This should be your first objective in every meeting.

In my previous (and very first!) post I wrote about a key cause of slow or failed deals - bad process - and suggested a methodology for doing it better. 

The other cause (again, assuming the business case adds up for both sides) is lack of trust - so obvious and fundamental, yet so easily overlooked.

Trust.

Let's make this super simple.  If you have read about Covey's "Speed of Trust", then you know exactly what I am talking about.  If you don't know, Google it, watch the videos.  There is a lot out there about trust and its importance to deal-making and business relationships.  I think Covey captures and distills it better.  It's one of those obvious age-old truths that we so easily forget in our hectic business and personal lives. 

What I want to share is my own personal take on this concept and my experience of applying it.

Trust is not only the underlying feature - and objective - of all successful personal and business relationships.  I believe it should be the conscious and primary objective of every meeting and interaction you have. 

Your first objective.

When I was "reminded" about Trust and shown one of the videos, I had a new team with some big challenges in the way we worked with other functions.  Recent organisational and people changes led to a lot of confusion, responsibility gaps and overlaps, empire building and territorial disputes.  I needed to get the different functions and people working together.  I had been focussing on processes, routines, RACIs and other tools of the trade but somehow things were not working - at the people level.

So I showed my team some content on Trust.  I started to challenge my team before every meeting: what is our primary objective of the meeting?  I got answers like "to agree on our areas of responsibility" or "to align on how we respond to this new regulation".  I told them, no.  Those are of course some of our objectives.  But our primary objective is to build trust.

Once we consciously set that as our primary objective for each meeting, the difference was immediate and immense. 

It completely changed how we ran the meetings, and their outcomes.

It required no extra time or energy or preparation, and all the other objectives flowed naturally from it.  It was easier to  agree and get things done.  

Very soon, whenever I asked my team "what is our primary objective?", the immediate answer was "to build trust". 

Try it.

The challenge of course is to sustain it - it's so simple that it can be so easily forgotten or neglected in practice. 

If this is new for you, or you had simply forgotten, let me know how it went.