trustWhat would you say if someone asked you, “What’s the #1 ingredient for a successful relationship?” I’m talking about any type of relationship—marriage, parent-child, work, church, civic organization, Boy Scouts, baseball team, etc.

In my opinion, and probably yours, too, there’s only one answer. The single most important ingredient in any successful relationship is trust. No question. Hands down. No more thought required.

As a business coach, I’ve experienced the entire spectrum of trust with people in my program. In some of these coaching relationships, we’ve trusted each other 100%. On the other hand, I’ve worked with a few people where trust was nonexistent. I’ve said this thousands of times over the past 25 years: If you don’t have trust in a relationship, you don’t have anything.

We all know that trust is earned. You can’t buy it, borrow it or make it up. It really can’t even be gifted. It is earned over time and through experiences shared with another person or group.

A while back, an executive called me to talk about coaching one of his company’s promising managers. As he explained, this manager was an important part of the team. He was experienced, proven, and had the trust and respect of the people who worked for him. The only thing missing was a sense of trust in relation to the leadership team. The executives at the company didn’t trust the manager’s loyalty to them.

He was “all in” with the people who reported to him, and he was “all but in” with the leadership team. That wasn’t enough. While he was doing a good job working with his own team, if things didn’t get better, his career and overall success with the company would be in jeopardy.

By the time I met with the manager and the executive for their “kickoff session,” the meeting felt more like an intervention than a professional-development coaching engagement. It was obvious the manager had little, if any, trust in the executive. And we all know “you get what you give.” So the executive had little real trust in the manager. Yet the executive was the one who had called me because he believed in the manager’s potential and valued him. Still, things had to change.

I knew that if we were going to have any chance of success in this coaching relationship, I first had to earn the manager’s trust. And that wasn’t going to be easy or fast, since he wasn’t the one who reached out for my help. I made a promise to talk only to the manager for the first several months of our coaching arrangement. There would be no executive interaction, even though I usually do get the boss’s feedback in the early months of manager coaching. At that initial meeting, the executive listed his objectives for the coaching sessions, and the manager gave his input. We all agreed on six- and 12-month goals, and the boss stepped away.

Over the next few months, the manager began trusting me and our process. He started to open up and get vulnerable in our sessions. We discussed why he didn’t trust the executive team. It came down to the fact that trust must be earned, and it’s a two-way process.

Just as importantly, the manager acknowledged that he wanted to be a part of the leadership team, and he knew to do that he had to be “all in” with them. He recognized that to achieve his goal of a place on the executive leadership team, he had to change how he felt about that team. This is important: When he moved the focus from not trusting the leadership team to wanting to be a part of it, he set a definite, positive goal and establishing trust was the way to achieve that goal.

He began taking chances trusting the executive team. And his risks proved to be successful. I challenged him to affirm successes with his boss and to “raise his hand” and question the situation if he felt trust was absent.

One year later, the manager has made tremendous progress. People throughout the organization have seen the changes and growth in him. Several people have commented to me about the manager’s evolution as an emerging and promising executive.

I told the executive and the manager that the coaching worked because the manager was willing to do the work—the really hard work, some of it internal—to establish, nurture and reciprocate trust. It took patience, some risk, determination and perseverance from everyone involved—starting with the manager.

Do you have trust in the important relationships in your life? With trust, you can accomplish so much. If you are willing to work to build—and maintain trust—truly amazing things can happen.

Trust me—I’m right on this.