Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve used a FranklinCovey planner. Most of us have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, too. After all, the Covey name is synonymous with business leadership.

And while the initial success belonged to Stephen R. Covey, it’s his son, Stephen M. R. Covey, who took over as president and CEO of Covey Leadership Center and led the company into a new era of excellence.

Stephen M. R. Covey is focused on new ways of leading that start with the belief that people are creative, collaborative and full of potential. His first book, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, focused on trust as not just a social virtue but a measurable economic driver that accelerates or drags down everything in life and organizations.

That work led to his most recent book: Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others. He contrasts this new way to lead with the more traditional “Command & Control” way of leading, prevalent in 92% of organizations today.

“Operating today with Command & Control as your leadership style is like playing tennis with a golf club,” he’s said. “The tool is completely ill-suited to the new reality.” When trust is high, communication is faster, costs are lower and relationships become far more effective.

Stephen M.R. Covey doesn’t concentrate on being “nice” – he’s all about being credible and consistent – but he didn’t throw out being nice to achieve that.

After growing up in a family that was all about business leadership, he used that mental leg up to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. His first “real” job was with real estate developer Trammell Crow Company as a stepping stone to joining the family business. It wasn’t the first time the two had worked together.

As a grade-schooler, Stephen M.R. Covey was given the responsibility to keep their family lawn green and clean – green meaning it matched their neighbor’s yard and clean meaning time behind the lawn mower. It was his job to figure out watering schedules and weed control – a tall task for a first-grader.

Stephen M. R. began at Covey Leadership Center in client development – sales, to be exact – building both theory and practice on his résumé. He eventually parlayed a national sales manager position to to become president and CEO – determined to not only honor his father’s legacy but to expand it. To that end, he co-founded CoveyLink Worldwide to focus on trust as a business and leadership leader. He eventually merged CoveyLink with FranklinCovey to form The Global Trust Practice, where he serves as global practice leader today.

FranklinCovey is now in more than 140 countries and is one of the largest leadership development companies in the world. And it was the son who personally led the strategy that propelled his father’s book to become one of the two most influential business books of the 20th century.

It’s a picture-perfect example of how to forge your own niche. Or, as Stephen M.R. Covey himself would say, why you need to deliver under trust, not just credentials.

We sat down with him ahead of his keynote address on Trust & Inspire leadership at the CASBO Annual Conference & California School Business Expo 2026 in San Diego to discuss the ins and outs of courageous leadership.

If you had an unscheduled hour in your day, what would you use it for?

If I get uninterrupted time that comes as a surprise, the first thing I do is call my wife and say, “Hey, I got some time, want to go to lunch?” If she’s not available, I would try to do something with one of my kids. Relationships are the most important thing in my life, and I travel a lot, so I prioritize family. As the philosophy goes, don’t just prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities.

What’s your favorite piece of advice from your father that’s still relevant for today’s leaders?

One piece of advice that he gave me we actually turned into the book Live Life in Crescendo. It’s the idea that your most important work is always ahead of you.

My father wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and yet he always felt like his best book was still in front of him. He had a mentality that there are always more contributions to make. To have that mindset is a beautiful thing because you’re always thinking “I can go to another level, there’s room for continuous improvement, for getting better.” And it’s framed around contribution, not accumulation – because after you satisfy your basic hierarchy of needs, in the end, it’s about a belief that your most important contributions are still ahead of you.

Given workforce shifts like talent shortages and remote work, what’s the most courageous but necessary change a district business leader must make right now to attract and retain top talent?

The courageous step is to shift your leadership style from the traditional, hierarchical Command & Control style to a more people-centric approach – what I call Trust & Inspire style. So, you’re moving from control to inspiration, and it doesn’t mean you lose control, you just change the nature of how you go about leading.

People don’t want to be managed, they want to be led, trusted and inspired. People respond to those things – and it becomes like a talent magnet! When people are trusted, they want to stay, and they do their best work. When they’re not trusted, they’re going to go find a place where they are. And it’s the same with inspiration. People want that in their lives.

