Stephen M. R. Covey
Global Practice Leader for Speed of Trust Practice, CoveyLink
Author, Trust & Inspire
A new world of work requires a new way to lead. Command and control is dead. Trust and inspire is that new way to lead.
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan Fleischmann sits down with Stephen M. R. Covey—bestselling author and Global Practice Leader at FranklinCovey—for a powerful conversation on how trust transforms leadership. From growing up as the son of the legendary Stephen R. Covey to leading one of the world’s largest leadership development organizations, Stephen shares his deeply personal and professional journey to discovering trust as the key to unlocking human potential.
Stephen discusses pivotal moments—from his "green and clean" childhood lesson in responsibility to helping companies scale purpose through trust. The episode unpacks the core ideas behind The Speed of Trust and Trust and Inspire, exploring why outdated command-and-control models no longer serve today’s organizations.
Mentions & Resources
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything - by Stephen M. R. Covey
Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy, and Joy in a Low-Trust World - by Stephen M. R. Covey
Trust and Inspire - by Stephen M. R. Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
Guest Bio
Stephen M. R. Covey is The New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Speed of Trust, which has been translated into 22 languages and has sold over 2 million copies worldwide. He is co-author of the Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others and Smart Trust.
Stephen brings to his writings the perspective of a practitioner, as he is the former President & CEO of the Covey Leadership Center, where he increased shareholder value by 67 times and grew the company to become the largest leadership development firm in the world.
A Harvard MBA, Stephen co-founded and currently leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice. He serves on numerous boards, including the Government Leadership Advisory Council - Partnership for Public Service, and he has been recognized with the lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust” from the advocacy group, Trust Across America/Trust Around the World.
Stephen is a highly-sought after international speaker, who has taught trust and leadership in 56 countries to business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO entities.
Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann.
I’m joined today by a global authority on trust and leadership, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author who has transformed how organizations inspire greatness. Stephen M.R. Covey currently serves as the Global Practice Leader of Franklin Covey’s global Speed of Trust practice. Over his career, he has gained broad experience helping to coach and develop leaders, and previously led the largest leadership development firm in the world.
Stephen’s groundbreaking books The Speed of Trust, Smart Trust, and Trust and Inspire have sold millions of copies and reshaped how leaders approach building high-trust cultures. He has taught trust and leadership in 56 countries across public, private, and civil society sectors.
I’m really thrilled to have Stephen on the show today to discuss his career journey, the principles behind his trust-driven philosophy, his insightful books, and the many lessons in leadership he’s learned along the way.
Stephen, welcome to “Leadership Matters.” I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Thrilled we made it happen.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Well, thank you, Alan. I’m excited as well. Love your show and just the whole topic of leadership.
Alan Fleischmann
I think people are starving for authentic leadership. Always have, I think, more than ever. And I think we’re so inundated by so much noise in the world right now that people are looking for the voices, not just the words. And I think we have an opportunity and a challenge ahead of us.
But before we get too far, let’s talk a little bit — we were just talking before the show started about your early life, your upbringing. Obviously, some of us know about it, but some of us would love to hear more. Tell us a little bit about life growing up, brothers and sisters, obviously what your parents did, and anything that you want to share. Because your journey has been a lifelong journey on this topic, and I’d love to see how it ignited, where it all began — obviously with your dad being one of the most influential leaders and thinkers of the 20th century. And what was it like growing up focused on values, on developing habits, on purpose and family?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, well, let me say this — it was a really amazing experience growing up. And I feel blessed, fortunate, lucky to grow up in a home where I had both my dad and my mom, who is every bit my dad’s equal, just not as well known.
And my dad, Stephen R. Covey, is the one that wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And we had nine kids, so I was one of nine. And we like to say that we were the first guinea pigs for the seven habits. We were the first testing group for it. And my dad would try out the ideas on us and refine them. And so we kind of learned the seven habits growing up when they weren’t seven habits, when they were just individual principles one by one. And it was really over time my dad kind of put them all together into seven with a framework that really made sense.
But that was a really extraordinary experience. I’ll just give you one example. So one of the habits is “begin with the end in mind.” I’ll never forget, we had a family meeting, and my dad takes the family up to a construction site where we go in a building next door to where this big hole in the ground was. We go to the top of the building. It was a big skyscraper. And we got on top, went out on the roof with this architect. And we looked down at the big hole down below, and they were building a new building that would go right next to the skyscraper.
And the architect had these blueprints. And my dad said, “Okay, now look — this building you see right now is just a hole, but there’s going to be a building just like the one we’re standing on in about a year and a half. And this architect has got these blueprints of that building. He’s already built it in his mind. He’s built it on paper, and now we’re going to build it physically.” And he said, “Kids, that’s what I mean by begin with the end in mind.”
So he would do these visual experiences, and he always just taught us principles. But we were really quite fortunate to kind of grow up with that kind of teaching in the home, and it really impacted me and all of us siblings. And we kind of had our own little language and everything — the seven habits language. And we’d talk about synergizing. And all our friends were wondering, “What the heck are you talking about, synergize?”
And so it was a remarkable experience growing up with my siblings and also with such great parents.
Alan Fleischmann
What is your number of the nine? What is your —
Stephen M.R. Covey
I’m number three of nine. There’s four boys, five girls, and I’m the third. I’m the oldest son.
Alan Fleischmann
Did a lot of you get involved in the work of the family and your dad’s stuff?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, yeah. A number of us have — a couple of my sisters, and really all four of the brothers did at some point. And people are doing some different things now, but most of us have been involved in some way, shape, or form along the way.
Alan Fleischmann
And do you remember how old you were when your dad’s book took off?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Totally. I remember it was launched in 1989. The thing is, Alan, he’d been working on it for a decade prior. He actually gave his first talk on seven habits in 1979. It took a whole decade for the book to come out. Usually it’s the other way around, right? You write the book and then start talking. My dad was talking about it, teaching it, training on it with all kinds of big organizations before the book got launched.
