Five Good Reasons to Trust a Crone

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Remember the crone, the multi-faceted older woman from fairy tales, the archetype from modern psychology? She’s the old woman, often ugly, sometimes malicious, and always possessing magical powers due to her proximity to the next world. In Robert Graves’s writings  she is the third side of the Triple Goddess: the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone.

Her role is to give the enchanted maiden or the hero on his journey – the child of destiny – the magical amulet or golden apple to take them to the next stages of their quest. In her benign form, she’s the fairy godmother.

Data from the Trust Quotient 10,000 Survey

Be cautious of whiplash as we move from fairy tales to hard data here.

Trusted Advisor Associates has gotten more than 12,000 responses to the Trust Quotient Self Assessment Quiz. At the 10,000 point, about four months ago, we performed some serious analyses of what we had learned to date.

Some of the material was covered in Trust and the Standard Deviation. Another finding suggests that in fact you should trust the crone, and the old man too. The strongest correlation in our study shows that as we age, we become more trustworthy. 


Since this data is self-reported, it got me wondering what’s behind it. My first guess was that we become less self-absorbed as we get older, and our Self-orientation scores improve as we move away from Self-orientation and towards Other-orientation.

I was wrong. We actually improve on all four scores (Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy and lower Self-orientation) as we age, and this holds true for men and women. Which begs the question: is everyone collectively kidding themselves? Or can we actually trust people more as they age? I believe the latter.

Five Good Reasons our Trustworthiness Goes Up With Age

Here are five reasons you should trust a crone, even though we are “sometimes malicious.” (The same probably goes for older men too, but I’ll stick with what I know.)

  1. We have nothing to prove. We’ve proven all that we need to in our lives, and we’re proud of it. We have every reason to tell the truth, and more of it. We’re not competing.
  2. We have greater capacity for intimacy (as defined by the Trust Equation) and fewer secrets to protect. Nothing embarrasses us.
  3. Our role is to help heroes and maidens on your journeys. We’re concerned about, but not invested in, the outcome.
  4. We have supernatural or magical powers, or at least very high wisdom, which makes us credible.
  5. And – trust me on this – even when we’re malicious it’s for your own good!

Do You Trust the Taxi-Driver? Or Not?

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I spent last week in Denmark, 40 miles outside of Copenhagen. While nearly every Dane speaks near-perfect English, I of course stand out as an American.

I took a taxi from a resort hotel venue to the local train station. The fare was 70 kroner (about 15 dollars). I gave the driver a 200-kroner note. He gave me back 30 kroner change.

So here’s the question: If it were you in that situation, what would you instantly assume about what is going on?

Trusting vs. Being Trustworthy

Much of what we usually talk about on Trust Matters is trustworthiness, as opposed to trusting. They are not the same thing; in fact they are quite distinct.

The ability to trust strangers (as will be described in this week’s Trust Quotes interview with Eric Uslaner—tune in Wednesday) is instilled in us when we were young, and does not change easily. Trustworthiness, on the other hand, feels less risky and is more teachable.

The taxi driver incident is about trusting, not trustworthiness: and it offers a quick litmus test of your propensity to trust. Which do you instinctively assume:

  1. You assume that obviously the taxi-driver made a mental slip, thinking you had given him a 100-kroner note, rather than a 200-kroner note. It is early in the morning, perhaps he hasn’t had his coffee. You politely point out you had given him 200.
  2. You momentarily think, “What is going on here? Why did he do that?” and then just as quickly assume he probably just had a momentarily lapse. Since the 200-kroner note is still in his hand, you are comfortable pointing at it and smiling, so that he will notice his error.
  3. You are mildly annoyed: you think, “He can’t be pulling this move, can he?” You quickly realize, however, there is no risk here; you simply point out the 200-kroner note still in his hand, somewhat clumsily sitting on his lap. “I gave you 200,” you firmly point out, realizing also he had plausible deniability—if pressed, he’d almost certainly insist it was an honest mistake.
  4. Adrenaline rises in you instantly: you think, “What do you take me for, some naïve foreigner you can hustle? No way, Jose, are you getting away with this crap—not with me, you don’t.” You point directly at his hand, still guiltily holding on the to the 200-note, and say grimly with clenched teeth, “You’re short, buddy; give me the other 100, and you can forget about a tip.”

There is no right or wrong answer here, there are simply degrees of propensity to trust. Whether your answer is ‘smart’ is also situational; you may answer differently in rural Denmark at 9AM than you would in downtown Hamburg or Detroit at 2AM (and if not, you’re naïve).

Given that, if your answer is:

  1. You are very trusting, more so than the average person in the world. Depending on the situation, you may be too trusting, in fact, for your own good.
  2. You make a distinct choice to note your suspicions, but to act as if you do not have them; people read you as responding from trust, though you haven’t given up your objectivity about risk.
  3. You’re a bit suspicious. While most would not take offense at your response, neither are you likely to take advantage of some opportunities presented in life. Your basic response to life is one of caution.
  4. You believe you don’t have much control over your life, and that others know it and are out to get you before you get them. You expect little of others, and are rarely disappointed.

