CHAPTER 1

The Language of Trust

Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time.

—Brené Brown

Trust is fundamental to our sense of safety, autonomy, and dignity as human beings. It is also an integral part of every relationship we have. When we trust someone, we feel safe to share what is important to us, including our thoughts, ideas, efforts, hopes, and concerns. When others trust us, they reciprocate in kind. It doesn’t mean we always agree, just that we listen to, respect, and value what each other has to offer. In fact, trust allows us to disagree, debate, and test each other’s thinking as we work together to find the best ideas and solutions. Having work relationships built on trust allows us to get better and faster results with less stress.

Consider the following two examples of people talking about their leaders, Randy and Ray.

Randy is in charge of information systems for a midsize service company. Anita reports to Randy, along with three other managers, and each of them manages several other people. This is how Anita describes her relationship with Randy:

I have a great working relationship with Randy. Even though Randy is our boss, the five of us work as a team most of the time. We get a lot done and have a good time doing it. And it shows because our clients often tell us they appreciate what we do for them, which makes me proud to be part of this organization.

We don’t always agree, and Randy does have the final say, but he’ll always hear each of us out before he makes a decision. He makes his share of mistakes, of course, just like the rest of us. But we each take responsibility for them when we do, and we try to learn from them. Another thing that is important to me is that Randy also checks his facts before he says something, and his opinions are based on evidence, which he shares with us.

The bottom line is I trust Randy. I trust he knows what he’s doing and has what’s good for our clients and the company foremost in mind. He’s not one of these people who’s all good intentions but never follows through. He does what he says he’ll do. He is direct and doesn’t beat around the bush. If I’m doing something wrong, or he thinks I’m not doing my best work, he won’t hesitate to talk to me about it. But he is also quick to tell me when he thinks I’m doing something well. And I know both are for the sake of my professional growth and development.

In contrast, here is what Lisa has to say about her boss, Ray. Lisa and three other coworkers report to Ray. They are supposed to work as a team to process loans.

Our office has the lowest productivity in the region, and it’s because of Ray. To be honest, I don’t think the man knows what he’s doing most of the time, but he won’t admit it or ask anyone how to do things right. Instead he makes mistakes and then blames someone else when his mistakes cause problems, which they always do. The someone who gets blamed is usually one of us loan processors. I’ve even caught him in outright lies he’s told to cover for mistakes he made. If I see he’s about to do something that isn’t to regulations and tell him about it, does he thank me for it? No. Instead he argues with me about it, like he knows what he’s talking about, until I show him the specific regulation or procedure.

Not only do I not trust that he knows what he’s doing on the loans, I’m sure he’s bad-mouthing me and the other people here to his boss and our customers to make it sound like we’re the ones who are messing up. I don’t even talk to the man anymore unless I absolutely have to. And it’s too bad because it’s the customers who ultimately suffer.

The working relationships fostered by Randy and Ray were vastly different. In one, manager and employee built trust together; the other dissolved into distrust. Over time, in both situations the link between words and actions determined the trust relationship. Randy was aware of the importance of his language and actions in building and maintaining trust. More importantly, he understood the fundamental language of trust, the distinctions of care, sincerity, reliability, and competence that people use to think about and judge his trustworthiness. Just as important, Randy had a high degree of trust in the people on his team as well. This trust was a two-way street that benefited everyone.

Ray, on the other hand, consistently failed to appreciate the connection between what he said and what he did and how the disconnect created distrust. Nor did he have any idea why people were judging him as untrustworthy. As a result, he created enormous distrust in his workplace. Not only did his staff, supervisors, and clients distrust him, but also he distrusted them. While it began with Ray, everyone in and around that office behaved in such a way that no one felt they could fully trust anyone else.

Both Anita and Lisa have made a choice, a decision to trust or not trust. Figure 1 shows a model of trust as a decision.

When Anita said, “I trust Randy,” she was actually making an overall judgment that includes all four distinctions. For example, when she said, “He does what he says he’ll do,” she was talking about her assessment of his sincerity and reliability. Her statement “Randy checks his facts before he says something, and his opinions are based on evidence, which he shares with us” also indicated her judgment of his sincerity. When she said, “I trust he knows what he’s doing and has what’s good for our clients and the company foremost in mind,” she was talking about his competence and the care she believed he held toward what she also valued. Taken together, the four assessments combined to add up to her trust in him.

Anita was not alone in her strong trust of her manager. Randy’s other direct reports, his peers, and his manager all expressed similarly high levels of trust in him. As Anita’s description attests, the strong trust that Randy evoked in the people around him was good for him, good for them, and good for the company they worked in.

Ray’s behavior, on the other hand, left his staff, supervisors, and clients to distrust him. As Lisa pointed out, their office was the least productive in their region. All of them, Ray included, were spending so much time, energy, and creativity defending themselves against what they feared others would do or try to do to them that they had little to spare for their real work.

The following four distinctions compose a framework for understanding how you assess other peoples’ trustworthiness and how they assess yours.

Care is the assessment that you have the other person’s interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take actions. Of the four assessments of trustworthiness, care is in some ways the most important for building lasting trust. When people believe you are concerned with only your self-interest and don’t consider their interests as well, they may trust your sincerity, reliability, and competence, but they will tend to limit their trust of you to specific situations or transactions. On the other hand, when people believe you hold their interests in mind, they will extend their trust more broadly to you.

Sincerity is the assessment that you are honest, that you say what you mean and mean what you say. You can be believed and taken seriously. It also means your opinions are seen as valid, useful, and backed up by sound thinking and evidence. Finally, it means that your actions will align with your words.

Reliability is the assessment that you meet the commitments you make, that you keep your promises. Keeping promises is another way of saying you’ll follow through.

Competence is the assessment that you have the ability to do what you are doing or propose to do. In the workplace this usually means others believe you have the requisite capacity, skill, knowledge, and resources to do a particular task or job.

Understanding trust as a collection of assessments in four different domains frees us from the limiting belief that trust is all or nothing. We can be wiser and more precise about extending trust.

You can, for example, determine someone is not trustworthy in the domain of reliability because he often misses deadlines he has agreed to, but you may still be able to trust that he is sincere, is competent in his area of expertise, and cares. Rather than distrusting him completely, which will surely make your work and his more difficult, you can take measures to deal with his failing in the domain of reliability and still benefit from his work in other ways. Or, as I’ll discuss later in the book, you can have a conversation with him about your concern with his reliability.

One thing that made the situation worse for Ray and his group was that they all believed either you trust someone fully or not at all. Once Lisa decided she didn’t trust Ray in one situation, she figured she couldn’t trust anything he did. In fact, she did something most of us unconsciously do: she started looking for other things he did that would further support her judgment he was not trustworthy and ignoring anything that would contradict that judgment, something psychologists call confirmation bias. Knowing trust can be assessed in four distinct domains is an antidote to the tendency to engage in confirmation bias. We can more easily step back and ask ourselves whether the other person might be trustworthy in some ways and not others.

As we will see in chapter 7, the four assessment domains give us a better way to talk about and repair broken trust. In the next four chapters we’ll look at each distinction of trust in greater depth by reviewing the following:

• What the distinctions mean and how people use each to assess your trustworthiness
• How you can consciously speak and act to build others’ trust based on the distinctions
• How these distinctions can be used by teams to build, strengthen, and, if necessary, repair trust