Alan Fleischmann
How did he come up with seven? Not eight, not six, the magic seven? I thought there was something so authentic about the fact that — I remember exactly when I read the book the first time, but I remember thinking how remarkable it was. It wasn’t like everyone does three or five or 10 or 15. They always have a number for a reason. And I just was curious why seven. It made it feel more authentic.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, it just kind of evolved into what became a framework. Because, again, he was teaching these principles individually. Like he talked about proactivity — that’s habit one. He talked about begin with the end in mind, which is habit two, and so forth. So each of the seven he kind of was teaching individually, as well as a couple of others.
But then the framework came to him that the first three habits were about moving yourself from dependence to independence. He called that the private victory. And the next three habits became about moving yourself from independence to interdependence. And he called that the public victory. And then he had a habit that encircled all of them that he called “sharpen the saw,” which was the habit of renewal — always make sure you’re never too busy to take time to sharpen the saw.
So it kind of evolved into this useful framework of moving yourself from dependence to independence to interdependence, and then always renewing yourself along the way. And so it was the three for the private victory, the three for the public victory, and then the renewal habit. And again, it kind of evolved.
Now what’s interesting is, you look back at it now, and somewhere along the way, someone said, “This is the greatest name for a book that you could have — The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” But at the time, there were some people — there were a lot of publishers that initially rejected it, and one said, “That’s the worst title I’ve ever heard.”
Alan Fleischmann
And now that it’s the norm, everybody loves it. Back in the day, nobody loved it, I guess.
What I also find amazing is being a dad now of a 20, almost 21-year-old and an 18-year-old — and you’ve done so many versions of the book, and your dad did — but it’s evergreen. Those principles still are as relevant and significant today as they were when you published the book. And that’s not the case for a lot of books around leadership or trust. Some of the classic ones, the best ones, certainly are, but it’s not always the case, I should say.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah. It isn’t the case. And the reason for seven habits is that my dad focused on principles as opposed to practices. He’d use some examples from time, but he’d always focus on the principle that was timeless and universal and not tied to a particular culture, but applied to all cultures, anytime, anywhere. And because of that, it’s really a classic book, a timeless book.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah. It doesn’t get disrupted by technology. We’re talking about principles. Technology is a tool, maybe, but it’s not the means to the end here at all.
Let’s go back to you a little bit. Your first work experience was actually doing lawn care. And I’m curious how that happened — the Green and Clean Lawn Care Company when you were a kid. And you continued to do that for 10 years. I’m curious if you think about that a lot today, what kind of role that played in your plotting and planning and future development as well.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, well, the Green and Clean Lawn Care all came about from when my dad — and he writes about this in seven habits — when, as a seven-year-old boy, he gave me the responsibility to take care of our lawn, our grass. And it sounds easy today, but at the time, this was in the days before automatic sprinklers, and we had three different sections of grass. This was kind of a big job. But he kind of trained me how to do it, taught me how to turn on the sprinklers, taught me how to clean up. And as a seven-year-old, it felt pretty ominous.
But I took it on after two weeks of training. And at first, after he gave me the job, for about five days, I did nothing. And this was in the middle of the summer when it was scorching hot, and the lawn was about to — it was turning yellow. It was anything but green and anything but clean. And that was the goal — green and clean.
But it was from that experience that I realized, “Hey, I’m responsible here. I own this. My dad is trusting me to take care of this lawn, and he believes in me.” And rather than giving up on me and saying, “Hey, he’s too young,” instead, he kind of came back to the agreement, and he said, “Why don’t we walk around and you can tell me how it’s going?”
And I realized at that time, five days into it, having done nothing, that the lawn is turning yellow and it’s not clean, so anything but green and clean. And it was at that moment when my dad said, “Hey, I’m willing to be your helper if you need help.” And I said, “Would you help me?” He said, “Yeah, that’s our agreement. I’ll help you if I have time.” “Do you have time, Dad?” “I’ve got time,” he said.
So I ran in the house. I came out with a garbage sack, one for me, one for him, and then I began to direct my dad. “Would you go over and pick up that garbage?” He said, “I’m your helper.”
It was at that moment I realized, “This is my job. I own this. I can do this.” And I started — I began to see myself differently as a seven-year-old. And I took responsibility, and I took care of that lawn, and it was green and it was clean. My dad didn’t have to remind me about it one more time, not only for that summer, but for another decade that followed. And I began to take care of some other lawns too and kind of took responsibility.
And it was really a great example of empowerment, of really being trusted as a seven-year-old. Because at the time, honestly, Alan, as a seven-year-old, I didn’t really care about money. But I didn’t want to let my dad down, and I wanted to live up to the confidence that he had in me and how he inspired me and how he really treated me according to my potential, not my behavior. And I ultimately lived up to that potential.
So it was really formative for me to be trusted at a young age, to be empowered, and then to be kind of coached and mentored to rise up and realize I can do this. And so it was kind of very transformative for me as a young boy. It became really a mindset for how I view the world through the lens of trust, and what being trusted, being inspired, what it can do for someone — because it happened to me.