If we can shift the paradigm of how we lead from the traditional model to the more forward-thinking Trust & Inspire model, that creates a different culture and climate that’s compelling, exciting and attractive to people, particularly for top talent that has many options.

For some, this will be a complete shift in style, and for others it might just be a tweak, but it’s a courageous and bold move.

Being the type of leader that just tells people what to do might have worked in the past, but as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith said, “What got us here won’t get us there.” Maybe Command & Control brought us where we are today, but in the new world, with all the shifts in the workforce and younger generations that are coming up that have different expectations about how they want to be led, there’s a need for more collaboration and more innovation.

Today, Trust & Inspire is a far more relevant approach to leadership. Yes, it’s a paradigm shift; yes, it’s a leap. But it’s courageous and necessary.

What can leaders expect after they make the shift to the Trust & Inspire model?

The hardest part of that shift is the question as to whether moving from the Command & Control model to Trust & Inspire still allows you to get the job done.

School business leaders have to get results, they have to perform – and you will get results as a Trust & Inspire leader. It doesn’t mean that you’re just nice and trust everyone. Instead, you build an agreement with people around the job to be done that includes outcomes and expectations, as well as accountability for those expectations. So, you’re building an agreement, and the control is within that agreement, as opposed to hovering and micromanaging.

If you involve people in the process of building this agreement, you’ll build greater commitment, greater engagement, and you’ll actually get greater outcomes. Done well, Trust & Inspire will produce better results than Command & Control ever did.

It feels like a leap for people – I get it. And I’ve had a lot of people say, “I love this Trust & Inspire idea, but I’ve got to get the work done.” And I say, you will, because you’ll build the agreement with expectations, with accountability – and you’ll actually get the job done better. Your team will be more creative and innovative, and they’ll also grow and develop. So, you haven’t lost control, you’ve just shifted it from micromanagement to the agreement that you built together with the person, and there’s more commitment to it.

The research shows that often people will perform as much as three times better when there’s trust with expectations and accountability versus when they’re just told what to do.

Bold decisions come with risk. How should school district leaders who manage public funds and are under intense scrutiny frame the concept of risk and the potential for failure to their boards and communities to make room for a culture of courageous innovation?

It’s a balancing act. We need innovation to stay relevant and current in a changing world, but you won’t innovate very well if you’re not willing to take a risk, and you won’t take a risk if there’s not a sense of trust. But risk has to be calculated and within restraints.

It’s not about just saying, “Hey, I trust you; go take some risks out there.” That could be too risky, or it could be something that could sink the district or hurt the district’s reputation. It has to be within boundaries. And we have to reframe “failing” as “learning” and be willing to take that risk – and even fail sometimes. That’s how you learn and innovate.

There’s research to prove this. In a high-trust culture, people are 32 times more likely to take a responsible, calculated, smart risk, and as a result, they’re 11 times more likely to innovate.

In this scenario, people are more willing to take a responsible risk and maybe even fail, but they learn from it, and they get better and risk-taking is reframed as part of innovation and learning. That’s how we’re going to stay current and relevant – by reframing it.

Leaders should talk about risk within the context of saying, “Here’s the type of judgments we’re going to make, and sometimes we’re going to take a risk, try something new. It may not work, but we’re going to learn from it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something new again and we’ll get better.”

If trust in an organization is low, no one will take a risk because it feels unsafe and maybe even career-ending. So, we have to reframe it for employees, the public and stakeholders, letting them know we’re innovating so we stay relevant. That we strive to fail well and within constraints, so it’s not seen as out of control. But that reframing of risk is vital to innovation.

Your book, The Speed of Trust, treats trust as an economic multiplier. Can you share specific examples or metrics that demonstrate how high-trust cultures, established by courageous leaders, have positively impacted results of education organizations?

The basic premise is that trust always impacts two measurable outcomes: speed and cost. When trust goes down in a district, in the community, with stakeholders or on a team, speed will go down with it. Everything’s going to take you longer to do, and the cost will go up, because now you’ve got to take all these steps to compensate for that lack of trust, whether it be checking or verifying or validating or building in more redundancies.

