Recently, I met David Porush, CEO of MentorNET. He runs a great organization which provides highly motivated protégés from many of the world’s top colleges and universities with positive, one-on-one, email-based mentoring relationships with mentors from industry, government, and higher education. As we sat down to coffee, we engaged in a conversation about TRUST. To me, it is the foundation of any long-term relationship and a competitive advantage (very hard to imitate) in business.

David, just shared this conversation in his newsletter. Here is sneak peak for you.

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Yesterday I met Deepika Bajaj, Founder and President of Invincibelle. Go to her site www.deepikabajaj.com and you’ll see why I was eager to meet her. Among her many accomplishments – former electrical engineer for AT&T, author of Diversity/Tweet, serial entrepreneur – she’s now turning her considerable energy and vision to building “a community for … women who live and work in this flat world economy.”

In the course of our conversation, Deepika gave me not one but two mentoring moments. The first came when we were comparing the kinds of cultures we try to build in our respective organizations. Deepika said, “You know, trust lowers the cost of doing business.”

Wow. This was one of those moments: an insight so simple but so powerful you know it’s going to keep you meditating on it for a long time to come. In this case, I was immediately tempted to incorporate the subject of TRUST into our program.

Trust, as Deepika said, among all its other obvious benefits to the happiness and psychic health of a company, also makes good business sense. It reduces time-consuming second-guessing and checking to a minimum. When there’s trust, there’s a reliable handoff and collaboration. Teammates’ efforts amplify each other.

Distrust, on the other hand, exponentially increases costs. When a manager can’t trust someone reporting to her, she has to go continually go back and check in on his work, tripling the effort. When you can’t trust a colleague or supervisor, you’ve got remain on your guard, put up walls, limit what you work at and express in the workplace, always worry that your work will be undone by someone else.

Deepika and I traded stories of big business transactions we’d seen where the principals seemed mostly to do nothing but shmooze for an hour or so and then, at some invisible signal, seemed satisfied, stood up, shook hands, and concluded a huge agreement, without papers or even any explicit details apparently being traded. We laughed when we thought of how complex and expensive it would be if lawyers were involved in making the same deal happen first, and not just afterwards in the form of contracts and jockeying for advantage.

Closer to home, Deepika pointed out that trust enables her to focus on her passions and her most important obligations as she is building her new company, while empowering her colleagues to take on other vital missions. Trust creates confidence, which in turn makes the next power sharing even easier and more productive, as your colleagues learn to trust themselves and so take initiative and ownership of their work and relationships to you and others.

Continue Reading the article at MentorNet: Invincibelle and the TRUST prompt.