I’ve delivered several seminars to the executive leadership team at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If there were ever an organization whose reason for being is compliance, it would be the NRC.The agency’s role is to formulate policies and develop regulations to ensure safe use of radioactive materials. This is very serious business. And a critical component of the desired outcome of the NRC’s work is strict compliance with policies and regulations designed to protect the public.

But let’s consider another paradigm that’s every bit as important to the work and mission of the NRC. That’s the paradigm of commitment.

Obviously, we want everyone in the nuclear industry to comply with policies and regulations that ensure safety. That is doing the right thing.

At the same time, we want them to operate in compliance – not just because they want to avoid getting written up – but because they understand and agree with the rationale behind policies, regulations, and stacks and stacks of rules.

That involves commitment.

That involves doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Not long ago I was discussing this very subject with a bright young manager at a nuclear power plant. He clearly understood the importance of compliance, but seemed to be struggling with the role of commitment. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “As long as people are doing what they’re told to do, why does it matter what their motivation is?”

I noticed in his office he had photos of his young family. I engaged him in conversation about his sons, aged three and five.

“Do you have seatbelt laws in your state?” I asked.

“Yes, we do. And they’re well enforced,” the young father told me.

“Do you buckle up your boys?”

“Absolutely. They have the best car seats money can buy and I always crawl into the back seat to ensure that they’re strapped in correctly.”

“So you invest that effort to avoid getting a citation from the police?” I asked.

“Why, no. That never occurred to me,” he said. “I buckle up my boys because I love them and want to keep them safe.”

“Ah, ha,” I said. “That is commitment. You’re doing the right thing for the right reasons. You’re not motivated by fear, you’re motivated by love – which is a much higher purpose.”

Yes, I know. “Love” is not a word we often hear in the workplace. But we certainly hear a lot of synonyms: “He really has a passion for excellent service.” “Our team gets excited every time we land a new client.” “Customer care is our first priority.”

It’s possible for people to operate out of compliance while they have very little commitment. But the opposite is virtually impossible. If one is truly committed, compliance is rarely an issue. The young father is genuinely committed to the safety of his little boys, so his compliance with safety laws is automatic.

Henry Kissinger

With well-placed modeling, a good leader can instill this distinction in others. In the early 1970s Dr. Henry Kissinger was the U.S. Secretary of State. One day he asked a couple of the bright young guys on his staff to draft a white paper for him. In that context, a white paper is a document that describes an important issue, and then outlines the options available to the decision maker. The document also includes an analysis of the implications associated with each decision option.

The young staffers drafted the white paper and sent it upstairs to the Secretary of State. The next morning Kissinger summoned the two guys to his office.

“Is this the best work you can do?” Kissinger asked.

“Well, actually, Mr. Secretary, we could provide a bit more data on this section, and we could do a little more research on that section,” came the reply.

“Well, then, please do it,” Kissinger said.

After the second draft came upstairs, Kissinger summoned the two guys again.

“Is this the best work you can do?” Kissinger asked again.

“Actually, Mr. Secretary, there are a couple of ambassadors we could consult, and there are some data points from another agency we could include,” came the response.

“Well, then, please do it,” Kissinger said.

After the third draft arrived, Kissinger again sent for the young staffers. By now they were probably feeling like truants called to the school principal’s office.

“Now, is this the best work you can do?” Kissinger asked again.

“Yes, sir, it is,” came the reply. “We’ve exhausted every resource available to us. We’ve carefully scoured intelligence briefings, ambassador communiqués and every other piece of pertinent data. This is definitely the best white paper we can produce.”

“Thank you,” Kissinger said. “This time I will read it!”

Henry Kissinger knew the importance of expecting only the best, and he understood the difference between compliance and commitment. It’s a sure bet that from that day forward his two young staffers were committed to the excellence he had a right to demand. Because they feared him? No. Because he helped them understand the importance of their work and the necessity of getting it right.

As any Change-Friendly leader knows, people may perform temporarily in a certain way because they feel the heat. But the change becomes permanent only when they see the light.

Rodger Dean Duncan is author of the forthcoming book Change-Friendly: How to Engage People’s Heads, Hearts, and Hopes.