The interesting thing about trusting-ness is that it is catching. The way you behave toward others influences the way they respond back to you.

Whether you expect the worst of people, or the best of people, you’ll pretty much be right.

Act accordingly.

Impeccability vs. Perfection: Who’s Got Your Back?

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At first glance, the difference between Impeccability and Perfection is slight.

Taking a closer look, they are very different characters, each with a profoundly different impact when it comes to building trust. Here’s the punch line, delivered by a recovering perfectionist:

Impeccability is your friend; Perfection is not.

A Character Study: Perfection vs. Impeccability

Let’s envision Perfection and Impeccability as two characters in a play.

In physical appearance, both are well-dressed. Perfection’s shirt is buttoned to the top; Impeccability’s open collar reveals a crisp, white T-shirt underneath. Perfection sits with his back rigidly straight; Impeccability assumes a relaxed yet confident stance. Perfection drums his fingers nervously on the table-top; Impeccability sits quietly.

As to their personalities: Where Perfection is determined with gritted teeth to always get it right, Impeccability is determined to be thorough and complete. Where Perfection endeavors to never make a mess, and experiences distress when the inevitable occurs, Impeccability recognizes that all humans make mistakes and chooses to see the inevitable as an opportunity to build trust. (see previous post: Why Mistakes Build Trust).

Perfection is controlling, stressed, and perpetually uptight; Impeccability is focused, at ease, his sense of perspective and humor intact at all times.

Perfection is often accompanied by Impatience, Judgment, and Frustration; Impeccability hangs out with Compassion, Confidence, and Self-Acceptance.

Impeccability vs. Perfection: One Level Deeper

Both Perfection and Impeccability are well-intended characters—striving to be the best they can be. Yet dig a little deeper and we see a key difference between the two: what’s driving them.

Perfection constantly feeds a need to satisfy something internal and self-oriented. Impeccability, on the other hand, is other-oriented at the core; his motivation is the satisfaction that comes with being of service and making a difference.

Even Perfection agrees that Impeccability is much more pleasant to be around. Impeccability is much easier to relate to. He endeavors to do his best and humbly accepts that he will fail at times. He cleans up his messes with transparency, swiftness, and an appropriate amount of lightheartedness. In doing so, he leaves room for others to be human.

Put yourself in your clients’ shoes. With whom would you rather spend your time?

Robert Porter Lynch on Trust, Innovation and Performance (Trust Quotes #2)

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Robert Porter Lynch may be one of the best trust thinkers you haven’t heard of.  A long-time thought leader in strategic alliances, he has written several books on collaboration and innovation. He quotes Robert Frost, has studied how the Greeks created trust, and counter-balances Machiavelli. He is equally at home with high tech companies and with laborers in the trenches.

He’s currently working with Paul R. Lawrence (Professor Emeritus, Organization Behavior at Harvard Business School) on Lawrence’s new book: Driven to Lead, and his own book: Leadership and the Architecture of Trust (to be published)

Excerpts from our Interview:

CHG: Welcome to the Trust Quotes series, Robert. You cover a range of trust-related topics, but let’s start with one. You talk about the strong link between trust and innovation. Can you explain that link to us?

RPL: Absolutely. All innovation comes from people who think differently — that is, one perspective meets another, and something new can be born. If two people in the same room think alike, one is unnecessary when it comes to innovation,. The eminent psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung wrote: The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension between opposites.

But two differing perspectives don’t automatically create something new, and all too often the differences become destructive: like Republicans vs. Democrats, old vs. new, my way or the highway.

So the art becomes: how can you increase the creative aspect of interactions between opposites? And the answer is trust. When this tension exists in a trusting environment, people’s creative juices are aligned, and they become jointly innovative, thus trust is an alignment of human energy. This aligned energy is also referred to as synergy – something that is so often elusive in organizations and relationships.

CHG: That’s fascinating. Earlier in this series, Ross Smith of Microsoft said very much the same thing. Are you two in cahoots?

RPL: Nope, never heard of him, but that’s how memes work. That and he’s obviously an insightful man!

The Trust-Innovation Link

CHG: Well, how does creating greater trust enable greater innovation?

RPL: Turns out that’s a great question. Let me re-tweak it a bit, if I may. The question is: how can teams act at the highest level of performance? And the reason I phrase it that way is that there’s solid evidence to show that the highest team performance comes from trust. So high performance teams ought to know something about trust.
CHG: Where did you look, and what did you find?

RPL: I spent 2 years looking over the worst-to-first instances in sports: such as Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers of 1960 going from the bottom of the league to the Superbowl, or Pat Riley taking the L.A. Lakers to the NBA championship, or the most exciting of them all — arguably the greatest worst-to- first performance of all time, the 1980 American hockey team that won Olympic Gold against all odds, culminating in a win over the monstrously dominant Russian team.

One thing people forget is that Coach Ross Brooks — a man who had himself had been turned down from an earlier Olympic team — turned down a player who himself had more talent and better credentials than probably any other player on the team.

