Quite often I get asked to come and facilitate workshops to help build trust within a team. Or in my coaching, I am working with someone who places low trust in their reports or supervisor, or who has received feedback that they aren’t trustworthy.
I’m always curious to start unpacking what they actually mean by ‘trust’. It’s a term that we use a lot and assume that everyone is meaning the same thing, but actually I think we rarely are.
It’s actually a joke in a family because of how often I’ve told my kids that ‘our most important family value is trust’. By that I mean – I trust that you will tell me the truth and let me know what’s going on and I trust that you trust that I will have your back to help figure things out and that I am always trying to act in your best interests, even when you don’t like what I’m doing. In our family it’s clear and we have created a shared expectation around the word.
But at work it’s a bit more complicated than that. What does ‘trust’ mean in the context of:
- A leader needing to make a difficult financial decision that appears to be right for the organization but will mean uncomfortable changes that not everyone will be on board with?
- Someone looking for a new job and deciding whether or not to tell their supervisor in advance?
- A sensitive matter happening that is causing uncertainty and fear within the team but where the details can’t be shared?
The model that I find most helpful when thinking about trust as a leader comes from Erin Meyer and her work on intercultural collaboration and communication. She describes this scale in her book The Culture Map and in the article, Building Trust Across Cultures, but I think it is relevant, in any team context, not simply a multicultural one. She writes, “There are two basic types of trust: cognitive trust and affective trust. Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability. This is trust from the head. Affective trust on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart.” On her scale of trusting she puts ‘task based’ on one end of the spectrum and ‘relationship-based’ on the other. And she asks individuals to locate themselves on the scale. To what extent do you need to see the quality of someone’s work to trust them? Or do you need to build connection first? I know that l lean much closer to the relationship end of the scale. And, in retrospect, I realize that often past struggles to build trust with former colleagues, may have come about because they were much closer to the task-oriented end of the scale. I needed to know them to trust them and work well. They needed me to deliver results and then trust would come. There is no right answer but it’s really helpful to bring this forward as a discussion point within teams and use it to diagnose whether these differences might be getting in the way and if so, decide what to do about it.
Note: Another framework I like is the BRAVING inventory developed by Brene Brown that she succinctly describes in this LinkedIn post. BRAVING describes 7 components of trust (Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault, Integrity, Non-judgment and Generosity) and she invited individuals to do a self assessment on how they are behaving within each of the 7 and then build shared expectations as a team. I would invite leaders and their teams to co-create these expectations together.
The pathway to building trust depends on the culture of any particular team – if you are curious to explore more, reach out and let’s talk!