At least one part of BP’s PR message is credible: there seems to be plenty of blame to go around. But of course in a disaster like this, blame-fixing is little comfort. It simply shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Compromise: A Common Thread in Disaster Stories

Compromise seems to be a common thread in all the stories about this disaster. This offshore drilling saga seems uncomfortably reminiscent of stories we’ve heard in health care, aviation, the auto industry, finance, and other industries.

Let’s explore some learnings here: At a business conference I visited with Harold W. Gehman. He prefers to be called Hal. Hal is a retired U.S. Navy admiral who served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon’s top military decision makers. Hal was called on by President George W. Bush to head the special board investigating the Columbia Space Shuttle accident.

There is much to learn from the board’s findings. The investigation board set out to answer three questions. First, “What happened to the Columbia?” As anyone watching television on that Saturday morning can tell you, the Columbia disintegrated when it reentered the earth’s atmosphere at 205,000 feet while traveling 14,000 miles per hour southwest of Dallas at about 8:00 a.m. Central time.

Although the Columbia scattered more than 84,000 pieces of debris across Texas and into western Louisiana, there were no witnesses to the accident. (Yes, millions of us saw the debris falling, but nobody saw the actual accident.)

The second question the board set out to answer: “Was whatever caused the accident an anomaly, or was it something that had occurred before without such consequences?” If the answer to the second question was that the accident’s cause had been seen before, then the third question had to be “Was the cause dealt with adequately?”

After thousands of man-hours of investigation, the board concluded that there were two causes to the Columbia accident. One was technical, the other was organizational. The technical cause of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia occurred 16 days before the accident. It happened on launch. The shuttle was struck by a small piece of light-weight material similar to that of a Styrofoam cup.

The organizational cause of the accident was both complicated and simple. More on that later.

It’s interesting to note that, prior to this launch of Columbia, there had been 113 shuttle flights. Most people are amazed by that number. It shows how routine space flight has become. As it turns out, “routine” is part of the danger.

Now, a Bit of Shuttle 101

When a shuttle lifts off the launch pad, it is bundled with three other huge pieces of apparatus. Two mammoth white rockets on the side of the shuttle are solid rocket boosters. They produce a total of five million pounds of thrust. After two minutes and 15 seconds, these two rockets are jettisoned and fall harmlessly into the ocean.

A big orange tank in the center of the bundle holds liquid fuel for the shuttle’s three on-board engines. The tank is made of aluminum, and the fuel it holds is cold – roughly minus 450 degrees. Because something that cold produces dangerous ice in the humid Florida air at the launch site, the tank is covered with insulating foam. This foam was the technical cause of the Columbia accident.

Hal Gehman says the people in the space program had succumbed to “the Gamblers’ Dilemma.” On every single previous launch of a shuttle, the orbiter was damaged by foam striking it. And on every single previous launch the damage did not cause an accident. “The Gamblers’ Dilemma” was the danger in forgetting that what happened in the past is in no way a guarantee of what may happen in the future (as the fine print in any financial prospectus reminds us).

Early in the shuttle program, falling foam was regarded as a “Level 1” hazard. The orbiter is covered with an extremely delicate thermal protection system that absolutely must remain intact. Upon reentering the earth’s atmosphere, the orbiter is subjected to heat of up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Any compromise in the orbiter’s outer skin can spell disaster.

But on 113 previous flights, damage from falling foam was within tolerable limits. So, over time, the engineers accepted the falling foam as a harmless, recurring reality. They even had a term for the phenomenon. They called it “a normalized deviance.” Falling foam was “outside of specifications,” but because it hadn’t been a problem it was simply accepted.

A chilling part of this story is that “normalized deviance” also played a role in a previous disaster.

Remember the Challenger tragedy in 1986? It was caused by leaking O-rings on the solid rocket booster. The O-rings had leaked on nearly every previous flight of the Challenger, but the “outside of spec” phenomenon had become accepted as tolerable.

This kind of compromise is the organizational cause of the Columbia accident. As Hal Gehman says, “Some engineers were yelling and screaming, ‘We can’t live with this,’ while others were saying, ‘No, no, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.’”

In a world driven by schedules and budgets and political pressures, compromises are an inevitable part of the mix. Some of the compromises can be deadly.

