But before you can know your partner, or your competitor for that matter, it might be best to know yourself.

Charles H. Green has just posted a nifty online self-assessment tool to calculate one's own Trust Quotient. While I was taking it, I wondered if the kind of unsavory folks you likely shouldn't trust would lie on the test and thus score well.

Does that make me devious or simply curious?

In his blog today, George Ambler offers a neat summary of some work that social psychologist Robert Hurley published on the topic of trust in Harvard Business Review .

Clearly there are a lot of dimensions to trust, and with the help of some of these tools you might be better able to adjust your approach to an important meeting or collaborative engagement to achieve better results.

Roger W. Farnsworth