Alan Fleischmann
What also is really cool is it also underscores the power of mentorship in many ways, and the power of parenting, family. I mean, so clearly you’re describing how you didn’t want to disappoint your dad. The power of being the person who can be looked up to.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, absolutely. It was, because someone asked me the other day, “Hey, how do I get my kids to buy into Green and Clean?” And I said, “Well, try to find a way, try to get them to identify with it, and find some type of — it could be money. I mean, if they’re older, money would have probably excited me. But at the time, as a seven-year-old, it was just more that I loved my dad, didn’t want to let him down. He believed in me, and I wanted to kind of come through for him.” And so trying to find that overlap of purpose, if you will. And it could be identification.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. And that was your thing. That was your thing. So you went on to Brigham Young University. You got a degree in American Studies. I want to know why American Studies. And tell us a little bit — I mean, that was your university, I imagine, because it was nearby, you also knew it, and you probably had a strong connection to it. So it seemed like a natural that you would want to go there, I could get that. But when you were there, are there classes that you loved? Why American Studies? And I’m very struck on this idea of the role of mentors. And I’m curious if anybody — the dad seems like he was a great mentor, but are there other people that kind of were from the university life and maybe even high school? I should ask for that as well.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll say this — American Studies was, I couldn’t decide what major to pick. And I was interested in history, in English, in political science. And American Studies enabled me to kind of blend all of those with a focus through an American lens. But it was heavy with history and political science and English, and so it was an integrative major. And it enabled me to kind of have a good liberal arts education with the idea that I always planned to go get an MBA. And so I thought, “Hey, undergrad, I’ll do a liberal arts one.”
And I did have a mentor. It was the head of the American Studies program, Dr. Neil York. And he’s another one that kind of believed in me. I took an early class from him when I was debating whether to do the major. And I’ll never forget on a paper that I wrote, his comments that he wrote up saying, “Hey, you have an understanding of this that is really good. You could be — this would be a great major for you, and you could excel and do this.”
And it was just more someone seeing potential in me and communicating it to me in a way that I came to see it in myself. So kind of he did for me, academically, what my dad had done for me as a young boy. He believed in me and helped me come to believe in myself. And so Dr. Neil York was a mentor for me in college.
And then I went on and did a little bit of work experience in between for a couple of years in Dallas, Texas with Trammell Crow Company, the real, big real estate development company. And then I went and got my MBA from Harvard Business School, and had some mentors there that have kind of impacted me as well over time.
Alan Fleischmann
Cool. I love that. And then — did you go direct? By the time you graduated from Harvard, your dad had already started the Covey Leadership Center, right?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah. He had started it, actually, when I was still at the university before I left, but it hadn’t really taken off yet. He started it in ’83, and it was not until ’89 when the book came out, The Seven Habits book came out, that it really took off. And so prior to that, it was mostly just my dad and a few people doing consulting work. When the book came out, then it changed everything. And I had finished at Harvard, and I joined about six months before the book was published.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow, that’s amazing. So you went to the center right where the storm hit in a good way.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Well, and I remember thinking about that because all my classmates were graduating, I was graduating, and, you know, “What are you going to do?” And I had some good, traditional offers that were really good. Like, I had a chance to do work on Wall Street with a big investment bank. I’d done that over the summer. I loved it. They offered me to come back. And that was pretty exciting — New York City type of thing, deal making.
And then I also had a chance to go back to Trammell Crow Company, where I’d worked for a couple of years, and I loved that and loved the people there. And then I had this other little fledgling opportunity. This is what it looked like to all my classmates — with a little small company, my dad’s company. And no one knew about it. But I knew that he had something that was phenomenal in the seven habits. It’s just that no one knew about it yet.
So I said, “Hey, I could go build buildings, or I could go build people.” And I chose to go build people, which I felt was more aligned with my unique mission. Nothing wrong with building buildings — that could be someone else’s unique mission. But I felt like building people was mine. And I joined up with my dad and really kind of helped create the wave behind it.
Alan Fleischmann
So cool. I love that. So when you started, you had a role at the Leadership Center?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, I mean, I came in really as kind of a business developer, a client developer, working with clients, kind of learning the business from the ground up, trying to sell leadership development programs and training and processes at the time, and working directly with clients to kind of learn this business. And I wanted to pay my dues like anyone else would.
And that really was helpful, because I learned clients. I learned client needs. I learned our content. I learned how to apply our content to meeting the needs of clients, to add value, to create value for them. And I learned how to sell. I learned how to position and offer this.
And then I started individually, and then I began to work on a team, and then I became the team leader of the team. And then over time, I began to lead multiple teams. And then over time, I began to lead the whole Client Services Group. And then at some point, was asked to lead the company.
Alan Fleischmann
How many employees were there when you started, and how many employees did it grow to have?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, well, when we started, we probably had about 30 when I started. And then when, by the time we did the merger with Franklin Quest, some eight or nine years later, we had, I’m thinking — well actually, yeah, it was about 700 at the time. And really more than that, because a lot of our international partners were licensee partners, so they’re not employees, and we didn’t count them in those numbers. But if we added it all up, I think it was 1,200.
Alan Fleischmann
Under your leadership, I know the Covey Leadership Center doubled its revenues and increased its profits by a factor of 12, I think?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, yeah. And that’s the big thing — we always had a good mission. People were drawn to it. Seven habits was so powerful, and this idea of principle-centered leadership and focusing on principles that applied to everyone was so powerful.
And so our challenge was not opportunity, because we had all kinds of opportunities to work with businesses, but also with families, with communities. And we found ourselves getting into a lot of at the time — I call them hobbies, where it was something that met the purpose of the mission, but we didn’t know how to make money at it. And you can only be in so many hobbies before it starts to impact the entire company. And so our margin had gone down.
And when I came in, we’d had 11 years of negative cash flow. We were growing. So there wasn’t a growth issue. It wasn’t a value proposition. It was we didn’t have a business model yet to figure out how to make money, and our margins weren’t good. And we had to kind of adopt the mantra, “No margin, no mission,” because it was a very mission-driven group.
And if you just come in and say, “Hey, we’re going to focus on operating like a business,” that wasn’t going to excite and inspire people. They wanted to be part of a cause, a mission. And so I said, “Look, I love the mission, but if there’s no margin, there’s no mission. We’ve got to figure out a business model for this. If we do that and get a good margin, then we can grow and expand the mission.”
