The Paradox of Trust

How many times have you heard the phrases ‘earning trust’ and ‘building trust’?

What if there were approaches that allowed you to earn and build trust faster than you ever thought possible?

What if that hack was so simple that you would have a hard time even believing it could work?

Trust is a two way street. It requires a reciprocal relationship to work.

Trust requires symmetry.

As leaders, we are responsible for creating this symmetry. We must develop deep trust in our teams. And we must inspire our teams to have full trust in our leadership.

These two approaches have worked for me:

Trust Hack #1: Giving Trust Freely

Don’t make your team earn your trust! Just give it to them. Not conditionally. Not in your imagination. Give it 100% freely and give it explicitly. Look your team members in the eye and tell them, “I trust you.” And then tell them what this means.

“I trust you because you are the expert in x.”

“Whatever you tell me, I will believe.”

“Whatever you do, I will know is in the best interest of our team.”

“I won’t try to do your job or micromanage you.”

This works especially well if you are new to the team. But it can work even if you aren’t new to the team.

This communicates several key things:

• First, it sets your default position as one of trust and not one of distrust.
• Second, your team knows that you value their expertise.
• Third, by telling them that whatever they tell you as the leader will be believed 100%, and expressing full faith that they are working in the best interest of the team you give each team member full ownership of their role.
• Finally, you reinforce their ownership of outcomes with the explicit statement that you won’t micromanage their processes.

And here’s the real trick: you must follow through and actually live those statements in every interaction. This requires deliberate thought and effort. And it is worth it.

Trust Hack #2: Radical Transparency

As a leader, you may not have team members who use Trust Hack #1 up the chain. (This would be a really cool experiment to try, though!) So how do we inspire our teams to trust us?

Here’s what worked for me: I had to learn to be radically transparent with my teams.

What does radical transparency mean?

When I was a young officer in the Navy, there wasn’t a lot of explaining why we were doing things. Some of my colleagues were frustrated by this, and resisted doing things that they didn’t understand.

I took a different approach. I figured my job was to do what was asked to the best of my ability, and then observe and try to puzzle out the bigger picture. It was a good exercise that got me thinking about what problems my boss was trying to solve.

As I was entrusted with more leadership, I gradually figured out that when I explained why something needed to be done, how it fit into the bigger picture, and what the expected benefits were, it gave the team a greater sense of cohesion and they took on a greater sense of ownership. This in turn, resulted in better mission accomplishment, which led to higher morale, and increased trust. It became a virtuous cycle.

And something else happened. When I didn’t have time to explain the why, the resistance I had remembered from earlier in my career wasn’t there. The team had banked trust and was able to draw on that account.

As a leader, knowing your trust account balance is important. You can’t make more withdrawals than deposits for very long, or you will turn your virtuous cycle into its opposite.

How do I go about being radically transparent now? It has developed into much more than just telling the team why we are doing something. Now it is a constant dialogue. We talk about the problems that we are solving. I ask the team if we are solving the right problem. I ask what the team knows that I should know, but don’t yet. I ask what the solution looks like based on their experience. I ask what barriers they foresee and what help they need overcoming those barriers. I ask if we’ve tried this before; what went right, what went wrong, what if anything is different this time. I ask what question should I be asking that I haven’t thought to ask. The questions are about sharing our thought processes, especially all of the uncertainties. Only then can we quantify and plan for the unknowns. Only then can we understand and mitigate risk.

It is critically important that the leader listen first and speak last. When the leader speaks first, the entire conversation becomes swayed by their comments.

All of these conversations have one thing in common. They assume that the leader doesn’t know everything. They require great humility in the leader.

And paradoxically, great humility requires great confidence.

Winning teams develop the trust necessary to move authority to information while retaining unity of purpose. Because the world is moving too quickly to keep trying to move information to authority.

These two approaches have worked for me. You may want to experiment with them on your team.

What has worked best for you when building trust in your organization?