Why would a coach refuse a superior player as you’re heading into the Olympics? Well, the player was asked to practice with the team, and the team confronted the coach unanimously, saying ‘you can’t hire him.’

‘Why not?’ asked the coach.

“Because he doesn’t give 100%,” the team said.

“But he’s more talented than anyone else, even at less-than-full effort, he’s arguably the best player on the ice,” the coach protested.”

“But coach,” the players said, “if you never know what effort he’s going to give, you can’t trust what he’ll do. You never know how much game he’s bringing. You cannot depend on him to be reliable.  He wasn’t a collaborative kind of guy, he’d rather try to score himself than pass the puck to someone better positioned.”

That’s why in hockey they still call Wayne Gretzky the “Great One:” because he not only scored more goals than any other player, he also had more assists – he was the ultimate team player.

And it is this sense that permeates all great teams. They trust each other; they trust each other to give the utmost to the team. Which means, everyone can rely on everyone else’s motives, and everyone can trust the results. Unqualified commitment by each member of the team drives trust, and trust enables high performance.

That’s the link.

CHG: I get it. So, where are some lessons for business?

RPL: Well, you’d think way more businesses would grasp the obvious economics of collaborating — cross functional teams, innovative supply chains, alliances and joint ventures, for example. But very few companies do them right—because they don’t trust, because they don’t know how trust is created or destroyed.

CHG: How does that play out?

RPL: Todd Welch and I researched this; and the one thing we found was that unless there is trust at the top of the organization, collaborations don’t work. When trust is lacking, legal agreements are erroneously expected to fill the gap. And, of course, the longer the legal agreement, the stronger the distrust, because nearly all legal agreements actually generate more distrust, exacerbating fears and thus making it less likely the venture would succeed. You could make book on it.

CHG: You told me a story of a client who does major huge deals on a handshake basis. What’s the real story behind that one?

RPL: That is the real story. The only thing surprising is that the rest of us consider it surprising. The company is Daymon Worldwide, which provides private label brands to the grocery industry. I’ve seen Du Pont and Merck put a billion-dollar joint venture together on a handshake, and the legal agreements followed a year later. I witnessed Fleet bank enter a multi-million construction of their headquarters on a handshake with Gilbane Construction company. Handshake deals are far more common than many think.

CHG: You have developed a couple of models for thinking about trust; can you tell us briefly about them?

RPL: One of the primary reasons trust has been an elusive mystery is because we have either ambiguous or complicated understanding about why humans act the way they do. Recently Paul Lawrence has cracked the code on human behavior and provided a very elegant way of explaining what others have made so convoluted. Anyone from senior execs to high-school students grasps it in about five minutes: Here’s a brief explanation.

Trust and Ethics

CHG: What’s your view of the connection between trust and ethics? And what’s the state of ethics in business these days?

RPL: It goes without saying that ethics are in an abominable state of affairs, but I’m not sure that’s really different. Washington is better now than it was in the 1870’s, and business is probably no worse than it’s ever been. That’s an empty compliment because poor trust is very, very expensive. The biggest problem with ethics is the illusion we all have that good ethics would cure the problems of distrust.

Ethics actually creates a dilemma for building trust. While the lack of ethics will definitely destroy trust, the presence of ethics may only bring trust to a neutral point. Good ethics implies “I won’t do something wrong;” it takes the fear out of the picture. But it doesn’t mean “I’ll be effective,” nor “use sound judgment,” nor “be collaborative,” nor “compassionate,” nor “spontaneous.” Other things are necessary.

We all know ethical people who are ornery, dispassionate, inconsiderate, self-righteous, or uncooperative; thus while “trustworthy,” they are still not able to generate a trusting relationship. Trust embraces far more than ethics.

Real trust comes from people who are willing to be highly cooperative as well as ethical. Trust manifests when three things are boldly present: good character, good competence, and good collaboration. When we see great trust, we see people who know that their self-interest must always be put into a bigger picture: what’s in the mutual interest of the relationship itself.

Just yesterday I was asked to help rebuild a relationship between two business partners where the trust had broken down. The older of the two partners said it so well:

“For me at this stage of my life, I find it very difficult to separate friendship from business. The qualities of a great friend are quite similar to those of a great partner. Frankly, I don’t know where the dividing line is any more. The qualities of trust, integrity, mutuality, loyalty, and commitment to a larger mission are inherent in both a friendship and business partnership. As we embark on the threshold of a noble destiny together, I want these qualities to be present between us. In fact, this is more than a “want,” it is an “essential ingredient.”

This is the second installment of Trust Quotes, our new series featuring interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners in the world of trust: people who apply trust in powerful ways in business and society.

Previous Issues:

Trust Quotes #1: Ross Smith of Microsoft on trust and innovation

What a Trust-based Company Looks Like

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The tone of this blog is frequently critical. That’s probably because I believe we all learn much better from negative examples than from positive.
But if you don’t have any positive examples with which to contrast, we can easily forget why negative is negative. So the occasional positive blogpost is especially important. And this one is a real upper.

