If you could name one thing – except for health – that could take you the furthest in 2021 in your career, business and life, what would that be?
Last year was by far one of the most tumultuous in our lives. Deprived of usual distractions (commuting and travel, interruptions at work, drinks with friends in the evening etc.), many people became still. In this silence they started to realize things they had forgotten for a long time – like for example what they truly wanted in life, how they really wanted to work or whom they wanted to be surrounded with, so life can feel flavorsome and fulfilling again. This is why I can bet that some of you, when stopping to consider the question above, came up with the answer: relationships.
Now, if this is the case, let’s stop for a moment and think of the secret sauce that makes or breaks a relationship. What is the one thing that needs to be there so we can fully relax in the presence of others and entrust them with our money, careers, personal development, business and, ultimately, our destiny? What is the one thing that breaks any relationship – between an investor and a start-up, a boss and a staff member, a CEO and a board of executives, and between us, humans, in general? It is a breach of trust. When we are not able to trust each other, we start to question everything. Is that vaccine really safe? Were those elections truly legal? Do they really mean what they say?
No need to emphasize what happens when this dark spiral is activated, and when we start to question everything in our relationship with a person or an institution. In our personal lives lack of trust leads to separation and divorce; in the public arena it leads to revolution.
This is why I am convinced of the urgency to start a deep, cross-societal conversation on trust. In my view, trust is a factor of three things: our EQ (emotional quotient or the level of our emotional intelligence), our CQ (our communications quotient or the quality of our communication skills) and our SQ (our systemic / stakeholder quotient or, if you will, our social intelligence). Let’s take a look at each of them one by one.
1. EQ: Trust is mainly and above all about emotion mastery
Our emotional intelligence is defined as a combination of two things: our intrapersonal intelligence (knowing ourselves and being able to master our own emotions and behavior) and our interpersonal intelligence (the capacity to empathize with others, to feel their emotions and thus to be able to lead more informed and constructive dialogue). Last year during a virtual leadership conference I asked 7 CEOs how much money they had invested in the development of emotional intelligence of people in their organizations over the last ten years. Their answer was honest enough: zero. Yet, unless we understand our own patterns of trust – how we relate to people, if we tend to trust too much or to be rather distrustful when we meet new people – and our behaviors related to trust – what we do when someone breaks our trust – we cannot start a conversation on this subject. This is a challenging topic, because it takes us into the early days of our life when our basic capacity of attachment and bonding was created. And this is not all – we also need to start exploring and understanding our own trust-related blind spots – how we, personally, lower and break other people’s trust through our behavior. Which is taking me to the second ingredient of our trust- ability: our communication style.
2. CQ: Quality communications deepen, retain and restore trust
Communication is nothing without a firm reality to back our message up. That would be a delusion and, even if sometimes such a delusion can take you as far as to the White House, it is contextual and sooner or later, the bubble bursts and everybody can see that the emperor is naked. A high trust-building communications quotient is a perfect alignment between thoughts, deeds and words – otherwise said: “Say what you think and do what you say.” That’s called integrity. Another thing that we need to understand is that quality communications is a marathon, not a sprint. Leaders in all walks of life need to be able to communicate well, with self-assurance and clarity AND consistently in time, in order to deepen loyalty and retain people’s trust. This means that 2021 could be the best year for us to take a good look in the mirror and to ask ourselves: is my communication style truly the best it could be? In the new normal, trust-building communications could really make or break an executive career and could represent a massive competitive advantage in the leadership noise on the market. Which is taking me to the third and final ingredient of trust: our social intelligence.
3. SQ: Systems are greater than the sum of their parts
Last but not least, our social or systemic quotient means our capacity to understand and influence positively wider social dynamics. We need to start to understand that groups – teams, organizations, communities, nations – are wholes driven by their own laws of survival, one of them being that a whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. Our capacity to understand systemic dynamics will help us to become more aware of the impact of our actions on all members of our business ecosystem and thus to behave more sustainably, with more integrity and trust, long term.
To sum it up, our EQ enables us to understand and experience trust, our CQ allows us to deepen, retain and restore trust and our SQ allows us to put our positive leadership to the service of something greater than ourselves. The good news is that all Qs can be developed and trained. Once we understand that trust is the most expensive currency that we have in business and in life, we can all invest more efforts in this direction. A good place to start would be to simply choose 15 to 20 people who are important to you, look them in the eye and ask them onascaleof1to10,where10isthe maximum, how much they trust you. If they hesitate for even one second or if they tell you anything under 10, you know you’ve got work to do. But at least you know where to start – and that’s a great place to be and a superb contribution to improving the quality of your career and life and to your making our world a bet- ter place not only in 2021.
By Cristina Muntean
Cristina Muntean is a consultant, trainer, mentor and coach who specializes in personal branding, strategic communications, emotional and systemic intelligence for leadership. A former journalist with more than 12 years of experience in the Czech, Romanian and international media, she founded Media Education CEE, a communications and people development agency in Prague in May 2010. Her clients are executive level managers and entrepreneurs with Top100 companies in the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe. Cristina is also an internationally certified trainer and coach with the Enneagram, a complex system of personal development, and a facilitator of systemic dynamics in organizations. She provides services in English, Czech, French and Romanian, her mother tongue. Cristina can be reached at +420 776 574 925 or at cm@cristinamuntean.com