Values
Values inform our advice on strategic communications.
Trust
Trust encompasses confidence, assurance, and reliance, combined with hope, belief, and faith. It’s a simple word with deep meaning.
Trust is vital to your relationships, whether personal or professional, individual or business. Earned slowly over time, trust can be lost immediately. Without trust, other people may not think or speak well of you, affecting your reputation.
Reputation and trust are highly interrelated. Reputation is what people think of you (their heads). Trust is how people feel about you (their hearts). Combine the two, and you capture people’s attention and inspire actions (their hands).
While its meaning implies certainty, trust is uncertain, making it a highly prized possession. Most people assume positive intent: they trust you until you do something to prove you’re not trustworthy. Under the best of circumstances, rebuilding people’s trust is tricky. Sadly, some relationships and reputations never fully recover.
Empathy
Empathy strengthens connections between people, allowing you to form deep emotional bonds with them. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is the foundation of empathy. When you genuinely understand and feel what they feel, you experience empathy.
People can sense when your actions are rooted in empathy. They know when you are experiencing what they feel at that moment, not what you may feel in the same situation. It’s magical when you experience genuine empathy: you feel understood, connected, and less alone.
Empathy is often mistaken for sympathy. Those words are related but different in a very visceral way. Sympathy conveys support and care without you having to experience the emotional response that empathy creates.
“I feel your pain,” when said genuinely and truthfully, is empathy. This expression of empathy requires you to have felt a similar pain and know how debilitating it can be. Often, just the suggestion triggers the emotions you personally associate with pain. That’s why empathy creates and strengthens connections. In contrast, “I am sad because you are in pain” is sympathy.
Equity
More common in the language of law and commerce, equity describes the quality of being fair, impartial, and just. It’s concrete, connoting a sense of worth, monetary value, for people, property, and things.
When you do something for a greater good, even (especially) if that action is not the best choice for you personally, you demonstrate you value equity. You demand equity when you expect everyone to play by the same rules. When you simply listen to someone and do not judge, you embrace equity.
Demonstrating support and appreciation for equity can have a meaningful impact on trust and your reputation. When people know you are open to listening, learning, and understanding different points of view, relationships form and become more fulfilling.
Unfortunately, equity is often linked to and confused with diversity and inclusion or D&I, which have been part of the vernacular for 20+ years. From an academic perspective, these terms are closely related. In practice, however, D&I have let us down. Many policies and programs intended to advance D&I have failed to yield their intended results. That has helped fuel mass protests for Black Lives Matter and calls for deep-rooted systemic change in all parts of society.
As a result, people often avoid discussions about equity, wrongly dismissing them as political. (See “A word about politics….”) Arguably, equality is unequal. Operating with a genuine mindset of equity for all can be crucial to helping you build trust and lasting, healthy, and productive relationships with people.
Authenticity
Living authentically, or revealing who and what’s behind your curtain, is essential to safeguarding trust and developing the deep, productive relationships that come from it. Authenticity is often something you take for granted one-on-one or in small groups and more intimate situations.
Yet, the little things that make you you are often the first to disappear when “communicating” with larger, less intimate audiences. It’s not unusual to be overly formal in behaving and presenting yourself in groups. So much feels on the line. Having all the answers becomes a requirement to be genuine, credible, trustworthy. “I don’t know” become the three scariest words in the world.
The antidote is knowing yourself — expecting to make mistakes, reflect, learn, and develop self-awareness. Why? You appear — you are! — confident when you truly know something. Over time, as your confidence grows, you also become more comfortable with yourself. That puts others at ease, which yields greater self-awareness, reinforcing what you’ve done before and creating a virtuous cycle.
The self-awareness and the openness that develop when you allow yourself to be authentic to the world are powerful. Those traits give you the space and credibility to make mistakes, evolve and change as a person — even radically change your mind.
Being authentic allows the more public, formal you to match the more intimate you people see and interact with in person. That, in turn, earns trust, builds your reputation, and safeguards your personal brand.
Fearlessness
While a stellar reputation is not powerful in itself, the many personal qualities it takes to build and safeguard that stellar reputation add up, creating a sizable trust bank. If you have a solid reputation, you likely have an army of advocates ready to follow your lead. That can empower you to be fearless, encouraging you to create the change you want to see.
Fearlessness emerges as you realize and accept that people take great comfort knowing you speak for them when they cannot. It develops as you comprehend the plight of others and act accordingly. It strengthens as you own their truth as your own – and speak that truth to power. Like confidence, your fearlessness grows as you liberate and express it to the world.
Combined, trust, empathy, equity, authenticity, and fearlessness forge your superpower. Beware, however: “protecting what you have” is fearlessness’s kryptonite. Developing relationships, cultivating trust, advancing in your profession, starting a family, and so many parts of modern life take effort. And anything worth hard work is worth protecting, right? Absolutely! But our instincts to “protect” and “defend” — retreating, circling the wagons, building walls, shifting to offense from defense — rarely fatten the trust bank. In fact, being a bull in a china shop or steamrolling people can cost your reputation a great deal.
Within nature, there’s a continuum of (re)actions to things we encounter in the world: passive anchors one end, aggressive anchors the other. The middle ground — the one that balances the two and safeguards your reputation — is assertive. When assertive, your fearlessness can change the world. It is bold, brave, courageous, heroic.
A word about politics ...
Recognizing that politics is polarizing, many people choose to avoid political conversations. Preventing unnecessary conflict is understandable when your goals are to attract, serve, delight, and retain clients and customers. Right?
Not always. Favorable reputations are based on many things, including trust, empathy, equity, authenticity, and fearlessness.
When people sense you’re withholding something — when you don’t seem real — it can stand in the way of strengthening the very relationships you want to cultivate and protect.
“Agreeing to disagree can be a trust-building exercise when handled in mutually respectful ways.”
Approach political conversations with an open mind and a willingness to listen to different points of view. It can help build trust and greater understanding. Agreeing to disagree, in fact, can be a trust-building exercise when handled in mutually respectful ways.
Relationships and reputations can survive disagreements. They are less likely to thrive and grow surrounded by walls.