PSA: Pediatric Services of America

Last week I had the privilege of working with a very fine small company, PSA Healthcare. They deliver home health care for medically fragile people, mostly children. They have about 3,500 private duty nurses, operating from 50 locations in 17 states. What they do can make an enormous difference to families, allowing them to lead normalized lives under difficult conditions.

But having a great mission alone doesn’t make for a fine company. A lot of what makes PSA fine is that they are intentionally and consciously using trust principles to run the business. They are not only making a lot of people very happy and proud, they are doing very well by classic business measures. A fine case of doing well by doing good.

Let’s start with the metrics, go on to the principles, and end up with the real punch lines.

The Numbers. Jim McCurry started as CEO a little over a year ago, when PSA had been declining in revenue, market share, and profitability. Previous management was a classic top-down, measure-by-the-numbers team that had, simply put, failed.

The old style was that each month the bottom-performing offices were required to ‘justify’ themselves on a conference call to the top management. At the annual meeting, office heads were required to double-up on hotel rooms. Orders were given, decisions had to be approved up the line, and the style was management by FIN—fear, intimidation and numbers.

By the end of McCurry’s first year—at the tail end of a recession—revenue steadily increased, reaching a 20% annual rate of growth by year-end, all of it volume-based. The company increased profitability, more than doubled total profits, and turned the market share decline into market share gain. Staff morale is up enormously. Expenses are down.

Bottom line: really solid business results.

The Principles. How did McCurry do it? It was not the classic MBA turnaround medicine of tightening up, taking control, and cutting expenses. Instead, Jim told the staff the following:

“From now on, this company is run for the customer. The office heads work for the customer, and the rest of leadership works for them. Make your own decisions, and we’ll help you make them. Don’t wait for us to tell you what to do, you figure out what to do and do it—we trust you. No more intimidation, no more review boards.

“Our new mission has three parts: Action-oriented, Care-giving, and Trust-based.” (It spells ACT: coincidence? Of course not).

The annual meeting I was privileged to be part of was full of hokey-yet-fun skits, honesty, mutual helping, and positive energy.

The Punch Lines.  McCurry is an MBA. A Harvard MBA, actually, from a year after Dubya’s vintage.

The company’s owners are two private equity firms; the head of one of these is dedicated to the business in large part because his mother had been born so prematurely that she likely would have died were it not for the in-home nursing care she received in the first weeks of life.

This is a profitable business, not a charity. It is being run like a real business; like a real business ought to be, I should say, because too many businesses are being run the way PSA used to be run.

It’s refreshing to see an example of the much maligned du jour—MBAs and private equity—using modern, “squishy” leadership and management principles to improve life and the bottom line in parallel.

Collaboration, ethics, trust, openness, honesty, integrity—these are not fuzzy phrases, uttered by bureaucrats, wealthy Hollywood stars, or mega-rich Googlish do-gooders. These are utterly workable principles that deliver the best results around. They give capitalism a good name. Collaborative capitalism, I like to call it.

McCurry and PSA Healthcare deserve their success.

 

The Purpose of a Company Is…

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Thinking that the purpose of a company is to make a profit is like believing that the purpose of living is to eat.

Now that we’re clear about where I stand, and that this is going to be a bit of a rant, here we go.

The Purpose of Living is Not to Eat

I’m with whomever it was that said the ‘purpose-of-a-company-is-to-make-a-profit’ thing is back-asswards.

But let’s not start at full rant level. Let’s start by actually parsing the word “purpose.”

May I suggest that the statement “the purpose of [whatever] is…” does not actually mean anything unless given a context. And there are many contexts.

A sociologist (structural-functionalist variety) would look at a company and ask, ‘what social role does that kind of entity fulfill?’ Here are just a few answers.

• From the point of view of a state or local government, one role of companies is to fund a tax base and employ local citizens;
• From the point of view of a federal government, a corporation is a vehicle for implementing tax collections, health care policy, and vaccinations;
• From the point of view of the Supreme Court—at least recently—a company is indistinguishable from a human being when it comes to contributing to electoral campaigns and free speech;
• From the point of view of shareholders, it is to provide a return on shareholder investment;
• From the point of view of customers, the purpose of a company is to create customers (this in fact was the view of Peter Drucker).

A religious person might look at a company and say, “The role of a company is to allow man the means to fulfill God’s mission on earth.”

An anthropological historian might say the role of a corporation is to aggregate capital to fund larger-scale economic activities than could be done by individuals working alone.

I don’t know what Milton Friedman meant when he said it; he could perfectly well have meant, “if a company is making a profit, it’s doing all the other things it’s supposed to be doing, no need to inquire further.”  But it’s clear that Friedman has since been hijacked by those who have a far narrower, and more corporatist, agenda to pursue.

And so on. Without any context, absolute statements about the purpose of anything reveal either intellectual laziness or a political opinion—usually the latter. But let’s continue.

Corporations Are Not Granted Divine Rights

Often what people mean when they equate corporate purpose and profit is to suggest that the concept is primary, fundamental, or very basic, or a core principle; not quite revealed truth, but not far from it.

