Trust should be treated as something to continuously build and monitor. When trust weakens in one area, focus on strengthening that specific part. The Trust Triangle consists of authenticity, logic, and empathy, all of which need to be experienced simultaneously to earn trust. If any one of these components is missing, trust is not established, leading to skepticism and potential breakdown of trust.
You said it. But did they hear it? For Frances Frei, communication is about saying things simply enough for an audience to truly understand.
As a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School, Frei knows that shaping culture within organizations requires communicating in ways that influence how people think and act. The problem for many leaders, she says, is that when we “understand something deeply, we describe it in a complicated way. If you want broad influence and persuasion, we have to understand it really deeply. And then describe it in a simple and compelling enough way that others can take action.”
In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Frei and host Matt Abrahams explore strategies for simpler communication, building and maintaining trust, and celebrating diverse perspectives within our teams. They also discuss takeaways from Frei's latest book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leaders' Guide to Solving Hard Problems.
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For a transcript of this episode, visit our website.
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leaders' Guide to Solving Hard Problems
Fixable, a podcast with Anne Francis and Frances Frei