In low-trust environments, you can expect what I call a “low-trust tax,” and it’s a wasted tax that doesn’t add value. Things take longer, cost more and cause distrust – making things very expensive. The good news is the converse is equally true. When trust increases, speed goes up and the cost goes down because we can do everything much faster and at a lower cost.

I worked with a district that was really focused on building internal trust in their schools and with their people, so they could build external trust with the community and stakeholders – and they were really able to move the needle by doing just that. Thanks to the high-trust relationship they built, people understood the schools in the community were great, and when they put a school bond on the ballot their credibility and trust were so high that the bond passed with flying colors. Five years earlier, when they didn’t have that relationship of trust in the community and were not seen as credible, a similar bond failed. But they refocused and built those relationships – first internally and then externally – and the bond campaign passed.

I worked with another school district in an area that had experienced a hurricane that wreaked havoc on 21 schools, making eight of them unusable. The first thing the district’s leadership did was focus on caring and concern for people.

The district administrator called a meeting for district leaders and included two union presidents. He made it clear that the district’s top priority was to make sure everybody got paid as soon as possible – even though they wouldn’t be working. Then, teams of union and administrative representatives went out together and made sure those paychecks got delivered.

As damage assessments came in, leaders realized they were going to lose six schools permanently and that two were repairable. At that point, the district waived parts of the union contract, set up a memorandum of understanding to address the critical changes that had to be made, and created a plan for double school sessions. Within two weeks of the hurricane, children were back in school, and teachers and administrators were back at work.

Within three months, they were able to bring in relocatable buildings, rebuild temporary campuses and back off the double sessions.

This district demonstrated such care that people understood the concern was not about getting back to work but rather how they and their families were doing. It was heartfelt and modeled from the top, and it built a deep connection during the crisis.

As a result of their efforts, the district built an incredible sense of trust with employees, and the community began to see the school system as a focal point of recovery.

Later, when it was time for labor negotiations with the unions – which usually takes months – the chief business official put all the numbers on the screen and said, “Here’s what we have available, and here’s how that might look over a three-year implementation.” From that point, the negotiation took only two hours. There was no caucusing. There were no threats. There was no question that the data on the screen was correct.

This whole thing happened with greater speed and at a lower cost than the usual prolonged negotiation process. The district’s response to a disaster enabled them to accelerate building trust better, faster and intentionally. It’s really a remarkable example.

When a courageous decision in a school district fails, resulting in a crisis of trust with staff, the school board or families, what’s the most effective and courageous way for school business leaders to restore trust?

There’s a key principle in play in a situation like this: You can’t talk your way out of a problem that you behaved your way into. If we’ve lost people’s trust through our behavior, words alone won’t get it back. What can get it back is if we’re willing to behave our way back into trust, just like you behaved your way out of it.

First, you have to confront the reality that you’ve lost trust. Sometimes, people are in denial and just can’t go there. But you have to confront the fact that you’ve lost trust and then implement behaviors that will help you restore it. You’ve got to practice accountability by owning it and taking responsibility versus pointing the finger and blaming everyone else.

The more you say, “Look, we know we lost trust, and we own this, and we’re going to take responsibility for it,” the more apt I am to say, “OK, tell me more.”

The next behavior is to right the wrong. That might include an apology, restitution or making up for the consequences or costs of the decision that went badly. You right the wrong so you’re back to a more level place. clarify expectations around what you’re going to do to regain trust. You tell people what you’re going to do, and you signal your behavior so they’re looking for it.

The most important step is the last one. You keep commitments – you do what you said you’d do. And because you told people in advance, they’re looking for it and they will credit you for it more than if you never said anything, but they’ll also hold you more accountable if you don’t do it – and it will cause them to become more cynical, and trust will not be restored.

If you lay out what you’re going to do to regain trust but don’t do it, you’re worse off. But if you do what you committed to, you’ll build trust faster and you’ll be behaving yourself back into trust.

If you’re sincere about it and work hard at it, it is possible to restore trust. There might be some situations where the nature of the loss of trust was so egregious that people move on. But in most situations, you have a chance to restore trust if you’re willing to behave your way back into it using that five-step process.