Credibility

I really want people around me that are credible. Don’t you? What a difference it makes when you know, without a doubt, that a job is going to get done and get done correctly. It happens faster, easier, and with less emotion. It’s also more profitable and it just plain feels good.

This past week, with some time-off, I thought a great deal about what credibility means to me and wondered about what experts had to say about it. Three of the five books I picked up from my desk had the word “credible or credibility” in their indexes.

Chet Holmes, The Ultimate Sales Machine, mentions numerous times the importance of credibility with customers and potential customers and co-workers.

John Maxwell, in his commentary on Proverbs 17:2, says that “credibility is a victory, not a gift. We gain credibility when our life matches our talk and when both add value to others.”

Stephen M.R. Covey, in The Speed of Trust, writes about Self-Trust and the Four Cores of Credibility; Integrity, Intent, Capabilities, and Results. Think about how much better you feel when you're working along side someone whose walk and talk match up (integrity); their agenda works with yours (intent); they have the ability to do the job (capability); and past performance has produced results (results).

With the changes in the business the past year, you’ve probably had a hard time trusting most anything or anyone, but did you stop trusting yourself? Many of us did because we weren’t sure what was ahead and some, if not much, of the past has proved to be a mistake. Yet, by still being around to read this likely means you’ve weathered the storm well enough to at least survive. So, how about this summer? Are you staying in the game? How’s your “self-trust?” It was a wise man who said “we can’t talk ourselves out of something we behaved our way into – but, we can behave our way out of it.”

This is in part what our Round Tables are about, learning Self-Trust and its effects on building Best Business Practices. We’ll have two Round Tables in Dallas on Thursday. A separate announcement will go out later today. Hope to see you there.


Danny


Read more about credibility and how it relates to our company’s values at http://alethes-values.blogspot.com/ .