The Trust Equation

The Trust Equation
In the constant attempt to deepen knowledge and
understanding of coaching, helping other people, and
fulfill the motto of AMC of providing the 'Keys to
Success', I have recently read the book "COACHING AND
FEEDBACK FOR PERFORMANCE", which is part of the a series of
books titled "leading from the center". It's published by
Duke Corporate Education.

One area I am often running into as coaching becomes more
used and better understood is the question of internal
versus external coaching. The group of authors who created
the Duke book try to make a clear claim for the benefits of
coaching from the inside, actually going as far as
suggesting that every leader and manager should be a coach
for his team members.

I agree with some of the arguments made and the methods
suggested, but still strongly believe that an external
coach is a much better change agent for the company or
organization that hires him or her (or me).

When looking through the book at the arguments for and
against internal versus external coaching, I ran across the
"Trust Equation". I am sure everybody reading this article
is probably in agreement that trust is the fundamental and
most important issue in coaching, period. What was
interesting when reading the book was that the authors
actually point to the creators of the Trust Equation to
show the importance of trust in the coaching relationship
without ever realizing that by highlighting it they
provided the best argument not to have the internal manager
or leader become a coach.

The equation is shown below. If you look at the parts and
the explanations you will see that the driving factor is
actually the level of self-orientation. The lower that
level is, the higher the level of trust will be. The big,
even huge, benefit of the external coach is that he or she
is not part of the internal politics, wrangling, history,
posturing and all the other internal fights and issues
every organization experiences. That allows the external
coach to have very little to almost no self-interest, other
then providing good service to help the coachee.

With that factor going towards zero, T = TRUST can become
almost infinitely high. Thank you very much to the
promoters of internal coaching from Duke Corporate
Education for providing such a great argument for external
coaches. I knew we did something right. I guess it goes to
show that you can find friends in the strangest places.

Here is the equation followed by explanations for each
component. In words it says: "Trust is the sum of
Credibility,Reliability and Intimacy, divided by
self-interest. This means that that trust can become almost
infinitely high when self-interest is very low, like with
an external coach. Just imagine you had no self-interest
when coaching. With that value being zero, trust would
really be without limit.

C + R + I T = _______ S

C = Credibility

Credibility has to do with the words we speak. In a
sentence, we might say, "I can trust what she says about
intellectual property; she is very credible on the subject.

R = Reliability

By contrast, reliability has to do with actions. We might
say, for example, "If he says he'll deliver the product
tomorrow, I trust him, because he's dependable."

I + Intimacy

Intimacy refers to the safety or security that we feel when
entrusting someone with something. We might say, "I can
trust her with that information; she's never violated my
confidentiality before, and she would never embarrass me."

S + Self-orientation

Self-orientation refers to the focus of the person in
question: in particular, whether the person's focus is
primarily on himself or herself, or on the other person.
Increasing the value of the factors in the numerator
increases the value of trust. Increasing the value of the
denominator—that is, self-orientation—decreases the value
of trust.

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Axel Meierhoefer is a published author, educator, coach,
consultant, and the founder of Axel Meierhoefer Consulting
LLC (AMC LLC). His motto is" Helping others help themselves
achieve success". If you like to take a free test
assessment to discover where you stand on the path to
success or you like to get a consultation to prepare
coaching, you can learn more about Axel at
http://www.meierhoefer.net/blog or send an email to
AM@Meierhoefer.net