More specifically,  trust defined as “the willingness of a party (trustor) to be vulnerable to the actions of another party (trustee) based on the expectation that the trustee will perform an action important to the trustor, regardless of the trustor’s ability to monitor or control the trustee.” People can sense how you feel toward them. By having a clear and positive attitude with them means they have a clear and positive attitude about you.

Building Relationships – Your Key Business Skills

A relationship is two people eliciting responses from each other. If you want a change in response, then you must change your own actions.As a business professional, you should ask yourself: “What business am I in?”.

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, strategic advisors who helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms drive radical management, business model and strategic innovation. On a piece he scribed for HBS recently he comments “We cannot organize tomorrow’s businesses – or economy – like yesterday’s.

What do I mean?  Simple. How should we organize and manage how firms interact with consumers? The Economist thinks it’s “creepy” but cool to trick consumers, because it’s profitable.

Is it?

Not a chance – as our research at the Lab notes, the fact is: companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.

True power isn’t the power to manipulate. It’s the power to create. There is a world of difference between the two – that orthodox economics has yet to understand.”

One of the four GE Work-Out’s major goals is to build trust through encouraging employees to speak out critically inside the company about GE and the way they perform their jobs without negative consequences to their careers.Trust-based working relationships are an important source of your sustainable competitive advantage because trust is valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and often nonsubstitutable.  The level of trust a leader is able to garner from his/her employees is contingent upon the employee’s perceptions of the leader’s ability, benevolence, and integrity.

Customers will usually come back if:

Your keep your promises

You are willing to help

You inspire confidence

Your treat customers as individuals

You make it easy for customers to do business with you

All the physical aspects of your product or service give a favorable impression.

Building Relationship Capital is a critical skillset when growing your brand, business and reputation. How you deal with people interpersonally becomes your reputation and your brand. Ergo, reputations are built on trust.