Trust is...
Complicated and foundational
Trust is foundational, specific, built over time, indirect, emergent, transitive, contagious, fragile, internal, and complicated. Let’s look at each in turn.
Foundational: We are social creatures. We wouldn’t make it very far without other humans.
Get three or more people in a room or on a project and trust issues show up with them. Raise the stakes, and trust issues jump to the front of the line.
The story of humanity is one of betrayals and cooperations. Whether we can trust a particular person or group is one of our key concerns, often because we’d like to be on the right side of those betrayals and cooperations.
Specific: I would trust my friend David Reed with my vote on any issue in the realm of telecommunications. He could confidently vote my proxy in that domain. But I have no idea if I could trust him to cook a dinner for 6.
Shift domains and your quanta of trust shift. I have several absent-minded friends you wouldn’t want to trust with small children. They’d forget them at the park.
If you do a brief inventory of your relationships along the axis of trust, you’ll quickly discover surprises, on the upside as well as the down. Some of your friends or colleagues will suddenly pop out as being remarkably trustworthy; others will reveal a pattern that is the opposite. But those variances will likely happen within individuals, so that one person is highly trustworthy in one area and not so much in another.
Built over time: Since a large aspect of trust is predictability, doing things consistently over time is a well-known way of becoming trustworthy.
This may sound counterintuitive, but a few accidents or mistakes along the way will deepen trust — but only if they’re dealt with well. Lack of bumps in the road means we don’t know how the other party will react when things go off the rails. (See Fragile, below.)
Indirect: “I’m going to make you trust me” isn’t a particularly clever thing to say. It sounds doomed from the start, doesn’t it? Much better that I did various things that demonstrated my trustworthiness, especially if I never mentioned how trustworthy they made me seem. That latter move would be another faux pas.
Like community and happiness, trust doesn’t thrive when you make it your explicit, central goal. You have to take an oblique approach.
Emergent: Just like you shouldn’t aim right at trust, you also can’t order trust into being. It shows up when conditions are right. It unfolds. Blossoms. Grows. Thrives. And often implodes.
You can’t take trust for granted.
Transitive: When one of my trusted contacts recommends I talk with someone, I set up that conversation right away, and I start that conversation leaning in to discovering the thing my contact thought I would groove on. When they send me articles or videos they think I should see, I try hard to absorb them (emphasis on try).
Personal recommendations are typically the most powerful path for new things to become familiar things.
Sometimes personal recommendations fail, as happened to investors convinced that Bernie Madoff had their best interests at heart. Trust’s transitive nature is a primary tool for con artists.
Contagious: Have you had the experience, on entering a group’s conversation, of realizing that they’re operating at a very deep level of trust? Has this inspired you to say or do things you normally wouldn’t? How did it feel?
Trust has a resonance you can sometimes feel, outside of normal channels of communication.
Mistrust is also contagious. You’ve likely been in a room where things are going great, then someone really sticks their foot in it. They say or do something that cracks the trust in the room. Maybe they reveal a secret inappropriately, display blatant bias, or dress someone down very harshly who doesn’t deserve it. You see body language shift, people lean back and cross their arms. The excitement dies down. Trust vanishes.
Fragile: We’re all aware how easy it is to lose trust, to break the bonds of credibility that let others believe and follow us. It’s frustrating, because there isn’t an amount of money you can pay to create trust with certainty (see Indirect and Emergent).
Internal: Trust is about your intentions and beliefs. You can try to wallpaper over these by faking trustworthiness, but the internal work is essential. The truth works its way out.
That said, there are many companies ready and willing to help your enterprise appear to be authentic and trustworthy, from crisis managers to PR companies, reputation managers and messaging craft shops.
See Fragile, above.
Complicated: So trust is Fragile, Indirect, Emergent and all sorts of things nobody’s trained us to be good at. Why bother? Because it’s Foundational.
Ah, one more.
Stronger after it breaks: Amplifying on Fragile and Built Over Time above, you can screw something up and raise your trust in others’ eyes. It all depends on how you deal with the screwup.
If you dodge and obfuscate, you reveal yourself as even less trustworthy than others thought. But if you admit the problem, share openly how you’re fixing it and take steps to make sure it never shows up again, you may end up being more trustworthy than before the problem showed up, when things were hunky-dory.
Sincere apologies also help; non-apologies make things worse.
In my more cynical moments I argue that without crises, trust isn’t tested, so trust is likely not as strong as it could be.
For more background on trust, browse around these trust definitions and models.