And so we said, “Look, we’re not just an ordinary business. No, we’re a mission-driven business. We’re a business with a mission. But we have to see ourselves as a business, not as just a cause. Otherwise, if we don’t operate by business principles, we won’t be around, and no one will want to model after us if we’re not viable.”
So that’s where we had to — that’s why we had the dramatic increase in profit, because we figured out a business model, we figured out how to scale ourselves. And once we did that, then the profit dramatically increased. And then with that, it opened this up to all kinds of possibilities. And that’s when we decided, at some point, to do the merger with Franklin Quest, to kind of leapfrog, forming Franklin Covey and bringing together two like organizations that, rather than competing, let’s collaborate and see what we could do together.
Alan Fleischmann
That formed the global Speed of Trust practice, which you lead. I know that came out of that merger as well, right?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Well, yeah, that actually came out later, about five years after the merger. So we did the merger, combined, formed, created Franklin Covey. And then I kind of went independent for a few years after five years after the merger and said, “I’m going to focus on what I feel called to do, which is trust.”
Because I saw in the merger itself, two good companies coming together, wonderful people, good values, but we’d been arch competitors. And suddenly, when we were put together, there was low trust because we were so competitive in how we viewed the world. And that kind of hurt us in the first year or so of the merger, until we recognized, “Look, we’ve got to trust each other for this to work.” And so we began to focus on building that trust intentionally, deliberately, and we did.
And when we built the trust, it changed everything. We could move faster, less cost. We were far more creative, far more innovative, and far more focused on creating value for customers. And I came away from that whole experience saying, “Wow, trust matters enormously. And we always have known that, but I think we were underestimating how much it mattered by a factor of 10, maybe by a factor of 100.” Trust matters. And trust is learnable. It’s movable. You can actually build it intentionally. You can build it on purpose.
And I said, “I think I found something I want to talk about, even write about.” And by the way, Alan, in my leadership journey, it was easier for me to focus on the business side, because that way I wouldn’t be compared to my father. My father was an author, a teacher, and that was a little bit intimidating. I have his name, and he wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the biggest books of all time. And it was a little daunting to think I was going to try to do that.
So I kind of went into the business side, and I did that for nearly 15 years. But after I found my voice around trust, I no longer was frightened or fearful of taking it on, of saying, “You know what? I think I found what I want to talk about, what I want to write about and focus on.”
So I kind of transitioned my career from practitioner to thought leader. But I left the company and I formed my own group, CoveyLink. That’s where I wrote The Speed of Trust, and really created a whole training program and consulting methodology around it that we ran independently for six years. And then Franklin Covey came back and said, “Hey, why don’t we — we’re interested in bringing this into us,” because they saw the success we were having.
And so I merged back into the mothership, if you will. And I’ve been a part of that. And I did that to leapfrog the work that we were doing, rather than repeat what I’d done before in building, you know, Franklin Covey and its predecessor, Covey Leadership Center. I thought I could repeat that, or I could leapfrog it by merging back with the company that’s doing a similar thing. And that’s what I did, and it just brought me back to the mothership, if you will.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s so cool. But I thought it’s really cool to know — you had your dad’s name. Your dad was so successful. But you too had a search to kind of find your own voice. And I love the fact that you realized that you were enough. I mean, the hardest thing to be the son or daughter of someone who’s so famous is those who succeed are the ones who embrace the legacy and realize they’re enough and they have their own unique voice. And maybe a wonderful legacy, frankly, is that you’re living on the success. Certainly you wouldn’t maybe have had the name recognition without your dad first, but the fact that you have added to it to have your own lane is a new altitude. You obviously — it’s not like you added a lane that is in a separate world. You added one that was actually adding enormous value and values. So it’s cool that you actually discovered, luckily, that you have your own voice as well.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, it really was just that — a discovery. And I’ll tell you what, Alan, it was easier for me to kind of just be on the business leadership side, focus in on being an operator. And the truth is, it was a little intimidating, and I was a little bit fearful to be a thought leader, to try to be a thought leader, because I thought I’d just be a poor man’s version of my dad at best.
But once I found my voice, once I found that trust is it — that trust is the kind of overestimated, neglected, ignored, indispensable asset that’s impacting everything and that is learnable. And I felt, I experienced that in the merger. And I came out of that saying, “Aha. I found what I want to talk about.” I discovered it.
That gave me the courage to overcome the fear of trying to be a thought leader. And at that point, I didn’t care. I did say, “I’m enough. I feel like I want to talk about this.” And I didn’t worry about not measuring up to my dad, but rather, “I can do this, and I’ve just focused on it.”
And I also said, “Look, I have a huge advantage. I have my father’s name. And as long as I know that I’m enough, that’s sufficient. Now let the market speak for itself.”
Alan Fleischmann
The fact that you’re enough, and then also to know that you, with that name and with that legacy, you have a power. And I always often tell people who are worried about, “Am I living off the success of my parent?” — my attitude is like, find that voice. Know you’re enough if you have the talents and skills. I mean, obviously there’s some people that don’t, but if you do, what are you doing with the power you’ve inherited?
Just like your dad grabbed his power and figured out his direction and used it for the world, you were raised in a household where expectations were high, having a life purpose was extraordinarily, significantly important. And you could have ignored your power and said, “I’m going to live off the, you know, I either ignore or live off the laurels of others,” or you’re going to embrace it and say, “How do I enhance it and ensure that my power has purpose too?”
Stephen M.R. Covey
You’re right. And that kind of was the choice. And I chose the latter, and it took some courage. Once I found my voice, I gained the courage. And then I do feel like I have kind of expanded upon that. So I do feel a sense of stewardship, responsibility to live up to it, but also to kind of build on it and add some unique value to it. And I feel like I’ve done that around the area of trust.