So it’s worthwhile remembering the source of legitimacy of a corporation. The first were formed in England in the 17th century, e.g. the Hudson’s Bay Company; they were formed by authority of the government.  In the US today, companies are chartered by the States. Again, legitimacy derives from the government. In whatever country we’re talking about, corporations are granted their legitimacy by way of the state.

There is no ‘right’ to profit for a company. There is no Bible that imbues companies with extra-legal status. No tablets were handed down, no assembly of people blessed companies with a ‘purpose’ agreed upon by all.

What about corporate charters that require companies to be responsible to shareholders for earning a return? I’m not a lawyer, but I’m reasonably well-read, and I’m not aware of any shareholder suits that invoke that clause to argue against excessive management compensation. From which I conclude there’s probably a lot of latitude for interpretation.

The Role of Companies

The real role of companies is hardly self-evident; in fact, it’s an excellent subject for public policy debate. The key question is: what do we want the role to be?

A company is a creation of the state, which in turn is beholden to its citizens. The question of the role of a company is on the same footing as the role of any other civic institution; what do we want to be the role of our public schools? Of our prison system? Of our approach to civil rights?

It’s a great question, and very timely. Let’s not shut down the discussion by assuming there’s some pat debate-ending answer.

(For anyone interested in pursuing this line of thinking further, I find the Wikipedia entry on “philosophy of business” to be thorough and thought-provoking.)

 

 

Trust and the Standard Deviation

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Those of you who regularly read Trust Matters have probably heard something about the Trust Equation, a formula for figuring out your own individual trustworthiness.

It looks like this:

Where:

T = Trustworthiness
C = Credibility (words)
R = Reliability (actions)
I = Intimacy (safety)
S = Self-orientation (whose agenda are you working?)

You can read more about it in this article:

From this equation, Charlie Green developed the Trust Quotient assessment–20 questions which yield powerful information on not only a person’s overall TQ, but also her or his areas of strength and – let’s be forthright – weakness when it comes to creating trust.

And the Trust Quotient Assessment Says…

Over the past two years more than 10,000 people have taken the TQ quiz. And what a rich and delicious trove of aggregated data that has given us – the largest study of its kind ever done on personal trustworthiness.

One of the key findings is this: in building trust, consistency matters.

The data show that the more consistent a person is across all four areas of the TQ (credibility, reliability, intimacy and low self-orientation) the higher that person’s overall TQ score will be.

Put another way, the higher the standard deviation among the four components’ scores, the lower will be the overall Trust Quotient number. Science has now shown what intuition has always told us. We trust people more when they display all four key factors evenly, when they act consistently. In some ways, this is what we mean when we say ‘integrity’—a sense that we are seeing a whole, that this person walks the talk, there are no secrets, what we see is what we get.

In less mathematical terms …

Imagine that you scored very well on credibility (you really know your stuff), on intimacy (you relate to others on a human level, and are open with them), and on self-orientation (you really listen to other people and want to understand how you can help, not just how you can make a sale.)

BUT–with all of this going for you, if you miss deadlines, show up late or not at all for meetings, and fail to get your part of the project done, no one is going to trust you.

Will they tolerate you? Maybe, if you are the super-expert they need on the job, or the total charmer who makes even wacky excuses sound plausible. But trust you? No. You’re a brilliant or charming flake. You can’t be relied upon.

Does the TQ Contradict Strengths-based Management?

On the face of it, this may appear to contradict the strengths-based approach to management championed by Marcus Buckingham, who argues you’re generally better off working from your strengths than fixing your weaknesses. Because if a charming flake can improve her or his score on reliability, she or he can improve their TQ trust score.

In fact, we don’t think it contradicts Buckingham’s basic proposition; if your natural strength lies in intimacy, for example, you’d do well to use it.  But what if people can’t see it for the strength it is?  What is your flakiness obscures it?

As is true so often, trust may be a bit of a special case. If the appearance of dis-integrity (flakiness, perhaps) is keeping people from seeing your natural strength in intimacy, then improving reliability is a way of enhancing your strength, rather than just shoring up your weakness.

This is just a peek into the tent of our findings from the survey data. Stay tuned to read more in future blogposts.
 

Ross Smith on Trust and Innovation (Trust Quotes #1)

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 Given Trust Matters’ attempt to be commonsensical and practical, it’s fitting that we lead off the series with Ross Smith, a line manager who uses trust daily. I first met Ross in early 2009, when he was running a team of about 80 programmers working on Windows security for Microsoft—not the first place I would have guessed to be focused on trust.

Let’s pick it up there.

CHG: Ross, you didn’t set out to do work in trust, did you?

RS: Hey Charlie – No, not at all. We started several years ago on the Windows Security team and though we didn’t realize it at the time, we were experiencing the influence of the workplace generational change, the Internet, social networking, and web 2.0 on our work and our team. The experiences, knowledge, hobbies, and expertise of people went far beyond what they did in their daily work – and we wanted to create an environment where they could be creative and apply their outside interests and experience to how they did their jobs.