Hal Gehman puts it into perspective: “The really scary thing about this history of anomalies is how cleverly they [the space program engineers and administrators] documented every time a piece of foam came off, which was on every flight. And it’s scary how the recurring events were incrementally characterized as less and less serious. Somehow, man seems to think that by putting a different label on a bad thing he can diminish the danger of the bad thing.”

The Temptation to Compromise

What can we learn from all this? There are so many easy, even logical, compromises available to us. Most of us know a correct principle when we see it. And many people have a finely-tuned ability to cut corners for the sake of convenience or some other arbitrary excuse. For evidence, just consider the lapses at Enron, Tyco, the New York Times, WorldCom and other organizations where corners were cut.

A helpful approach to the temptation of compromise is seen in the story of the father of teenagers. The story may be only an urban legend, but it’s instructive nonetheless.

The family had a high standard on what kind of movies were appropriate for viewing. The three teens in the family wanted to see a particular popular movie that – although was “mostly” okay – seemed to violate some of the family standards. The teens interviewed friends to get details on the movie. They compiled a list of pros and cons. They would use the list to persuade their dad that they should be allowed to see the movie despite its occasional lapses.

The father reviewed the list of “evidence” and promised to give them his answer in 24 hours. The next evening he called his three teens into the kitchen. On the table he had placed a plate of brownies. He said he had carefully considered their request and had decided that if they would eat one brownie each he would let them see the movie. But just like the movie, he said, the brownies had pros and cons.

The pros were that they were made with the finest chocolate and other good ingredients. They were moist and fresh, made with an award-winning recipe.

The brownies had only one con. He had included a special ingredient – “just a little bit” of horse manure. But he had mixed the dough well. The manure probably couldn’t even be tasted because the brownies were baked at 350 degrees and any bacteria from the manure had probably been destroyed. “Probably.”

Therefore, if any of his children could stand to eat a brownie that included “just a little bit” of manure and not be affected by it, then he knew they probably would also be able to see the movie with “just a little bit” of smut and not be affected. “Probably.”

The teenagers decided the movie wasn’t that attractive after all.

Listen Carefully

The story is likely apocryphal, but it makes a good point. The next time we’re tempted to compromise a principle, wouldn’t it be great if a wise friend brought us back to reality by offering to whip up a batch of those special brownies?

Of course that’s not the way it works. We make most decisions and choices on our own, without the coaching of others. And even if others are coaching us, they can be susceptible to the same compromises we are. “Normalized deviance” is not unique to the space program. It can and does happen to anyone who toys with compromise.

Admiral Gehman certainly has it right. Putting an “acceptable” label on a dangerous thing is a perfect recipe for disaster.

Decision makers in every industry should listen carefully.

We can be prisoners of our thinking or be can be liberated and propelled by our thinking. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, endured the atrocities of several Nazi concentration camps by redirecting his thinking from the suffering around him to the meaning of his existence. He embodied the truism that although we cannot control our circumstances we can control our response to them. Compared to Frankl’s situation, the typical change or transformation effort is a walk in the park.

So you want to have a positive impact in your organization? You want to help incubate ideas and innovations that really make a difference? You want to influence people to embrace change rather than resist it? Then resolve not to behave like the Saints, the Ain’ts, and the Complaints we see in many organizations.

The Saints are people who regard themselves as martyrs. They believe they are victimized by systems, processes, or other people. Their woe-is-me demeanor seems to feed on itself, stifling creativity and smothering any hint of personal accountability. The cure: Let go of any victim stories you may be telling yourself. Confront the reality that your own behavior or constraining paradigms may be part of the problem. Honestly ask yourself the question, “What am I be doing, or failing to do, that could be contributing to this predicament?”

The Ain’ts are people who play the blame game. Their negative outlook is focused on what they perceive others to be doing or failing to do. They sometimes play the double role of Saint and Ain’t. After all, if you’re a victim doesn’t there need to be a villain somewhere in the story? The cure: Seriously challenge any villain stories you may be telling yourself or others. Such stories are often ill-founded and they serve no productive purpose even if true. Honestly ask yourself the question, “Why might they (other people) be doing what they’re doing?” Consider that the same data (your observations) could reasonably lead to a wide range of conclusions.

