Making Workplaces Work Better

What's Trust Got To Do With It?

By Daniel Robin

Practically everything! Have you ever heard someone say "I just can't trust that person!" or "Hey, why don't you just trust me?" Trust is an odd thing: on the one hand, it's probably the single most important ingredient in successful relationships. On the other hand, partly because trust is in our heads -- a state of mind, an interpretation, a subjective feeling that develops over time -- it is not clear how to reliably improve it.

Of the importance of trust there is little doubt. A high degree of trust would permit me to take you on your word, to accept your statements at face value without question. I could give you the "benefit of the doubt." We'd be free to derive maximum benefit from our relationship.

On the other extreme, a high degree of distrust creates quite a mess: a climate of fear and anxiety would make productive work nearly impossible, shifting the focus from flowing collaboration to suspicious second-guessing, guarded (if any) participation, and probably a pattern of conflict avoidance or passive-aggressiveness. Worse, our moral judgments about each other's untrustworthiness make resolution of these problems quite unlikely.

Most workplace relationships fall somewhere between these two extremes. What's wanted is not just blind trust, but a solid confidence grounded in reality. The challenge: different people give different weight to the importance of being reliable, of keeping a promise. The key: accurately give the degree of trust that is (1) appropriate for that relationship, and (2) necessary for obtaining the results you're after.

This article and the next two redefine trust in terms that you can discuss openly with others, will help you to strategically increase your ability to trust others (while handling potential risks and downsides), and will explore how you can become more trustworthy.

Trust, a Second-hand Emotion?

In our culture, there's a tendency to think of trust in terms of the other person's trustworthiness. And yet, the one person over whom you have a reasonable amount of control is -- you guessed it -- yourself. Thus, if you focus on whether or not you can trust others, you're just as likely, one of these days, to experience distrust as not. Sooner or later you'll come up with an example of how they "just can't be trusted." A more useful question to ask yourself is "Can I predict their behavior?"

Consistency isn't simply a virtue, it is a practical basis for developing effective working relationships. If you can predict someone's behavior -- even if you know they will screw up -- you can count on that. This means that the goal is to learn how people operate: pay attention, notice what results they consistently produce and where they get stuck, so you can handle contingencies, mitigate the risks, or involve someone else.

For example, when considering delegating a project, ask yourself "Will this relationship support these results?" If not, why not? Relationship too new? Results too important to fully delegate and let go? It probably wouldn't work to say "I'd like to trust you here, but ...." So what can you do? Talk openly about your concerns, your desire to let them run with it coupled with your conditions of satisfaction.

As human behavior is normally difficult to predict, use your interpersonal skills to form clear, unambiguous agreements and use those agreements as the proving ground for reliability. By setting expectations ("conditions of satisfaction") on the front end, and make sure you get a clear commitment, yes or no, on or off. That helps us hold accountable based on facts and evidence, not just based on our personal history.

Trust Isn't the Goal, It's the Result

If we give up trust as a goal, our past negative experiences when we trusted unwisely will no longer color our interpretations. You'll have a living demonstration of a person's reliability (and they'll have one of yours), so you can both trust the truth -- and learn from it.