We ran into a great paper “Well-being and Trust in the Workplace” by Helliwell and Huang – that equated an increase in trust to a pay raise. We thought about creative and innovative organizations we knew of, had worked on, or had read about – and some of the best practices they shared – things like freedom to fail, suggest new ideas, transparency, etc. – and realized that these behaviors are all rooted in trust. So, we kicked off an effort called 42projects, as an experiment in how we manage and engage as a team – in an effort to encourage more freedom, autonomy, play, and creativity in how we work.

CHG: Can you say more about the link between trust and innovation?

RS: Well, the term “innovation” can be a bit tricky and subjective. However, if the goal is to find new, exciting, cool, or different ways of doing things, or to generate ideas for ground-breaking new products, then people need the freedom to experiment. They will want to take risks. And, while no one likes to admit it, there’s a likelihood that that people will fail – and then they will iterate – and fail again – and iterate. We’ve all heard the Edison stories of experimentation and failure.

However, in real life, I won’t be bragging to my manager about my ability to fail, romanticizing the Edison mantra, if I don’t absolutely trust that my manager sees the bigger picture – and also trusts me to be working towards that. If we don’t have a solid relationship built on mutual or reciprocal trust, then we’re both likely to reduce risk-taking and stick to a conservative and accepted formula for execution.

Alternatively, in a climate of high trust – one where freedom of ideas and risk taking is accepted and encouraged, then as an individual, I’m more likely to try creative new approaches – and as I do, I will learn, iterate and improve. In a high trust workplace, therefore, I can be creative and “innovate”, because I have more freedom and autonomy to experiment without the fear of retribution for failure.

CHG: What are some of the ways in which you ended up exploring trust?

RS: Well, while this all looks really good on paper, in practice, trust is really just a “woo-woo” soft skill – and the world of engineering is quite structured. How do we take a right brain aspiration and develop a left brain process? I’m not sure we’ve figured it out yet, even after 4 years. But we started simply – just ask people – what behaviors do you feel influences trust?

We sat down in a room with Post-its and people wrote down behaviors that were important to them. We took that list, and built a little web-based voting game – and asked the team to play. We assumed that we could rank the list, and then go to work on the top three. But we realized quickly that trust is situational – and depends on context – and there was no one-size-fits-all solution. We returned to look at web 2.0 tools and put our ideas and research out on a wiki – and asked people to contribute their suggestions, examples, and stories.

We had a few people contribute, and we were able to compile enough useful information that we could share this as a sort of reference – a “playbook”. The big win for us was simply asking our team members to identify things that influenced trust for them. We made everyone aware of that list – and that awareness really helped individuals self-monitor and be more cognizant of their actions. I think it really helped leaders think more empathetically about their own actions and their influence on individuals via behaviors on that list.

We’ve also explored the application of collaborative play and fun on trust-building. We have used productivity games to help bring fun to the work we do, and we’ve found that as people play together as teammates, they develop deeper trust relationships in the workplace.

CHG: Along the way you also read a lot of trust literature, didn’t you? What did it tell you?

RS: Interestingly, I feel we were fortunate to be naïve when we started – we did not study before we began, we just set out on our own path. As we got going, we realized there were experts in the field of organizational trust whose experience and knowledge FAR exceeded anything we imagined. (readers – you know Charlie’s work, so hopefully he doesn’t edit this out – but he was one of these )
There are a number of great people, books and research that influenced us along the way.

[The list of  which is posted at the end of this interview]

CHG: What have you found out in the "real world" that’s different from what you read from academics and consultants?

RS: For us, it’s almost the other way around – we found a lot of great ideas in our reading that really helped improve/refine what we had been doing. Again, I think we came in to this very naïve – and it was great to be able to learn from experienced people, both in the industry as well as academia. The contextual nature of trust, how it differs across time and relationships, the importance of consistency, authenticity, and integrity, and how easy it is to lose vs. how long it takes to build – were examples of ideas we learned more quickly through reading the work of others.

CHG: How big a role do you think trust can play in business? And how far down the road are we?

RS: Trust plays a much bigger role than we realize.

I think trust is a fundamental component in everything we do – business or otherwise. What has struck me most in our journey is how the role of trust is unrecognized – or under-represented. People don’t acknowledge the existence – or non-existence – of trust as it is happening. Think about your last great manager. What made him or her great? Now think about trust. Do the same for your last bad manager. Organizations don’t really make trust a priority – or even talk about it – because it’s so hard to measure.

For me personally, in the last six months, I moved from the Windows Security team, where this work started and where trust is an obvious influencer – to the Office Communicator and Design group – that focuses on IM, audio and video communications – because I believe that as communication speed and styles continue to evolve, – from the ancient Greek runner in Marathon who delivered the message from noble to noble – all the way to the IM or web chat across the globe that happened while you read this – open and authentic communication is critical to building trust – in an organization and in society.