Alan Fleischmann
So I definitely want to zero in on trust in a minute too. Because I think if there’s ever been — you’ve been doing it for a while, and you’ve been focused on trust. And if there’s ever a need, gosh, on so many levels, public, private, and civil society, for us to focus on trust, it’s now.
So before we go there, because I want to spend time on that. First I wanted to say to all who are just coming on, you’re listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Stephen M.R. Covey. I’m here with Alan Fleischmann, Global Practice Leader of Franklin Covey’s global Speed of Trust practice, a New York Times bestselling author, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, a leader who really reminds us of the significant importance of trust, but also to build community, whether in work life or personal life, around the significance of trust, if we’re truly going to have a life of purpose and transformation.
I love it. But I have a question for you, and this may be something you don’t want to talk about on a radio show, but I’m curious. With Sean’s name out there and your name out there, do you both work together? Are you separate, and how do you divide and conquer? Are you supportive of one another, or is there a sibling rivalry? I don’t know if you want to get into this, but how does that work? Because I think of his name out there, your name out there. I think of other siblings that are in the business. I guess you’re both in leadership too, but you two definitely are the most prominent names.
Stephen M.R. Covey
I know. Yeah, yeah. I adore my brother, Sean. He’s phenomenal. And we’re actually doing similar work, but we have our different lanes. I mean, he’s — what he’s done, he’s focused heavily on education, so higher ed, K–12. But also he’s taken my father’s seven habits and adapted it to youth. So he wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens and The Seven Habits of Happy Kids. And he leads the whole education business at Franklin Covey.
So he’s a really talented individual that’s both an operator — because he’s the president of Franklin Covey’s education unit — but he’s also a thought leader in that he focuses on taking my father’s work on seven habits and applying it to new audiences and making it really relevant.
And so it’s not a sibling rivalry, just the opposite. It’s a sibling synergy. I learned from him, he learns from me. Whereas I have felt that my work is less around taking my father’s work on seven habits, but more to take an adjacency — trust — where I feel called, and try to bring that really to everybody, both the education but also the business and healthcare and government and NGOs and all kinds of organizations around the world.
And Sean’s my biggest supporter, and I’m his biggest supporter.
Alan Fleischmann
Are there any other brothers or sisters in Franklin Covey as well?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, my brother Josh is involved also with Franklin Covey in the education division. My sister Cynthia — she actually co-authored with my father his final work, his last lecture, if you will, last big idea that they were working on before he passed away. But then he passed away, and she thought, “Oh, we didn’t finish the book.” But then she later said, “You know what? We maybe didn’t finish the book while he was living, but we did map out the entire book. I’m going to finish it for him.” And she did.
And so it’s a book called Live Life in Crescendo. And the subtitle is what it’s about: “Your most important work is always ahead of you.” And it’s the idea of crescendo in music, where everything goes up, versus diminuendo where it goes down. And the idea is that you see your life, you live your life in crescendo, where, rather than saying, “Hey, I’m going to retire, my work is done,” you might retire from a job, but you never retire from making contributions.
It’s the whole mindset of you’re always — your greatest work is still in front of you. So it’s a mindset, a crescendo mentality, live life in crescendo. So she’s involved. I’ve had other sisters involved in different ways, and then my other brother, David, has been involved too. So there’s quite a few of us.
It’s Franklin Covey, and so you got the Covey name in there. And it’s a publicly traded company, so it’s not a family business, per se, but it’s naturally a draw to family members, because it’s part of my dad’s legacy and we all feel a sense of stewardship for it.
Alan Fleischmann
Let’s talk about your most recent book. And actually, I always say that one of the great core ingredients of trust is consistency. And one of the biggest problems we’re facing right now globally, politically and otherwise — I don’t want to get in politics, but if you don’t want to — but when we lose that trust, that consistency, we lose the trust. And it’s very hard, you know. I would say, if you know that someone’s going to be reliable, dependable, and consistent, you trust them. You trust at least that interaction. But when they don’t offer that, it’s not consistent, then you’re never going to fully throw the ball and know they’re going to catch it, and that’s a big part.
So your most recent book is Trust and Inspire, right? How great leaders unleash greatness in others. I love that. And tell us a little bit about the book and some of the key lessons you’d hope the readers will take away, why they should buy the book, which I’m going to argue as well, because of what they’ll learn from it. And I also — you wrote Command and Control, right? A previous book which went through leadership models. And you have the Smart Trust book. But focus on where you want, but I think Trust and Inspire and The Speed of Trust are classics at this point, right now as well, and probably have never been more important.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, yeah. I do think that everything you just said, Alan, about today, especially because we’re living in a world of declining trust in most of our institutions, most organizations. And that’s true in most of the world — it’s an increasingly low-trust world.
And the danger of a low-trust world is that it tends to replicate itself and repeat itself. Distrust and suspicion tends to create more distrust and suspicion, because nobody wants to get burned and everyone wants to guard themselves, protect themselves. But you can find yourself perpetuating a vicious downward cycle. Distrust and suspicion creating more of the same. Distrust is contagious. That’s the danger.
So we’ve got to consciously, intentionally counteract it, because it can work the other direction too, where trust and confidence can, in fact, create more trust and confidence. It could become a virtuous upward spiral, where you say what you’re going to do, and then you do what you say you’re going to do, and you build that trust on purpose. And that’s what we need.
And so my first book was The Speed of Trust, which is really all about why trust matters. That is the one thing that changes everything. And that also, that trust is a learnable skill. It’s a competency, something you can build intentionally, on purpose. And you identified the key thing. You say what you’re going to do, and then you do what you say you’re going to do. That simple. Now, there’s a lot of other components to it, but at one level, it’s that simple. And you behave your way into trust, just like you can behave your way out of it.
