How To Build High-Trust Relationships

I’m a pretty trusting person. By and large I’ve found that it’s served me well to assume that most people are honest, well meaning and trust-worthy. That said, I’ve also learned from some less than pleasant experiences that there are times when I need hold back placing trust in someone or just be more discerning about what I trust them with. Like the time back in my penny pinching university days when I foolishly trusted a roommate/novice hairdresser to put highlights in my hair. I wound up looked like a leopard!

Trust lies at the core of all our relationships and is the currency of influence in every workplace and organization.  And yet if you ask 100 people exactly what trust is you will likely get 100 different answers. The reason is that the concept of trust is complex and whilst we are often clear about who we trust (and don’t trust), we’re often much less clear about why.

When working with clients on trust, many of whom have leadership roles in organizations and are faced with issues of trust (or lack thereof) daily, understanding the three core domains of trust can be helpful. So I am hoping that they will also be helpful to you in both distinguishing why you don’t trust someone and in helping you become more effective in building trust yourself (or repairing it when damaged). As I wrote in Stop Playing Safe, “Your ability to develop high trust relationships is pivotal not only to your personal happiness but to your influence at work and career success.”

The Core Domains Of Trust

The diagram below illustrates the inter-relationship between the three core domains of trust. Whenever a person is perceived to act in a way that undermines trust in any of these areas, trust overall is diminished.

Competence

The element of competence is what I call “domain specific” in that it depends on what area of expertise or skill you are assessing someone to be trustworthy. For instance, you might trust me to to coach you to build your executive presence at work or navigate a job transition, but you wouldn’t trust me to give you a root canal (for good reason!). Likewise, I trust my kids to put their bikes away after they’ve gone for a ride but I would not trust them to cook me a roast dinner. Not yet, anyway. More training is required! It’s why people who move into roles they haven’t yet had experience in need to be careful in managing expectations until they  have the skills and resources in place to exceed them.

So the question to ask here is, “Does this person have the skills, knowledge and resources to perform this specific task?”

Reliability

Reliability is about whether you can count on someone to manage and honor their commitments. Or put another way, to do what they say they’ll do when they say they’ll do it. So you may trust someone to be competent at a particular task and sincere in their intention to do it, but their track record of unreliability, whether it be tardiness or sloppy work, keeps you from trusting them completely. People who say they will follow up on something but then fail to do so, damage trust, even if the failure to keep their promise had few consequences. At the core of this domain of trust is this: Be-your-word.

The question to ask, “Can I count on this person to keep their promises and get the task done properly and by the agreed time frame?”

Sincerity

Sincerity relates directly to our assessment of someone’s character; to their fundamental integrity. Of all three elements of trust, sincerity is the hardest to build, and the most pivotal in our decision whether or not to place your trust in someone and it’s what we want, need and expect from those who are in positions of formal leadership – from our President to our company CEO (which explains why allegations of impropriety and infidelity create the media headlines when made against those in positions of public office and senior leadership.  It’s why Hillary Clinton’s biggest challenge is not her likability, it’s the questions about her integrity relating to her use of a private email server. )

Of course you may not necessarily care much whether the person cutting your hair is cheating on their tax return (or their spouse), but you may well care a lot if it was your state senator or company CEO. Sincerity is also the most difficult element to repair when damaged, which explains why infidelity has a far greater impact on a marriage than a spouse who simply forgets their anniversary (like I did one time!) Or why discovering that a colleague has derided you behind your back does more damage than if they were just habitually running late for meetings.

Part of sincerity is also how much you think someone cares about what you care about (I call this domain Compassion in the video above). I once had a client whose mother was going through chemo and not once in the six months she was flying interstate to see her each weekend did he inquire how she or her mother was doing. It eroded her trust in his humanity; a large withdrawal from their trust account.

So the question to ask here is, “Can I trust this persons integrity; are they someone who’ll do what’s right even if it costs them?”

Armed with new knowledge (and new competence!) in trust, how might you apply it in your relationships – personal and professional? Of course, that’s not to say that you aren’t trustworthy right now, but take time to look at where you may have either inadvertently allowed trust to flat line through neglect or damaged it by your behavior.

How might you build/restore trust if you were to:

• Develop skills to grow your competence in a particular area?
• Improve your punctuality and treat others’ time as highly as your own?
• Share how you genuinely feel about an issue?
• When you have violated trust, apologized and sought to make amends (even if it was unintentional)?
• Not promise to do things you don’t have the time, resources or genuine commitment to do properly?
• Reveal your vulnerability, and share an aspect of yourself that exposes your humanity?
• Taken time to better understand how someone is feeling; to show concern and genuine compassion?

(An exercise called “Audit Your Trustworthiness” in Stop Playing Safe is a great one for doing this!)

Distrust Is Very Expensive

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “distrust is very expensive.” The fact is, without trust, influence wanes, intimacy erodes, relationships crumble, careers derail, organizations fail to prosper (and ultimately, also crumble) and, in short, nothing much works. Wherever trust is missing, opportunity is lost. Opportunity to collaborate, exert influence, deepen intimacy, build understanding, resolve conflict, expand peace and succeed at the very things that matter most – individually and collectively.  It’s why building trust is the foundation of every peace negotiation, every business collaboration and every truly meaningful endeavour.

What Can People Count On You For?

“Always do what’s right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” – Mark Twain

You cannot force others to become more trustworthy, but you can become more worthy of trust yourself. By raising your own bar, through your words and actions, and being the change you want to see in others, you can ultimately create a more trusting environment around you. So no matter how full the trust accounts are in your relationships,  it’s never too late to work at building trust and you can never work too hard at maintaining it.