We are at a time when human communication is changing at an unprecedented pace. 3G cell phones aren’t even 10 years old. Twitter is four. We are at the dawn of a new era where real time global communication is the norm, and there is an exciting opportunity for digital communication tools to create and enhance trust building across organizational and global boundaries. Egyptian hieroglyphics and Guttenberg, Juan Pablo Bonet and ARPANET – all milestones throughout the history of communication – have led us to this time and place where everyone can communicate with everyone else. Language, time, and distance barriers have fallen. How do we carry forth things like voice inflection and body language into the digital realm, so that fabric of trust that’s woven into every relationship evolves in this new age of communication?

CHG: You must think that at least some people can be taught trust; how many? And how do you do it?

RS: I think people can be taught to be AWARE of trust. I cannot teach you how to trust me. I can tell you the things that influence my level of trust in you – and then, by making you aware of those, you can go out and demonstrate them – and it’s likely that, over time, I will trust you more.
It takes time. You hear all the time about “earning” trust – and to me, that means demonstrating consistency – people need to be able to predict your behavior in a given situation – and if they are able to do that successfully, you’ve taken a step towards earning their trust. It’s a bit like a game where you can earn points or a regular bank account deposit.

CHG: What do you think are the biggest barriers to enhancing trust in the business world?

RS: I think that it is the awareness of the impact, Charlie. No matter how technical or binary we get, trust is earthy-crunchy. Insert your mental image of falling backwards exercises here. And do you really want to bet your business on that? Sounds like a bit of a shaky approach because you can’t measure progress, you can’t see it. And I think the lack of solid ROI metrics for the soft skills improvements minimize significant investments – and yet, it’s fundamental to everything we do.

Trust is like that IT person who works all night long to keep the servers running, and is so tired the next day they sleep through the status meeting, and someone else gets the credit for making things work. It’s like the night crew at the burger joint who clean the grills and empty the oil vat so the burgers taste good every day. Trust is fundamental to success, a key component of healthy relationships, yet often it’s very hard to notice until it’s gone.

So, I’d say the biggest barriers to enhancing the level of trust in the business world are the lack of awareness of its importance – and the difficulty of measuring it. I read once that trust is like freedom and air – you know when it runs out, but it’s really hard to know how much you have.
The work you’re doing, for instance, with your Trust Quotient, is a great step towards legitimacy in the business world. We’re looking at some experiments with the ROI Institute to measure the ROI of our trust-related work and its impact on productivity.

CHG: Do you think business can teach the world about trust? Or is it the other way ’round?

RS: Wow! – Great question. One thing that we’ve learned is that no one disputes the value of trust. If someone comes out and suggests that “we need to trust each other more”, there are no dissenting opinions…

The world moves quickly – our world of technology changes daily. But trust-building takes time, persistence, and demonstrated consistency. It’s a luxury we may not always have. But just like you can’t cheat in farming, there are no quick short cuts to building trust. The fast pace of communication can expedite relationship building – 20 instant message exchanges might be similar to 20 post cards mailed by hand.

I think people take for granted the ease in which we can communicate now. I can take an hour on a Saturday morning and send a personal message to everyone I know – perhaps, if I’m organized, everyone I’ve ever met. That’s amazing – and yet, people rarely take that time to communicate voluntarily. It’s the small, unsolicited communication over time that opens the channels to build trust.

CHG: Where do you want to go next in your examination of trust?

RS: Exploring in more detail the impact and influence of communication on trust in an organization – We are experimenting with communication tools that facilitate trust-building and that augment and enable our trust building behaviors. We want to better understand measurement and progress – and how do we build awareness in a group of people of the behaviors that influence their level of trust. What are the economic implications of a high trust vs. a low trust environment, and how does trust influence productivity and morale.

CHG: Anything else people ought to hear from you?

RS: We really appreciate people’s interest in our work. As I mentioned, we started off quite as real novices, and it’s been a real pleasure to be able to learn from so many great people. I think sharing and collective community learning is key to advancing the ideas of trust–building and its importance. There is a large body of knowledge that we hope we can draw from and add to – and we’d love to collaborate.
If you’re interested, join our “Friends” alias – or send me email – our site is www.42projects.org

CHG: Many thanks on behalf of TrustMatters readers for taking the time to talk with us.

RS: Thank you – we’ve learned a lot from your work – and from several others who I know read this – and it’s a privilege to be able to share our experiences.

Further Reading Mentioned in the Interview

Trusted Advisor !!
Well-being and Trust in the Workplace Helliwell and Huang
Leader Perfect Trust Centered Leadership
Mike Meutzel, Gen X / Y
Brock Dubbels
Serious Games Initiative
ROI Institute
Speed of Trust by Steven M.R. Covey,
Gary Hamel
Warren Miller – Freedom
Management Innovation Lab (case study)
Career Innovation A Guide to Trust
Paul Herr, Primal Management
Julian Birkinshaw Reinventing Management
Byron Reeves, Leighton Reed – Total Engagement
Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama
Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) by Piotr Sztompka
The Problem of Trust by Adam B. Seligman (Paperback – Feb 14, 2000)
Trust in Society (Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust) by Karen S. Cook
Trust and Trustworthiness (The Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust, Vol. 4) by Russell Hardin
Building trust in business politics, relationships and life – Solomon and Flores
Reina Trust Building

Collaboration: Not Just an Internal Virtue

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We usually think of collaboration as a good thing. But we also usually think of it as something we do internally—in order to compete with the external world. This is a viewpoint which has proven harmful in the past.

