I recently had a fast-paced hour-long conversation with Robert Porter Lynch, author, teacher, speaker, champion of increasing the experience of trusting leaders. He observed that if trust in our leaders isn’t repaired in the United States, we as a nation are threatened to our very core. Here are the LynchPrinciples — please download the PDF file.
Robert is writing a book on trust and leadership — he is Building a System of Trust. He spends his life on airplanes in academic and business contexts, talking about what causes trust, conversely what causes distrust, and the impacts on business and life.
I then attended a conference on social media where I learned a term, “crowd sourcing,” revolving around our need to go to our friends for advice, people, resources because authority as we have known it cannot be trusted.
Decisions are made based on assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions prove false. Consider these recent, faulty assumptions. Real estate values always go up. Financial institutions hold your money safely while you don’t need it. Retirement funds are managed to out-maneuver real risks.
These eight principles of collaborative trust from Robert’s book that is coming out in the fall of 2010 provides reminders of what is important. We are all leaders of our own lives, and we could choose not only to embrace them, but speak about them, remind others about them — in other words, Share them! Encourage them!
