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What Is 'Earned Regard'?

• Trust is earned through trustworthy behavior and positive results.
• When you demonstrate competence, reliability, good judgement, skill, or the capacity to deliver positive results, your Earned Regard increases. When you demonstrate the opposite, your Earned Regard decreases.

Josh Kaufman Explains 'Earned Regard'

Building Trust between individuals takes time and effort. In most situations, other people won’t give you substantial Power, responsibility, or control until you demonstrate trustworthiness and an ability to deliver.

Earned Regard is a subjective estimate of how much Trust you have built with an individual over time. When you demonstrate competence, reliability, good judgement, skill, or the capacity to deliver positive results, your Earned Regard tends to increase. When you demonstrate the opposite, your Earned Regard with that individual decreases.

In an interview with Shane Parrish, Tobi Lütke, cofounder and CEO of Shopify, explains this idea by way of a metaphor: the “trust battery,” which is charged or depleted based on the Quality and quantity of interactions over time. This metaphor makes it easier to discuss Earned Regard in a more direct, less emotional way:

So much about working in teams is the way you communicate working together, and the way you give each other feedback. It’s so much easier to say, “Hey, I love working with you and the kind of work you do, but you don’t show up to the team meetings, and I just want you to know those two things offset each other. This is why your trust battery with the rest of the team is just not going up, even though you’re doing great work.” That’s a much better conversation than saying, “Hey, do you not care about us?” […]

I want Shopify to be a company [where] people have an enormous amount of personal autonomy. But it’s not possible to just bestow that on everyone, because trust needs to be earned. And so, when you have a concept like this where you can say, “Hey, get to 80-90 percent of the trust battery with the majority of the people around you, and then we give you an area to own, and we trust that you own it.” That’s what people do already. So all we are doing is putting a metaphor into play that people can refer to and give people a goal of saying, “Hey, here’s what I get if I build trust with the rest of the team.”

It’s possible to build Earned Regard in a systematic way. In The Snowball System, Mo Bunnell, a veteran sales professional, recommends creating a list of your most important professional contacts, along with a list of people with whom you’d like to establish a new or stronger relationship. This list of VIPs is useful in two ways: it’s a practical Checklist you can use to ensure you keep in contact and a Priming tool that makes it easier to recognize when you come across anything one of your contacts might find useful or interesting. As a result, you’ll identify more opportunities to have a positive interaction, interact more often, and strengthen the relationship faster than you would’ve by leaving future interactions to chance.

The more Earned Regard you accumulate with the people in your life, the stronger your relationships will become, and the more opportunities you’ll have as a result.

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"You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do."

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and assembly-line pioneer

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Share this concept:

https://personalmba.com/earned-regard/

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