JEDDAH, 9 April 2008 — Many people are familiar with Dr. Stephen R. Covey and his bestselling book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” The same cannot be said of Stephen M.R. Covey, son of the bestseller’s author and an author in his own right.
The younger Covey is former CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which, under his stewardship, became the largest leadership development company in the world. He also personally developed the strategy that propelled his father’s book to become one of the two most influential business books of the 20th century. Now he has turned his attention to CoveyLink, of which he is a co-founder and current CEO. A sought-after and compelling keynote speaker and adviser on trust, leadership, ethics and high performance, he speaks to audiences around the world. His book, “The Speed of Trust,” challenges age-old assumptions that trust is merely a soft, social virtue and instead he demonstrates that it is a hard-edged, economic driver — a learnable and measurable skill that makes organizations more profitable, people more marketable and relationships more productive.
He made his first visit to Saudi Arabia recently at the invitation of Abdul Latif Jameel Co. Ltd. Covey led a workshop with its employees called “The One Thing That Changes Everything.”
“When we build trust in any relationship — in a team, in a company or with a customer — everything else changes,” Covey told Arab News in an exclusive interview. “Everything gets better; everything moves faster; everything costs less; everything is more enjoyable — more energizing. Trust changes everything. When there is no trust, speed goes down; things take longer to do. Everything is affected.” Covey also looked at business models of the Arabian Peninsula and noted some important areas for executives to examine.
“To succeed in a long run and be able to pass the business down, they should really focus on creating and establishing and growing trust with all the stakeholders,” Covey said. “The trust I am talking about is trust that is born out of not just character but also competence.”
Covey said the two were core requirements. “You need both: character and competence,” he said. “Sometimes in family businesses there is high trust because of the family members — that is on the character side, but we also need to have equally high trust on the competence side — to always improve, always get better, always stay current, stay relevant and not just assume that because it is a family business we don’t have to stay current and relevant. It puts a greater premium on staying current and relevant so that competence is equal to character. When we have both competence and character, we can establish trust faster, and with trust everything happens better.”
He said although it might be applied differently, the need for trust in business was a constant.
“Different cultures may have different applications of trust,” Covey said. “They may have a different practice — a different way of doing things — but the basic idea is universal, which is that people want to have trust in confidence in belief in their people, in each other, their customers and their partners, so they can work together. The universal definition of trust is confidence as opposed to suspicion. I don’t trust when I am suspicious of someone’s motives, about their gender, about their integrity or their track record. I do trust when I feel confident and the confidence comes because I know their character and I know their competence.”
It is no secret that the Kingdom is expanding its global footprint, but Covey said economic success might require some systemic changes.
“Saudi Arabia should continue in the path of increasing competence as well as character. I would focus on leadership, but management is important, too,” he said. “The difference between management and leadership is trust, and when we lead we create trust. If we continue to focus on building character and building competence we create credibility. It creates good judgment, and Saudi companies can be seen as credible companies with a great reputation and a great brand. If we don’t have either character or competence in the long run we cannot sustain our businesses. We might get away with it for a while, but we can’t in the long run. It is increasingly becoming a global economy. Saudi Arabia is part of that.”
Covey said mergers provided a good example of application of his principles.
“When mergers take place, too often trust is a casualty,” he said. “If there ever was a time when trust was needed it is during a merger. We need to deliberately and explicitly focus on creating trust. I have seen the cost of low trust, and when we became aware of it, we said we needed to increase the trust in order to get better economic results. And so we focused explicitly on trust and so we learned how to do it. Understanding how trust really works and how it is not just a nice idea is important. There is a process to it. We can actually get good at creating trust and not just talking about it.”
The author said he was impressed with Abdul Latif Jameel Co. Ltd. — both the business and the people involved.
“They are very sincere about their mission and their vision,” Covey told Arab News. “They focus on all their stakeholders — not just their shareholders — and they also focus on their customers. They focus heavily on their business partners, their associates, and they focus heavily on the communities they serve. They also have guiding principles that are extremely impressive. Their first guiding principle is respect for all. That is one of the great behaviors that build trust. I am impressed with who they are, what they stand for and the fact that they are taking a stand. You cannot argue with their results. If they perform well they have high market share. They have very satisfied customers and very satisfied associates. It is about continuous improvement.”