And so you learn the behaviors that build trust, and you manifest them, you exhibit them, you put them into practice, into action, you do it, and you do it consistently, so you’re reliable and you can be trustworthy, and you can be trusted. And so that’s The Speed of Trust.
What Trust and Inspire adds to it is — I’m trying to say this is a leadership philosophy. It’s an approach of leading. And I’m contrasting “trust and inspire” to the traditional hierarchical command and control model, which is, “Hey, I’m the boss. I’m in charge. And I dictate and I bark out orders.” Maybe that worked in the past, but it’s a new world today. There’s just change and disruption hitting us everywhere. Generative AI, disruption, all this change happening.
And also, these younger generations, new — Gen Z, this upcoming generation, Alpha — people have choices and options today in a way they didn’t have before. There’s a change in the workplace where suddenly there’s hybrid work, remote work that didn’t exist before. And the old command and control model doesn’t work very well in a world that needs to be agile and adaptive and responsive and appeal to younger generations.
So a new world of work requires a new way to lead, and command and control won’t do it. So I’m saying what we need to move to is what I’m calling “trust and inspire,” in contrast to command and control. Where you’re not only trustworthy, which is you do what you say you’re going to do, but you’re also as a leader, trusting. You’re willing to give that trust, to extend that trust, to empower — like I learned as a seven-year-old boy from my dad with Green and Clean — to be trusted as the most inspiring form of human motivation.
And so you model the behavior. You extend trust. You’re trusting. And you focus on inspiring others by connecting with people through a sense of caring, and then connecting people to purpose and to meaning and the contribution. So you model, you trust, you inspire. And that’s just such a better way to lead — trust and inspire — than command and control, which doesn’t inspire anyone, and it doesn’t also generate creativity and innovation or speed.
Whereas trust and inspire not only inspires people, it’s in the name, but it also is more collaborative, far more innovative. You move, you’re far more agile, far more adaptive, responsive and able to navigate the new world. And it especially appeals to the younger generations.
And so I’m just saying a new world of work requires a new way to lead. Command and control is dead. Trust and inspire is that new way to lead. And I kind of map out how we become increasingly trust and inspire leaders in our world today. We’ve got to re-script ourselves, because many of us, certainly us older ones, are deeply scripted in the command and control model. But it’s still the dominant model today. Nine out of 10 are still in command and control. They just become enlightened — and I call it “enlightened command and control.” But their paradigm is still a thing paradigm versus a people paradigm of trust and inspire.
Alan Fleischmann
This also, Stephen, is that I really believe heartily that the only way you can scale purpose is with trust. I mean, if you have good purpose — absolutely, I guess there’s bad purpose out there too — but if you really want it, if you have a great voice and you really have a very distinct idea of what you’re trying to do good in the world, if you’re so lucky to take that power that we talked about harnessing and having that voice, you can’t make an impact on the world. You can’t go viral. You can’t have scale. If you’re not going to be able to share it with other people, and you can’t share with other people and have them take the ball and run — you can’t be a great team member if you’re not going to trust.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Exactly right. Exactly right. Because trust — you’re doing this with them, not to them. Command and control, you’re doing it to them.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s right. Even if it’s for their best, but that’s transactional, tit for tat. It’s not transformational, but it’s transactional.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Exactly. Whereas trust inspires transformation. You’re doing it with them. And you’re creating purpose. You’re co-purposing together.
Can I give you a little example of that? This purpose in action, and how trust does it?
So Pepperdine University — I’ve worked some with them, and they have a school of business, the Graziadio School of Business, great organization. And here was their purpose. Their purpose was a good one. It was this: “Our purpose at Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine is to produce leaders who are best in the world.” That’s a good purpose. You want to have great leaders of competence.
But they changed one word and inspired everyone. And they said, “No, no, our purpose is not to produce leaders who are best in the world. Our purpose is to produce leaders who are best for the world” — one word, “for,” best for the world leaders.
And suddenly everyone became inspired. They scaled purpose to something of great contribution, great value — best for the world leaders. And that inspired not only the professors and the staff and members, but even the janitors. Everyone wanted to be part of that. But it required a level of trust, collaboration. And then you can scale that purpose. And when you co-purpose, overlap individual and organizational purpose, there’s a power to that, and that inspires people.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. That’s so powerful. But how do we get — I mean, one of the problems we have right now is the fear to speak up and speak out with trust, and which actually is breaking trust. Because a lot of stakeholders, whether you work with CEOs, I work with CEOs, we’re looking to our leaders in private industry and in civil society to speak out where there’s been a void in leadership, unfortunately, in public life.
And how do we get people to understand the part that they’re being trusted with is that — that straight talk is to speak up and speak out, not to be frightened or not to be quiet, and to articulate, for the purpose that you’re talking about? Because we have all a bunch of myriad of stakeholders in our lives. All of us do. But if you’re in a leadership position in the private sector and civil society, and I would argue in the public sector, that consistency of purpose, that constancy of values and value, is the only way to lead to trust. And you really aren’t going to have a legacy of success.
If you’re looking at history with a long lens, “Where am I on that park bench, looking back at my life and recalling what I’ve done on this earth?” — that’s a very different view than, “What am I doing tomorrow for the next quarter? What am I doing tomorrow for the next PR moment?” And I’m just curious what you say to — there’s a lot of trust being broken right now around the world. What do you say to people and how to navigate that? And what do you say about speaking up about that?
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, here’s two thoughts on that. First of all, I love the positioning you just gave. It’s vital, especially now.
So the first thought is this: someone needs to go first. Someone needs to take that risk. Someone needs to be open, to be vulnerable. And leaders go first. It’s a stewardship they have as a leader to go first, to model the behavior that they would like to see, to model not just courage, but also humility, to model not just authenticity, but also vulnerability — that they’re willing to make themselves vulnerable. And within boundaries, of course. But it’s interesting, the more open and vulnerable you are, the more people relate to it, and the faster they trust you. The more you put on airs and a front, the less they relate to it, and the slower they are to trust you. So it’s kind of ironic on that.
