How Easily Is Trust Lost?
I’ve been told by some associates that my tagline “build trust, build your business” is not eye catching enough to get people’s attention. The value of delivering on my promises must be passé. When you are a sales professional, it’s all about trust, all about being true to your promises, all about setting up your clients externally and internally for success. The worst thing you can do is betray them by hiding behind a process or procedure versus doing the right thing on their behalf.
This past week is a great example of when trust wasn’t passé, as a matter of fact, the biggest story of the week in sports was all about trust, or the loss of it. The Penn State disaster is a tragedy, no doubt about it. I don’t know if the kids involved will ever trust again because of the horrible acts they had been subjected to by someone they should have been able to trust.
Joe Paterno blew it. He messed up big time on this one and the proper actions were taken by the Penn State board of trustees. Is he a fall guy here? Yes. But I have to agree, he followed procedures, but he did not do the right thing.
Joe “Pa” built his reputation and the reputation of Penn State on the ideal of integrity and character, both of which assume trust is the most important part of the ideal. For over 60 years this is what he stood for and for 50 of those years he chose to do the right thing. One bad decision was his undoing and that is my point here:
We can walk with integrity all our personal and professional lives building the trust of our loved ones and our professional colleagues through our business relationships. It only takes one misstep, and it doesn’t have to be as egregious as this one, and we can lose everything we have worked for all of those years. I don’t have a list of “how to’s” on this subject, just one:
Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
Whether you are in sales management, direct sales, customer or answering the phones you need to understand that trust is earned over a long period of time and lost in seconds.
His mistake will haunt him and his family for the rest of their lives. More importantly it will forever haunt the young men who were abused. Your ethical dilemma may not cause that level of pain, but if you wouldn’t put it on the front page of the newspaper for everyone to see, don’t do it! If you continually build trust, you will build your business.
