generally the absence of fear; that feeling of reliability and that adverse situations, pain, or mistakes have less impact or can be pre-empted if there is a trusted relationship.
• Candor:  Truth with an attitude delivered very promptly. Truth plus the facts, truth plus some perspective, truth that reflects the value of other observations on the same set of circumstances and facts.
• Credibility:  Always conferred by others on those whose past behavior, track record, and accomplishments warrant it.
• Integrity:  Uncompromising adherence to a code of values by people, products, companies, with the attributes of credibility, candor, and sincerity.
• Sympathy:  The ongoing, often continuous, verbalization of regret, embarrassment, or personal humiliation, promptly conveyed, i.e., feeling truly sorry for someone who is experiencing pain, but stopping short of taking on that pain.
• Empathy:  Actions that speak louder than words ever can convey.

James E. Lukaszewski, ABC, Fellow IABC; APR, Fellow PRSA, BEPS Emeritus

If you have questions, or would like to dive more deeply into the subject of this blog, you can reach me 24/7 at jel@e911.com; 203-948-7029 (voicemail, email, text). I look forward, as a friend and colleague, to helping you achieve the objectives you’ve set for yourself for having a happier, more influential, successful and meaningful career.

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