Trust is Shifting

Being trustworthy, being trusting and feeling trusted. Most conversations only cover the first.

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Being trustworthy is giving other people reasons to rely on us. Early on, we watch for integrity. Care counts for more as we get to know each other, and competence, care and consistency show up over time, in small things done the way we said we would.

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Feeling trusted is whether the person on the receiving end believes we trust them. Bus drivers in one study said they knew they were trusted when they were asked to mentor newer drivers, asked for advice, handed some of their supervisor's tasks, told about sensitive changes early, and not watched all the time.

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Leaders are only moderately good at knowing how much each person trusts them, and tend to assume that if they trust you, you trust them. So it is worth asking people what trust looks like to them.

Partly. Trust often comes back, it just does not come back reliably.

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The UK TV show Golden Balls ran a version of the prisoner's dilemma as "split or steal". About half shared, and they shared less with someone who had voted against them earlier in the show. What people had done to them counted for more than what they promised.

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Real workplaces are untidier. In one study of managers and their staff, how much a manager trusted an employee and how much the employee trusted the manager were only loosely linked. About a quarter of pairs trusted each other highly, about a fifth trusted each other little, and half were mismatched. The manager's trust mattered in its own right, regardless of how the employee felt back.

Not on their own. Controls are not the enemy. How they feel to the person is the other half.

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In a survey of 582 European professionals, controls were linked with more trust in the employer when people saw them as fair. They undermined trust when they were inconsistent, rigid, or rewarded the wrong behaviour (Weibel et al., 2016).

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Controls can also get cooperation without trust. Relying on someone because we know what they will do, or what they can do, is a different thing from trusting them. Plenty of working relationships run on that.

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Nobody has published a timetable for getting trust back. Anyone quoting months or years is guessing.

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What the research adds is why it is lost fast. In one experiment, a partner who simply returned nothing at first, then behaved fairly, largely won trust back. One who had promised to return money and then returned nothing did not, even after fair play in the later rounds.

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The cost lands on the people who stay. After layoffs they tend to become less committed, and a fair process matters more to them than a fair outcome. When people feel an unwritten deal has been broken, trust, satisfaction and intention to stay fall, and more of them leave.

The Trust Effect™ treats trust as five behaviours other people can see. Care comes first, and Care starts with our intention: what is in this for them?

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1. Care. Make our intention clear: what is in it for them. Ask about their context, not only their content. Protect their outcome when it costs us.
2. Competence. Simplify without dumbing down. Share the implications early. Say when something is outside our expertise.
3. Candour. Say the true thing to the person, not around them. Share certainty and doubt openly. Own our mistakes first.
4. Communication. Say it early, with no surprises. Big news comes from their own manager first. Listen to understand.
5. Consistency. Do what we say, even in small things. Be the same under pressure as in calm. Close the loop.