“Is trust all you’re ever gonna write about?”
“Pretty much,” I rather curtly answered Sally and began to explain that my comments would hardly exhaust the subject. She gave me “the look” turned, walked away and left me with the question still clamoring for a valid response.
I then dove quickly into reading Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, where I discovered in the first few chapters a more satisfying response to Sally’s question.
Duhigg strongly asserts that one part of our brain—the basal ganglia—stores patterns and in effect causes habitual responses. “The process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as ‘chunking,’ and it’s at the root of how habits form. There are dozens—if not hundreds—of behavioral chunks that we rely on every day. Some are simple: You automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, such as getting dressed or making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex.”
Recently Sally and I experienced “chunking” as we habitually pushed the garage door opener, jumped in the car, turned on the ignition, engaged reverse and, without looking, backed out. It always works—door goes up, car goes out--habitually. But not that day. Garage door stuck at the top, I caved it in and damaged my car. Habit.
Duhigg calls our unthinking habitual responses an “intricate ballet” akin to auto pilot which we experience every day.
If behavior patterns and responses can in fact be stored in the basal ganglia area awaiting a cue, then it seems to me that such traits as trustworthiness, truthfulness, and transparency might become habitual for an individual, a company, a firm. What would a company look like if its leadership emphasized in classroom settings, on line interactivity and company retreats its strong stand on integrity, accountability, truth telling, and trustworthiness.
I’ve often wondered how failed and disgraced companies and audit firms would’ve fared had they spent more time on developing ethics and integrity as habitual attributes and qualities. Incentives for increased business and profitability are certainly part of our economic model but shouldn’t the incentives include a focus on first and foremost the principal sustainability factor of the public trust?
Is all this habitual ethics practice some feel good theory, some warm and fuzzy notion, some nice idea that loses its authenticity in the dog-eat-dog world of reality? Not according to Pinnacle Financial Partners, headquarted in Nashville, and not according to 99 other companies recently named by Forbes magazine as “America’s Most Trustworthy Companies.” I know the Pinnacle story. Several years ago, we in NASBA researched banks to try to find a bank that met our high standards for service, community involvement, reputation and ethical emphasis. Pinnacle is purposeful about ethics and integrity. Its employees buy into what the bank’s leaders model—truthfulness and transparency. Pinnacle has been consistently year after year named one of Nashville’s “Best Places to Work.” Trustworthiness has become a habit with Pinnacle. Isn’t that refreshing?
So, I’ll keep on writing about trust trying in my drip-drip-drip fashion to help individual, professional firms and companies pursue programs and practices which lead to clients and customers believing, trusting, and having confidence in their products and services.
Your basal ganglia sits there preparing to chunk. Time to get “chunking” with habits that matter to the public—truth, transparency, trustworthiness.
Oh, oh, another must read book. My Amazon account loves you. Another way of thinking of habit is to consider the hybrid car: electric motor for efficiency and combustion engine for power. Habits are like the electric motor: Great on gas, but not terribly powerful for climbing mountains or passing trucks. The only way we can create habits is to engage the cognitive features of our brain and experientially practice the new behavior. Otherwise the habits will overcome the capacity to change. Ask Gabby Giffords. She can now do the physically impossible. After incomprehensible brain damage, she practiced learning old behaviors anew. As a result, she formed new neural pathways in her brain which replaced the ones destroyed by a would be assassin's bullet. If we are going to acquire the habits of trust, practice is the only way to do so. Otherwise, our old habits will continue to ineffectively try to climb the mountain of trustworthy behavior.
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