The future of collaboration is not just internal, but external as well—with various stakeholders, particularly including customers and suppliers.

Old Collaboration: Us Against Them

As the Deputy Dean of Academic Affairs at Harvard Business School puts it, “Today, more than ever, business is a competitive endeavor. At the same time, management is a more collaborative endeavor.”  That’s the old view–collaboration as a management technique, practiced in service to a competitive-based strategy.

Jack Welch’s term “boundarylessness” captured this introverted form of extroversion perfectly:  it was boundarylessness, right up to the corporate boundary. At that point, it became us vs. them.

The Dangers of Limiting Collaboration to Internal Only

Google recently got slammed for its Buzz product introduction, which seemed blind to concerns about privacy.  The problem was not testing: Google routinely runs massive tests on new product introductions–but it does so internally. Had Google tried to collaborate with some non-Google folks, someone might have clued them in about the suspicious world outside the inner walls at Mountainview.

And that’s not a unique example. Toyota is currently paying the price for low levels of external collaboration—despite excellent levels of internal collaboration.

I remember vividly the first class on my first day of my first year at business school. It was a consumer marketing case, about introducing a new product. I and everyone in the class concluded it was a horrible idea; none of us could envision buying the product.

The joke was on us; the product was a huge success. The lesson? Never do market research on yourself.

Collaborating with your teammates is good for speed and efficiency. But external collaboration connects you with the world outside. Big stakes.

New Collaboration Reduces Risk by Going External

Conventional wisdom declares collaboration to be an internal management tactic. The collaborative capitalist view is that collaboration is no longer a tactic, but a strategy for more successfully engaging the outside world on terms other than solely competitive.
 

Are Book Titles Getting Twitter-ized?

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Have you noticed the plethora of one-word nonfiction book titles lately?

The following titles are taken from the top 60 best sellers on Amazon’s list of business books. That means nearly 1/4 of the top books have one word titles. Yes, they have subtitles, but other than that, I’m being a purist, and didn’t even count titles with ‘the.’ (Like ‘The Secret,’ which has no business being on a business list anyway).

Blink, Think
Stick, Switch
Tribes, Outliers
Nudge, Sway
Linchpin, Rework
Drive, Mojo
Freefall, Aftershock

Most naturally fall into categories of opposites. For every one word title, there is an equal and opposite title, seems to be the rule.

I can’t imagine we had this many one-word titles in recent history, and I suspect it means something.

The Curmudgeonly Interpretation: The Decline of Rome, redux

There is an obvious interpretation which appeals to modern Luddites and curmudgeons: "It’s the Twitter that done it!" You can write the rest of that post yourself.

Variations on that theme include, "Anybody who thinks he has 5000 friends doesn’t have any," and "Kids these days don’t even know their times tables."

There is another view, of course, and that is simply that the meanings of words change over time. In Jorge Luis Borges classic short story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote,”  , the author Menard resolves to write the greatest novel of all time. Which, as everyone knows, is Don Quixote. So after great labor, Menard triumphantly succeeds in writing Don Quixote, in its original Spanish.

But of course, the meaning of the words had changed over the centuries, hence it turned out that Menard had not written the greatest novel of all time after all; whereupon he died forlorn of disappointment (as I recall).

An awful lot of wasted energy gets expended on debates over the changing meanings of words like ‘friend.’ Too bad we don’t have the ability to just say ‘friend-like-it-meant-in-1957’ and ‘friend-like-it-meant-when-it-became-a-verb.’

Not Better or Worse, Just Different Books

Let’s just stipulate that there were some good things about the 1957-model Friend that were lost in the transition to the New Model. But the reverse is true too. With 2000 friends, you can find someone up at any hour of the night, for example. That’s non-trivial, as far as I’m concerned.

I just spent 3 hours of a 5-hour flight reading a really good old-style book called Crisis of Character: Building Corporate Reputation in the Age of Skepticism, by Peter Firestein. Not a one-word title. Because, in this case, it’s not a one-word book. (Excellent book, by the way).

Then again, I’m a Malcolm Gladwell fan; I’m not about to join the backlash against him. Blink? Outlier? Yeah, I get it, and I get it quick. Maybe I don’t have to read the whole book to ‘get it,’ but I always do anyway, because I love reading Malcolm.

Yes, I think one-word titles are different, and new, and here to stay.  And I’m sure it is all part of “the twitter,” we all have A.D.D. now, and so on. And some of that’s good, and some of that’s bad.

What it is, it’s just different.

My favorite old Greek philosopher (maybe the only one I remember) Heraclitus said, “you cannot step in the same river twice.” True dat, Heracky!