In August, Rick Parmely of Professional and Polished, LCC
visited our CMIID group and mentioned “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R.
Covey as part of his professional development talk. As of late, I’ve been very interested in
leaving grad school being well-rounded - that is, having more skills under my
belt than flow cytometry and mucosal cell isolations, so I decided to read it.
While there were many good points and interesting ideas from
the book, I came away with two points that really made me think.
1: Trust is made of two parts: integrity and capability. I would trust my lab mate to homogenize the
spleens from my experiment but not to perform my open heart surgery. My doctor could perform the surgery but probably
not isolate my lamina propria lymphocytes.
2: The degree of trust is directly proportional to how fast
tasks get accomplished and inversely proportional to how much it costs to
finish the task. For example, if trust
is low, it can take a long time for a collaboration project to produce data,
which will cost more money and result in fewer publications or patents. But if the trust is high, the collaboration
can work quickly to produce results, which will cost less money and result in
more frequent publications.
The majority of the book focuses on how to increase trust
within your organization which was interesting to me because as I said before,
I had never thought about how trust could be important in the work
environment. “The Speed of Trust” has
definitely made a strong case for trust in the workplace. Trust within personal relationships is also
discussed in this book but for this, I’ll stick to the workplace examples.
While we are all science nerds and therefore notorious for
our lack of social skills, we still need to have interpersonal skills in order
for our work to run smoothly. Isn’t it
easier to have a lab mate that you trust
take care of a small part of your big experiment so that you can focus on the
main objective? Isn’t it easier to
communicate with your PI when you trust them
to guide you through a rough patch of experiments and when they are confident in your ability to perform the
actual science correctly? Doesn’t the
work get done faster when you’re not
worried about whether the PBS you made last week hasn’t been swapped out with
HCl by one of your lab mates? (I haven’t had any experience with this but it
was a horror story somebody told me while I was interviewing at grad schools.)
All of this has made me think about how my actions are
perceived in the lab. Do my actions help people trust me? Do my actions help me trust me? I believe that people want to be connected to
other people and by having integrity and expressing compassion. I personally feel my best when I’m working
positively with others, making a connection with them whether it is through a
collaborative experiment or an idea exchange.
When we connect with other, it forms a network of support and a platform
for productivity and positivity. Learning how to build a network and platform
now will help us transition into any job opportunities, research based or
non-traditional, and any professional and personal relationships we have in the
future.
“Whether you’re on a sports team, in an office or a member
of a family, if you can’t trust one another there’s going to be trouble.” – Joe
Paterno
“There are no moral shortcuts in the game of business – or life. There are, basically three kinds of people:
the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful and those who become and remain
successful. The difference is character.” - Jon Hunstman, Chairman – Huntsman Chemical
“What creates trust, in the end, is the leader’s manifest
respect for the followers.” – James O’Toole, Author of Leading Change
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