But then they model not just performance — we always need to perform — but they also model the empathy that often precedes it, where you can better understand someone’s situation, their context, and so that you can help coach them, not just manage them, but coach them, because you know where they’re coming from. And you have — you’re empathic. And the more empathy, the more they feel understood by you, the more open they are to your influence.
So if you want to increase your influence, first be influenced. We need someone to model this, to go first. Leaders go first. That’s great leadership. So that’d be my first thought — to have the courage and the humility to go first and model the behavior that you would like to see.
And the second thought would simply be this: sometimes we try to maybe do too much, and we’re looking at that grand arc and having an impact, but maybe the best way to start is in one relationship with one person. And rather than overwhelm yourself with, “I have to be this kind of leader towards everyone,” start with one.
Who is the one person that you can be a trust and inspire leader to, like my dad was to me in Green and Clean, or Dr. Neil York was to me in my American Studies Program, where you believe in someone, and you communicate that belief to them such that they come to see it in themselves? And you maybe unleash one person. And if you can do it with one, you can do it with another.
So I like to tell my clients I work with, identify one relationship that you would like to transform where they would benefit enormously by being more trusted and inspired by you, and start there and become that person for them, just like someone has for each of us. For you. And if you can do it with one, you can do it with another.
Alan Fleischmann
And the power of community in all this as well, right? The idea that if you’re the first one, you’re going to end up having others hopefully join your journey side by side. They need to see you lead and they go from there. I think that resonates big time.
Stephen M.R. Covey
So here’s a little exercise I’d ask our listeners to consider. And you too, Alan. Think of a person in your life — and again, speaking to the listeners in the life of you as a listener — think of a person in your life who believed in you, maybe who believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time, who had confidence in you, again, maybe more confidence than you had, who took a chance on you, maybe gave you an opportunity you maybe didn’t feel ready for. And they said — you might have said, “Hey, I’m not ready.” And they said, “Yes, you are. You can do this, and I’ve got your back.”
Someone who trusted and inspired you. Again, for me, it was my father, Dr. Neil York, I could think of a couple of others. They helped me come to believe in myself. They unleashed me.
But think of such a person in your life. And as you reflect upon such a person — again, it could be someone at work, but also someone at home, someone in your school, growing up, someone in your community, your service organization, anywhere, someone in athletics — what did that person, what did that kind of leadership do for you? How did you respond? You know, isn’t that what we want? My guess is it brought out the best in you and in each of us.
And then I ask you to reflect upon that. And then as you reflect upon what that did for you, to ask yourself this question: what if you could be that kind of leader to another, just like someone has been for you, to pay it forward?
And I find that’s just a simple exercise, but it gets us reflective upon how being trusted, being inspired, actually brings out the very best in all of us, rather than abusing that trust, taking advantage of it. Ninety-five, 99 out of 100 live up to it. Want to live up to it. Rise to the occasion, perform better. Yeah, there might be an abuser here or there of the trust. The vast majority are inspired by it, and it brings out the best in us. And it just shows you the power of this kind of leadership.
So thank that person. If you can — if they’re still living, thank them. If they passed on, thank a family member or friend. You’ll be amazed at what thanking them does to them and to you. And then I invite you, pay it forward. Start with one relationship and see what you can do with that. And that’ll give you a vision of what you can do with one — you could scale it and do it with many.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. I think, you know, there are philosophies and some books that say, “Kind of cure your way by letting others — kind of let them do what they do, and don’t let them become part of your distraction. Focus on yourself and how to protect yourself.” And certainly, if it’s in a disruptive, just disruptive or destructive relationship, I certainly adhere to that.
But I also hear what you’re saying — to take the risk, lean forward. Even if trust has been broken, don’t give up. You can actually restore trust by being an example. It may not work sometimes with some, but it may work with them later. And if they’re obviously people who break your trust over and over again, that isn’t your burden, because you tried.
But rebuilding trust, focusing on trust, believing in other people, and being that mentor — because you’re just right. Those who believed in me have had enormous impact on my life, and I still — those who aren’t with us anymore physically, I hear their words every day, and I wouldn’t be who I am without the person, the teacher that cared, the parents who said, you know, love is enduring, and the bar was set high, and they expected something that made me sit up a little straighter, walk a little taller, and walk a little brisker.
And I think what I love about this idea of speed of trust is that there’s also an urgency in your call to action. You’re saying your purpose is that without it, we can’t build community. We can’t curate and create society that we all want to be part of, and we can’t have a brotherhood and sisterhood that feels like we’re part of a village that can be at any scale and any size. But we can’t have any meaning or impact unless we actually lean in and say, “This is my responsibility to build trust. It’s my responsibility to hold a high bar and high standards for others, but most importantly, to believe in them as they believe in you.”
Stephen M.R. Covey
I couldn’t have said it better, Alan.
Alan Fleischmann
I love it. No, but I urge people to not only buy one of your books — buy all of your books. Certainly read your dad’s book. It’s evergreen. In case you get the Stephen Covey names mixed up, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is still a great book, and you should buy and read it. But you should also buy Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others. I would say Command and Control is the opposite of this in so many ways. I love how you contrast it.
And I think the two other books that you want to buy, besides Trust and Inspire, would be Smart Trust and The Speed of Trust. Yeah, yeah. They’re not — none of them are expired, none of them are old, right? They’re all — there’s synergy for all of them. Read one, you should read all of them.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Absolutely. There’s a synergy there. But to your point, this is how we not only thrive in relationships — one-on-one is trust. The best relationships are those in which people can trust each other. But it’s how a team works. It’s trust that turns a group of individuals into a team. If you don’t have trust on the team, you’re not a team. You’re just a group of individuals working on projects. But trust turns a group into a team. It’s transformative. But you’ve broadened it to community. And trust is the currency.
