There seems to be a lot of talk on the interweb these days regarding Trust. Or more specifically about trust as a necessary precursor to effective leadership. I’m going to focus on business leadership here as there seems to be an almost global mistrust of political leaders regardless of who they are, where in the world they are, or what part of the political spectrum persuasion they fall into.
As is so often the case with popular soundbites on the internet, people write statements about trust to generate likes or dislikes, and more often than not use the medium to simply reiterate other peoples’ thoughts but rarely offer any genuine insight. More concerning is that people often see things as binary conditions. Either there is trust in leadership or there is not. This idea of trust in leadership becomes vaguer if we consider that most people don’t have any genuine relationship with their corporate leaders. How many people have sat down for lunch with their CEO and talked about their worlds outside the workplace? Does anyone in the leadership team (above your departmental leadership team) know your name? How can you trust someone you don’t know?
This got me thinking that because of the richness of our language (a quick search found over a hundred synonyms for trust) we were missing an opportunity to think about trust as more than a simple positive or negative condition. Perhaps we should be thinking more about degrees of trust. I was encouraged by a discussion about the subject with a new connection on LinkedIn and further by a Twitter post from Niels Pflaeging who suggested that we ‘overvalue trust and undervalue confidence in people; the former cannot emerge without the foundation of the latter’ (paraphrased).
It seems quite appropriate on this Valentine’s day to step back and think about how a relationship evolves. Our romantic relationships and our business and social relationships all follow a similar pattern, and all are generally looking for a similar positive outcome. The physical manifestation of that outcome might be different but we do tend to use similar terminology - we speak of “being in bed with our business partners” or how a successful merger or acquisition is likened to a “marriage made in heaven”.
All our attempts at building relationships start with uncertainty. We start to engage in a courtship ritual in which our dance takes us through awareness, mutual encouragement, confidence, dependability, respect, trust and ultimately end with a mutual commitment which we hope will be sustained over time. I have visualised this below but you could (should!) choose your own model if you feel it's something worth taking further.
Sadly, as we all know, we are vulnerable throughout this engagement and at any stage, one or more parties can destabilise the relationship, regardless of how advanced or well-established. Sometimes this is just a hiccup caused by a misunderstanding, an error of judgement or even a simple mistake and the damage can be fairly easily repaired. If the misdemeanour is intentional or simply doesn’t fit with the wounded party’s moral compass it may take much more effort or it may be beyond fixing.
Relationships need to be worked on, even after they are built on strong foundations. We should never take them for granted. As we move from uncertainty to being able to make commitments we are more likely to be able to meet each other's needs - arguably the ultimate goal in any relationship.
We also need to stop taking words for granted. It's easy to read a meme on a social media site and share it, but it's far more valuable to think a bit further and decide whether there is any real depth to the phrase and whether it has any value. Like a plan, the plan itself may have little value if conditions change so fast as to make it worthless, but the act of planning gives you insight into far more and leaves you in a better place than where you started.
Posts
