Authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character, despite external pressures.

Becoming authentic is an ongoing process of self-discovery that includes realizing our personal and collective potential and acting on that potential. Part of the process is accepting  responsibility for our choices and their consequences. The process leads to congruency between our ideals, values and our actions.

Authenticity in the microcosm of the individual,  propagates to the macrocosm.  Our intention to be authentic in every interaction both individually and collectively results in resilient human relationships.   By being mindful of our interactions we enculture authenticity.

Authenticity is essential for  building sustainable communities.  When we can show up as ourselves and genuinely like the people we engage with,  then collectively,  we are better able to adapt,   find new solutions and  flourish in a changing environment.

Individual Authenticity

• Do I think for myself and speak my truth?
• What fascinates me, what potentials do I want to explore?
• Do I own the consequences of my choices?
• What qualities do I value in myself and in others?
• Is my behavior congruent with my values?
• Where is my compass pointing me to at this time?

Authentic Interaction

• Am I mindful of how my choices may influence another person?
• Do I recognize diversity and appreciate the differences in others?
• Do I interact with others with  respect and courtesy?
• How do I extend degrees of trust?
• Do I respond appropriately when a personal boundary is crossed?
• Is my behavior appropriate given my role and the interaction?
• Do I observe and process the results of my interactions?

Authentic Group Engagement

• What is the group formed to accomplish?
• What am I here to do? What is my role? What contribution is expected of me?
• Is there an expectation of mutual accountability – if so what is it?
• What strategies is the group applying to find solutions?
• How will the group negotiate an impasse should one occur?
• How can we cultivate the positive dynamics of this team?

Organisational Authenticity

• As an organisation do we mean what we say?
• How do our customers experience us?
• Is integrity infused in our products? Is quality a priority?
• How is our culture expressed in our day to day activities?

Interpersonal soft skills are significant in their ability to build relationships forged on trust. Honest communication, mutual respect, even where there are differences of world view or personal opinion, integrity and ethical behaviour, contribute to underpinning the trust factor. Trust is required in constructing healthy communities and organisations, and when it upheld, has been seen to unleash creativity, engender empowerment, optimise teamwork. Fostering a culture of trust, therefore, rewards communities and organizations that hold true to the principles as a highly valuable intangible asset. Both Jack Welch and Warren Bennis maintain it as a key component to business succcess and yet few companies or institutions seem to manage in enfranchise trust sustainably because of a failure to transmit it as a cultural norm.

The characteristics of trustworthiness include integrity, reliability, fairness, caring, openness, reciprocality and, within appropriate caveats that does not transgress a core value set, loyalty. Organizations and institutional policies might promote a culture of trust by promoting open communication, by modeling behaving in socially responsible and ethical ways to every employee.

According to Charles Green, creator of the Trust Equation, ‘the way we use the Trust Creation Process model is really just outcomes of the principles we hold.’ What I understand Charles to impute, it that who we are and what values we hold to be true, informs how we engage and behave with others across the board.

Green maintains that the only way to become trusted is to act consistently from a set of core principles and the four specific principles governing trustworthy behavior that he cites are:

1) A focus on the Other (client, customer, internal co-worker, boss, partner, subordinate) for the Other’s sake, not just as a means to one’s own ends.

We often hear “client-focus,” or “customer-centric.” But these are terms all-too-often framed in terms of economic benefit to the person trying to be trusted.

2) A collaborative approach to relationships.

Collaboration here means a willingness to work together, creating both joint goals and joint approaches to getting there.

3) A medium to long term relationship perspective, not a short-term transactional focus.

Focus on relationships nurtures transactions; but focus on transactions chokes off relationships. The most profitable relationships for both parties are those where multiple transactions over time are assumed in the approach to each transaction.

4) A habit of being transparent in all one’s dealings.

Transparency has the great virtue of helping recall who said what to whom. It also increases credibility, and lowers self-orientation, by its willingness to keep no secrets.

According to Green, applying these principles to all of our actions will develop the fullest potential of trust that bonds and binds relationships, and thereby, builds longevity and reward born from such a strong tie.

As this erudite research on trust reveals, ‘Trust has several beneficial effects. It helps build teams, where trust acts as a bond of tying people together. It reduces energy otherwise required for controls. It helps in cases of conflict. Overall, it reduces task complexity.’

The benefits trust rewards us with professionally, socially and personally, are worthy of our time, attention and investment to explore, accomodate and demonstrate. Make no mistake. your ‘relationship capital’ is being accounted for with every interaction, so it is a wise person that conducts themselves with every meritricious endeavour of creating relationships bound and bonded in trust.

Understanding the power of a quality relationship management depends a good deal on an awareness of people’s behaviour and preferences. Soliciting from any group, community or department, what motivates, inspires and provides satisfying experiences is key to creating strong bonds and powerful alliances that drive buy in and support, no matter the context.

