August 2024 Are You trustworthy? Know Like and Trust Plus

(Diagram from Blanchard website, https://www.blanchard.com/our-content/programs/building-trust)

Last week I attended a business conference that provided new things to learn and time to process and then plan.

My brain got full.

Now I’m trying to pull out useful tidbits to use – and to share with this community.

One thing so far that has struck me was the reference to a likely decades old but new-to-me concept from Ken Blanchard of the Blanchard business leadership organization. His company has a concept they call the ABCD Elements of Trust: Able, Believable, Connected and Dependable, as shown above in the diagram from their website.

The primary goal of their model is focused on business leaders building trust with their employees, and to me it seems largely through evidencing good character. But there it is again – that foundational principle we’ve talked about here before of Know, Like and Trust. Or the longer version I’ve heard many times as:

People do business with people they know, like and trust.

Seems to dovetail nicely with Blanchard’s concept.

In a related bit of wisdom also shared by speaker and sales guru Julie Thomas, CEO of ValueSelling, she highlighted data from the Harvard Business Review about the huge role emotional components play in business decisions, as they report emotional components affect up to 95% of purchase decisions.

That stunning statistic, though, fits in well with the Know and Like parts of that wisdom statement, which also contain an emotional component.

There is so much to learn from other people and the principles developed from real life data.

It can be a bit daunting.

Sometimes in the face of others’ greatness and achievements, we realize how small our part is in God’s big plan, and we feel so small and insignificant. But each of us does have a part, and a responsibility to do the best job we can with our gifts and abilities. I don’t think God would agree with us when we focus on our feelings of insignificance. After all, He gave us our talents and the responsibility to use them.

As we consider the contributions we are called to make, a good place to start is by looking in the mirror and considering the Know, Like and Trust statement to see where we stack up.