The Complaints are people who lament most anything and everything around them. Just about anything can be a target of their condemnation and criticism. Naturally, if the real problem is “out there” somewhere, they can absolve themselves of responsibility. The cure: If you find yourself in the Complaint mode, jettison any helpless stories you may be telling yourself or broadcasting to others. Honestly ask yourself the question, “What can I do at this moment that could help produce a better outcome?”

If re-focused thinking can enable Viktor Frankl to triumph over the Holocaust, you can surely succeed with the change effort on your plate.

All of that is important, but sound thinking requires more than a rosy outlook and a dose of self esteem. Sound thinking requires a mindset – or orientation – that’s both receptive to fresh (even contrary) ideas and accepting of the notion that most of us can be more creative than we’ve ever dreamed.

When Carol Dweck was a sixth-grader at P.S. 153 in Brooklyn, New York, she experienced something that motivated her to explore why some people view intelligence as a fixed trait while others embrace it as a quality that can be developed and expanded.

Young Carol’s teacher seated the students around the classroom according to their IQ scores. The boys and girls who didn’t have the highest IQs were not trusted to carry the flag during school assemblies. They weren’t even allowed to clap erasers or wash the chalkboard or take a note to the principal.

“Our teacher let it be known that IQ for her was the ultimate measure of your intelligence and your character,” Carol says. “So the students who had the best seats were always scared of taking another test and not being at the top anymore. It was an uncomfortable thing because you were only as good as your last test score. I think it had just as negative an effect on the kids at the top [as those at the bottom] who were defining themselves in those terms.”

Today Carol Dweck is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, having previously taught at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard. Her special interest is in people’s self-theories about intelligence and the profound influence such theories have on the motivation to learn. She says people who hold a “fixed” theory are mainly concerned with how smart they are (or are perceived to be). They prefer tasks they can already do well and they tend to avoid tasks on which they may make mistakes and jeopardize their “smart” image. By contrast, Dr. Dweck says, people who believe in an “expandable” or “growth” theory of intelligence thrive on challenging themselves to increase their abilities, even if they fail at first.

Half a century ago Maxwell Maltz aroused the minds of millions with his book Psycho-Cybernetics. His primary premise was that many people are trapped in self images that limit them, while others have self images that open the door to a cornucopia of possibilities.

Dr. Maltz said that in the human brain there’s a sort of motion picture projector, and the “self movie” is played over and over and over again. If a child is told (especially by a parent, teacher, or other trusted authority figure) that she’s clumsy and awkward, there’s a good chance she’ll regard herself as clumsy and awkward the rest of her life. In fact, she’ll likely go out of her way to prove it. If we learn to believe that we’re not good at math, that we can’t speak with confidence in public, or that we’re not comfortable making new friends, all of that will likely be true. In short, the view we adopt for ourselves profoundly affects the way we lead our lives.

But the good news is that we can deliberately choose to project a different “self movie” on the motion picture screen in our brains.

Just like the heroine in the classic children’s book The Little Engine That Could, we can tell ourselves “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” And then there’s a good chance that, indeed, we can.

As the first outsider to be appointed president and CEO of Farmland Industries, he was charged with the task of returning this agribusiness giant to profitability.

Resuscitating a giant is always a mammoth undertaking, and this would be an especially tough challenge. Farmland’s business units – ranging from fertilizer and pork processing to grain, petroleum refining and ag chemicals – were test enough. But the nature of Farmland’s federated structure was a mixed blessing: the company was owned by more than 2,000 local associations or “co-ops” in 19 states. Because these same 2,000 local co-ops were also Farmland’s primary customers, a natural conflict of interest ensued. As owners, the co-ops wanted high profits. As customers, they wanted low prices.

Farmland was hemorrhaging from operating losses – $374 million for the previous five years. Within 12 months of taking over as Farmland’s CEO, Jim Rainey injected a proactive, collaborative spirit into the corporate culture, inspired the workforce and their constituencies to accomplish things never before dreamed, and returned the company to profitability. The impressive turnaround is now a case study at the Harvard Business School.

Authentic Leadership

The most pertinent point here, though, is not what Jim Rainey helped his people accomplish. The most pertinent point is how he did it.

He did it with integrity, trust, and respect.

He did it with tough-minded focus on business detail, coupled with genuine caring for the human element of organizational change.

He did it with authentic leadership.

