How is low trust impacting your organization? Your business results?
I’ve written about trust at least a dozen times in the past. In response to my recent post, A Culture of Distrust, Richard Fagerlin reached out to me about his book Trustology: The Art and Science of Leading High-Trust Teams. He wanted to get my thoughts on his stance on trust.
The book is about employee engagement through trust relationships, or in a nutshell, building a culture of trust. It’s a fast read, but make no mistake, it’s packed with a lot of practical ideas that you can put to work today.
A few things resonated with me, but this was probably one of my favorites: Trust isn’t what we “do” – it’s what results from what we do.
I’ve written that trust is earned and that it’s a two-way street: you choose to trust the other party, and they choose to trust you back. And vice versa. And I’ve said to trust until you have a reason not to trust (or to be trusted).
Richard takes an interesting approach and says that trust cannot be earned; it can only be given – that it is the responsibility of the person who wants to be trusted. He likens earning trust to keeping score; you get points for certain behaviors and lose points for other, less desirable actions. Earning trust is about control and constantly being evaluated. That doesn’t sound like a trust or trusting relationship, does it?
Instead, trust keeps no record of wrongs. Richard says to stop keeping score, stop tracking the good and the bad. Trust is not risk-free, but its strength is based on mutual vulnerability. That statement is powerful, and I agree that that mutual vulnerability is the basis of trust.
So let me step back a minute and look at how Richard defines trust: confidence in others. In his chapter on The Trust Model, he further defines trust as confidence in the other person…
· doing what they say they will do (integrity)
· having the knowledge and skills to perform the job (competence)
· having your best interests at heart (compassion)
Trust is strong when confidence in all three exists. He says that confidence equals predictability. And predictability is so important.
In those previous posts I’d written about trust, I attributed things like integrity, consistency, honesty, and predictability to trust and as drivers of trust. I have said in the past that predictability begets trust. So it sounds like we might just be in agreement.
In the book, Richard provides two trust assessments: one for teams and another for individuals. He then follows those up with tips and guidelines on how to fill the trust gap, which is defined as: the difference between where you would like to be as a team and where you are right now; the root problems that keep you from functioning as a high-trust, high-performance team. Here are a few examples of gaps he identifies in his three components of trust.
Gaps in integrity include:
· not following through on commitments
· a lack of honest, open communication
· politics, silos, and turf protection
· arbitrary goals and no clear direction for team members
Gaps in competence include:
· unwillingness to share information or expertise with associates
· a skill and knowledge gap that slows down the rest of the team
· frequently failing to meet goals and objectives
Gaps in compassion include:
· treating people like tools or resources to get things done
· cynicism and lack of care for others
· no desire or effort to understand others
· greater focus on me than we
Once the gaps have been identified, the team must agree on them and then own them. As Richard says, the gaps are OK; it’s doing nothing about them that is not OK.
As you can see, there are a lot of great nuggets in this book to help you develop high-trust, high-performing teams. I’ve only scraped the surface with this post, but it’s definitely worth reading to get some ideas on how to identify and resolve trust gaps within your organization.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. -Ernest Hemingway
Image courtesy of Dobi
Original Post: http://www.cx-journey.com/2014/09/trust-isnt-about-keeping-score.html
