AHIMA Keynote: Leading at the speed of trust
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| Stephen M. R. Covey is co-founder and CEO of CoveyLink Worldwide. Image source: www.speedoftrust.com |
Much of Covey’s keynote address focused on trust and the importance of building trust in today’s healthcare and business environments. He made comments directly to his audience of health information management (HIM) professionals and healthcare leaders. “Part of the work you have to do in HIM is hard work. You work hard, you work fast and the speed of trust enables us to work exceptionally fast,” he said.
Trust is hard, real and quantifiable, said Covey, son of author Stephen R. Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The younger Covey, in his own right, focused on the measurable effects of both speed and cost. He highlighted the function of character and competence today, and how trust can be created and quickly destroyed. It can be effectively taught and learned.
In most cases, lost trust can be restored, though it’s difficult work to restore one’s trust.
Covey described how a few years ago, he went fly fishing in Montana. He said that after putting on his waders and wading into the river, his guide asked him what he saw. “I said that I saw the trees, the sky, the river. But, he asked what I saw in the water.” After a few minutes of looking, Covey told his patient guide that he honestly did not see anything.
After passing over his polarized sunglasses and Covey put them on, he could see all of the fish that were around him. He used the story to explain the importance of trust and how trust is the hidden variable that will become the most leveraged tool, giving a healthcare organization that uses it as a distinct strategic advantage.
Covey said that as organizations begin to trust themselves, “you will get better at building trust, and trust is an economic driver (not merely a social virtue).”
“The effect of trust, the relevance of trust, and the impact of trust, even if we can’t see it, it’s there,” he said. “Trust is the No. 1 competency of needed from leadership today. Trust is the currency of healthcare today.”
He said the ability to establish, grow, extend and restore trust with all stakeholders—patients, physicians, hospitals, insurance companies, communities and co-workers—is the top competency of the healthcare economy. “Increasing trust engenders true collaboration, trust moves people into a team,” he said. “You can go into other areas to engage people because trust attracts people and keeps people engaged.”
With all of the activities taking place in healthcare (ICD-10 coding initiative, ARRA, the process of moving toward EHRs), Covey said trust is a performance multiplier. “Everything is going to take longer without trust,” he said, though there are many opportunities and possibilities to build trust, because “it’s a learnable competency.”
To further engage his audience, Covey asked AHIMA audience members to identify a person he or she works where there is a high trust relationship (for exmple, a peer, a boss). With that person in mind, Covey asked a couple of questions, encouraging audience members to write down their answers: What is it like to work with this person? What is it like to communicate with this person? How fast can you get things done? And, what kinds of results are you able to achieve?
Then, he asked the audience to identify a second person with whom you work, but with whom you have a low trust relationship. He asked them to think of the same questions, and then asked them to discuss the differences with someone sitting near them.
“High trust relationships are not just a social thing. It’s economic and gets at the team’s ability to perform effectively,” he said. “Trust is not merely a social virtue it’s also an economic driver. So, as trust goes down, then cost goes up.”
Images flashed across the screen to pounding music: “Espionage and counterfeiting, time theft, employee dishonesty, disengagement, office politics, unproductive meetings, excessive customer churn, excessive policies and procedures, international conflict.”
The images highlighted how a lack of trust in the workplace can lead to all these things occurring.
“When trust goes down at a company or on a team, so does the speed of that group,” he said, adding that often additional steps are added to the processes to compensate for there being a lack of trust. “It’s kind of like a low trust tax that is added to everything. As trust goes down, that equals the speed going down and the cost goes up."
However, when trust goes up that equals the speed going up, and with it, costs go down. “This is like a high trust dividend,” he noted.
To highlight his point, Covey told a story about the Donut Guy. A street vendor was selling donuts and coffee in front of a large office building. Often there were long lines of customers waiting to buy their coffee and donut on their way to work each morning. The Donut Guy discovered he was losing business because people checked their watch and after five minutes couldn’t wait in the long lines so they left. The Donut Guy discovered that what was hurting his business was his making change. So, the Donut Guy decided to put a basket at the end of his cart, and once the customer had coffee and donut in hand, the Donut Guy would motion the customer to the box to make their own change. There was certainly some risk with this approach: A customer inadvertently makes the wrong change, or someone takes too much money.
However, the Donut Guy observed that his speed improved and he has twice as many customers. What he found is that people genuinely liked being trusted. They were more loyal and he had many repeat customers and word-of-mouth led to more customers.
“It’s the economics of trust,” Covey said. “Anytime you increase trust, costs will go down.”