A couple of stories illustrate Jim Rainey’s approach to leadership. A few days after joining Farmland he walked into an early morning strategic planning meeting. You can imagine the attentiveness of all the eager beavers trying to impress the new boss. When he first entered the room, Jim overheard a young man mention that his wife was in the hospital. Jim inquired about the woman’s health, and the man said his wife was expecting a baby which was likely to be delivered that day.

“Let me make a deal with you,” Jim told the young father-to-be. “I promise to give you a personal briefing on the outcome of this meeting if you’ll rush over to the hospital where you belong. You’ll get only one chance to witness the birth of your baby, and you don’t want to miss it.”

On the surface that may seem like no more than a nice gesture. But it’s that very kind of thoughtfulness that earns trust and loyalty.

Walk the Talk

“Walking the talk” is another way to earn trust and loyalty.

During Jim’s first day on the job, the head of Farmland’s motor pool asked what car he wanted for his personal use. Jim requested a simple Chevrolet with standard options. Then the conversation went like this –

Jim: “When the car arrives, just give me the invoice and I’ll write out a personal check.”

Motor pool guy: “Oh, you don’t understand, Mr. Rainey. You get a free company car.”

Jim: “No, you don’t understand. This company lost tens of millions of dollars last year. I’ve been asked
to turn things around and, beginning today, nobody gets a free car.”

Jim immediately told me about the conversation and asked that I check to see how long it took the word to reach employees a thousand miles from headquarters. What would you guess? Two days? One day? It took less than 10 minutes for people several states away to get word of the new CEO’s policy on executive privilege. (This was before the use of email.)

For the next several years I watched Jim Rainey demonstrate integrity, trust, and respect in hundreds of private acts that quickly (almost instantly, in some cases) became part of his leadership legacy.

I see other leaders badly erode their credibility by ignoring or miscalculating the power of example. Somehow they assume that either nobody notices or nobody cares if they are petty or thoughtless in dealing with subordinates and colleagues. Oh, how dangerously wrong they are.

Duncan, a leading authority in organizational effectiveness, said trust is much more than a nice-to-have social virtue. It’s a competency that can be taught, learned, and improved.

“A big idea here is that low trust is a tax and high trust is a dividend,” Duncan told NRC leaders in an organization-wide meeting that was televised live to the NRC’s regional offices across the U.S.

“When trust is low, you pay a tax because everything requires more time to accomplish and everything costs more. When trust is high, you receive a dividend because you’re able to get things done faster and at a lower cost.”

Duncan discussed the behaviors of high trust leaders outlined in the bestselling book The Speed of Trust by his colleague Stephen M.R. Covey.

He also made a business case for trust:

• A Watson Wyatt study shows that high trust organizations outperform low trust organizations by 286% in terms of total return to shareholders.
• The high trust organizations in Fortune magazine’s list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” outperform the S&P 500 by 416% in terms of their economic return.
• The Gallup organization reports that 96% of engaged employees trust their leaders, while only 46% of disengaged employees trust their leaders. Gallup puts a conservative price tag of more than $300 billion per year on disengagement in the U.S. alone.

Low Trust Can Have a High Cost

Duncan illustrated the cost of low trust by relating an incident he observed at a nuclear power plant. During a maintenance outage a crew began dismantling some equipment. The first crew finished its 12-hour shift and a second crew continued the work. When the third crew reported for duty a worker said “Hey, guys, this is the wrong project. We’re not scheduled to work on this equipment until the next outage six months from now.”

Duncan said a couple of workers on the first crew knew it was the wrong project. But their supervisor was “a hard-charging, high testosterone guy who told his people to just follow orders and not ask questions.” So they didn’t dare speak up. There was a similar low trust environment on the second crew.

“But the third crew was led by a supervisor who understood both the importance of trust and the behaviors of trust,” Duncan said. “The high trust environment he fostered made it easy for one of his workers to say, ‘Hey, guys, this is the wrong project.’”

How much did the low trust behavior cost? More than $2 million. It took 36 hours to reassemble the equipment and begin working on the correct project. Because the plant was not generating electricity during those extra 36 hours, the missed opportunity amounted to $1.8 million in lost income. Added to that was the related cost of hundreds of supplemental workers on site during the outage.