Currently relationship management, across all it’s various attributions, is poorly understood and even more abysmally executed. If the current understanding of relationship management is simply to monitor and respond to negative commentary on your reputation, your brand, your business or your services, or to follow up and cross sell when the customer or client has fallen off your radar, this is no better than shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted it. It’s about listening, responding, reciprocating, acknowledging, modeling ethics and values, everywhere you are or your business is active.

The value of building and maintaining a reputation built on the seven principles of human givens (accountability, boundaries, respect, responsibility, honesty, support and trust) means creating cooperative alliances and rewarding relationships. This cannot be short cut, avoided, undeserved or manipulated. We are each being held to account on our behaviours in regard to our commitments and on this we stand or fall in peer assessment.

There is no excuse now, given the quantity and quality of tracking technologies and social media assets, not to create a formidable and very manageable strategy to build and sustain quality relationships and use all positive testimonials, word of mouth recommendations and quality referrals to build personal and professional capital as well as business advantage. To fail to implement such a strategy is to be asleep at the wheel in a fast moving and competitive world.

Firstly, let’s clarify what culture is?

Culture is embodied in the phrase “this is the way we do things around here”. More precisely, “what people perceive they have to do to fit in, be accepted and rewarded around here”. Culture is the sum of the behavioural norms of the workgroup, team, division or organisation. It is relatively common to have different cultures between teams or divisions within the one organisation. These are referred to as sub-cultures and they can range from being marginally different from the culture of the overall organisation to being quite radically different. This has implications for not only understanding an organisation’s culture but also for managing it effectively.

Why is culture important?

Have you ever tried to stay within the speed limit when everyone around you is driving at speeds well over the speed limit? The behavioural norms of a group can strongly influence the behaviour of the individual. Culture defines the behavioural norms (accepted behaviour) in a group, team, division or organisation. In turn, behaviour underpins the performance (what gets done, when it gets done and how it gets done) of the organisation and perceptions (reputation) of that organisation.

A Framework for Managing Culture

While managing culture requires a range of approaches and cannot simply be managed by dictating theculture you want, it is essentially about managing messages. The objective is to ensure messages are consistently conveyed through aligned behaviours (especially of key people), systems and symbols.

What is accountability?

The key concept is the notion of having a sense of ‘responsibility’ and a willingness to be ‘answerable’ to others and is the difference between a group and a team. In our experience, the most important factor in developing accountability is the quality of leadership and management (and this is the only aspect leaders or managers are really in ‘control’ of). Good leaders and managers generate high levels of accountability in their people.

Whilst organisations should plan to recruit the right people in terms of their willingness to be team players and be accountable; recruitment is only the starting point. The real key is what leaders and organisations do from that point onwards. Good recruits can be ‘lost’ in poorly lead organisations with unsupportive cultures. Many managers see accountability as being attributed to an individual’s values, therefore they blame the individual and underestimate their own role in creating an accountability culture. In doing this, a great opportunity to build a high performance organisation is missed.

Responsibility is not blame

It is important not to mistake responsibility for blame as they are diametrically opposed concepts. Where one exists the other will not remain.Responsibility is the ability to make a response,it is future and action focused. Blame is past focused and is more about the ego – isolating people, teaching them a lesson, point scoring or making them feel guilty/bad than it is about accountability. Guilt and fear is not a good basis for developing accountability.

A Framework for Building an Accountability Culture

We see the steps in building an accountability culture as
being:

1. Building trust as the foundation:

The four key elements of trust are

• Openness/transparency (giving and accepting feedback, transparency in decision making)

• Reliability (doing what you say you are going to do)

• Congruence (saying what you mean)

• Acceptance (acceptance of others and acceptance of differences).

2. Engage your people: meaningful involvement with alignment. Remember you can’t truly and sustainably motivate another person but you can engage them. It is through engagement that motivation will grow.

3. Ownership: once the first two elements are in place people start to ‘take’ ownership – they start to think and act like owners. (As this happens the future possibility for selling down equity, as part of the firm’s succession plan, becomes a reality).

The level of accountability is directly related to the level of trust, engagement and ownership that exists within an organisation. Certainly work at improving all levels simultaneously; however remember higher levels in the pyramid cannot progress any faster than the base they are built on, there are no short cuts. Without trust and engagement no performance measures and rewards will be particularly effective over the medium to long term – you cannot buy accountability. The key to building a culture of accountability is to find a way to lead people without ruling them.

Note: This article appears in the Institute of Chartered Accountants magazine “Charter” in October 2007.

Successful people have the ability to develop relationships that last. Building relationship requires the building of trust.  Mutual trust is a shared belief that you can depend on each other to achieve a common purpose.

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.