Alan Fleischmann
One thing too I wanted to say to people too, especially for younger people who think that sometimes changing jobs is important or just want to keep moving and moving and moving — actually, be so grateful to be part of the currency of trust in the community that you’re working in every day, or the community which you serve every day. Don’t stop. Don’t say, “Okay, I’ve done my job and move on.” Use that, kind of the way you build your platforms. Use that to help scale with that trust, because you’re going to be on a journey of impact. Why start over? Why try to experiment again and again and again?
Take that trust that you’re building and make it a foundation to take that purpose, whether it’s work or home life, and scale it by trusting one another and by building that trust. I think people sometimes think, “Okay, I’ve done it here. I’ll move to the next thing.” And they don’t realize what a valuable environment and valuable ecosystem they’re either part of, they co-built, or they could further build with others, trusting them in order to take it to a new level. And I think that’s something people should do more and more.
Stephen M.R. Covey
Yeah, beautiful. I love it. I love it. And I also love how earlier you acknowledged, look, sometimes you might lose trust and you’ve got to restore it. And, you know, I’m not Pollyannish on this. That’s why I wrote the book Smart Trust — to say you’ve got to be smart. You’ve got to use good judgment, not a blind trust. The idea of smart trust — say it’s not a blind trust, it’s a smart trust.
But rather than just kind of perpetuating this vicious downward cycle, we have to be willing to take a risk. Don’t let the fact that you can’t trust some define everyone else for you. If you lead out with trust and extending that trust in smart ways, with expectations, with accountability around the trust being given, you’ll find that’s a far better way to lead than to lead out with the idea that, “Hey, I don’t trust anyone until they prove that I can and should.” That just takes too long. Today, we’ve got to move faster.
Just a brief example of this: I was in Metzingen, Germany with Daniel Grieder. He’s the CEO of Hugo Boss, the big global fashion retailer. This was a couple years ago. He was brought in because they were not doing as well as they needed to be. They weren’t as relevant. So they brought him in from the outside. Great leader. He’s brand new. He’s on the first week on the job. No one knows him because he’s new from the outside. He doesn’t know the people on the team.
He meets with his top 100 leaders, and he says to them, “Team, we have a choice. Here’s our choice. We can spend the next year getting to know each other, deciding whether or not we can trust each other, you deciding whether you can trust me, me deciding whether I can trust you. We could do that, but I think we’d waste a year. Or we could start from today and choose to trust each other, because I know we hire great people at Hugo Boss. Let me tell you where I am, team. I trust you. I trust you. I’m asking you, trust me back. It’s through trust that we can create a whole new way of working together, a whole new culture.”
Now look, this was not necessarily the norm at the time, and the way that they were operating. But his starting point is, “I trust you because we hire great people here.” That’s smart — to trust you and tell you, “Give me reasons why I shouldn’t,” not the other way around.
People were inspired by this. It was refreshing. It was disarming. They responded to it. They reciprocated. They returned the trust to him fast. And they moved fast. They built a high-trust culture fast because he was not only trustworthy, he was trusting.
And here they built a five-year strategic plan. They called it the Claim 5 strategy. And so when I met with Daniel, they were two years into the plan, but they were achieving the metrics of the goals of year four of the plan. They were two years ahead of schedule. He said, “Stephen, we are moving at the speed of trust, and nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.”
Alan Fleischmann
For two years. Like, you learned that with the Green and Clean Lawn Care moment with your dad. I mean, that — absolutely. He gave you the trust, and you could have ignored it, shaken it off and said, “You know, it’s not my business. It’s not my thing. My dad can’t tell me what to do.” Or you could have done it the way you did, which was, “Wow, let me stand up straighter. Let me do quicker. Let me do effectively what my dad expects of me.”
And I think people, shockingly, do what is expected. I was reminded — I know we have to end this. I think we definitely have to have you back on, Stephen, for another hour, because we went further than the hour on this one, which I had a feeling we might. But I’m reminded by Robert Kennedy, who ran for president, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or neither, independent, he quoted Aeschylus. In 1968, he quoted the Greeks. He talked to people in the most challenged, marginalized communities in America, and he shared with them his philosophy about the world. He didn’t lower his standards, he raised his standards, and said, “Join me on the journey. And we’ll all excel together.”
And I always say that if you raise the bar and you trust people, they’re going to want to live up to those expectations. Not everybody. But for the most part, the opposite is also true. If you don’t, then, if you don’t ask and you don’t expect it, that there’s no bar to beat and there’s nothing to exceed, and you’re not going to get anything there as well.
So what you’ve done here, this wonderful hour-plus, is you’ve inspired us to think differently, to think about trust as a verb, not as a noun, to see it as an action-forcing moment, and to know that each and every person, whether you’re around the kitchen table or the boardroom table, or whether you’re in the marketplace or whether you’re actually just building community every day, that if you can make trust and mentorship your priority, you can truly have a life of purpose and impact no matter what you’re doing every day. And every interaction counts.
I love your books. I want to reread some of them, and I want to share them with folks here. As I mentioned, they should buy them.
But you’ve been listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Stephen M.R. Covey. We just spent the last hour-plus with Alan Fleischmann, Global Practice Leader of Franklin Covey’s global Speed of Trust practice, a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author. His books are extraordinary.
It’s been such a pleasure, Stephen, to have you on. Let’s really have another time together for another hour, if you’re willing to come back, because your insights about how we build a trust culture and how we rebuild our culture to allow for trust when it’s been broken would be something that would inspire goodness and greatness as we all are trying to navigate a very difficult and complex time.
Stephen M.R. Covey
I’d love to do it, Alan. Let’s do this. Thank you so much for this chance to be with you and your listeners. Wonderful.