Duncan discussed 13 behaviors of high trust leaders. Some of the behaviors, like Talk Straight and Demonstrate Respect, are character-based. Some of the behaviors, like Deliver Results and Clarify Expectations, are competency-based. And some behaviors, like Listen First and Keep Commitments, include both character and competency components.

Counterfeit Behaviors Damage Trust

Most of the trust behaviors seem self-evident, Duncan said. But what many people fail to realize is that while each behavior has an opposite, it also has a counterfeit that is sometimes subtle. For example, the obvious opposite of clarifying expectations is to leave expectations undefined or fail to disclose them at all. Not-so-obvious counterfeit behaviors might include being vague and ambiguous, or failing to provide appropriate specifics on commitments around things like results, deadlines, dollars, and deliverables.

As part of his presentation, Duncan involved his NRC audience in a series of “scenarios” that required use of trust behaviors.

“People in high trust organizations learn to see the world through ‘trust lenses,’” Duncan said. “They learn to speak the language of trust. Then they learn to use trust behaviors more deliberately and more consistently. When trust becomes a more explicit expectation, it becomes the default behavior in a culture. Then the organization and its stakeholders enjoy the dividends of high trust.”

The NRC meeting Duncan keynoted, attended by the chairman and commissioners and several hundred NRC employees, promoted the agency’s emphasis on an Open and Collaborative Work Environment, or OCWE. The title of Duncan’s presentation was “Trust: How to Put the WE in OCWE.”

Established in 1972, Duncan Worldwide helps individuals and organizations close the gap between good intentions and great performance. With proprietary diagnostic tools and best-of-breed training programs, Duncan Worldwide helps people make results, not excuses. Satisfied clients include leaders in many industries as well as cabinet officials in two White House administrations.

At the beginning of each semester, Luke rolls out the curriculum for the entire term. This includes assigning term papers on a wide range of topics. These are not the typical “research” papers. These personal essays are intended to help develop the students’ analytical skills – in short, teach them how to think for themselves.

High-Tech Monitoring

Because many students are relatively untutored in such skills, there’s a temptation to “borrow” someone else’s thinking. In this Internet age, some ethics deficient websites actually sell and resell term papers to students who are either too timid or too lazy to do their own thinking. It’s easier than ever to take short cuts. But most students who “take short cuts” don’t actually buy someone else’s work. They “borrow” someone else’s work, sometimes in small, addictive doses. A question, of course, is where’s the line between inadvertent plagiarism and deliberate thievery?

Luke uses a high-tech tool called Turnitin (see www.turnitin.com) that quickly identifies plagiarism. This compares student work against three massive, continuously updated databases of content: billions of web pages, plus more than 80,000 major newspapers, periodicals, journals, and books, plus more than 100 million student papers from around the world.

Luke’s students submit their papers electronically. Then, before he even reads them, the papers are instantly analyzed for – shall we say – attribution problems. On Luke’s computer screen appears an “originality report” that highlights matches and shows sources side-by-side. He may see, for example, that a paragraph from a student paper is a 53% match with a Wikipedia article, or a 47% match with an obscure journal, or a 64% match with a paper submitted by another student three years earlier at another university across the country.

Trust, Not Gotcha

Again, Luke is a professor of the fine arts, not a plagiarism cop playing a game of “Gotcha!” In his professor role he can expound with world class authority on a wide range of subjects. And, yes, he wants to teach his students about proper source citation in their term papers.

But he believes, and I agree, that his most important job is to mentor his students in the fine art of trust.

• He does it by showing them that relying on their own thinking is not only honest, but their own thinking is often better that someone else’s anyway.
• He teaches them that “trust” is more than just a word in the school’s honor code.
• He teaches them that trust is one of the most important lessons they can ever learn, and the most valuable attribute they can ever cultivate.
• He does it by appealing to their heads and hearts and hopes.

Then Luke’s young charges come to realize that with confidence comes competence, and then competence begets more confidence. The amount of effort that goes into cheating and covering it up far exceeds the effort required to do it right.

When the tide goes out, we discover who’s been naked all along. So why not invest in trust from the very beginning? Why not behave in ways that earn and maintain the trust of people important to us?

Yes, trust is a character thing. It’s also a matter of competence. And it can be taught.