Stupid Crazy Trust
Sometimes I get annoyed. Usually, that means I’m thinking like an idiot. Sometimes, however, it produces useful ideas.
Lately I’m annoyed by the constant repetition of a myth about trust. You know this one: “Trust takes a long time to create, but only a moment to destroy.” There’s no need to name names here, but you can see examples of it here and here and here and here.
This time, my annoyance produced some good: I can now explain why that myth isn’t merely annoying, but positively harmful as well. Here goes.
The Truth.
Let’s start with the truth. Most human relationships, like most emotions, take roughly as long to get over as they took to develop. Marriages or friendships don’t end overnight. There may be a flash point, a straw that breaks the camel’s back. But we cut slack for people we trust. We don’t dump them abruptly.
If trust were lost in a minute, battered women wouldn’t stay with the men who beat them; things are a little more complicated than that.
If trust died quickly, the SEC would have investigated Bernie Madoff when Harry Markopolos first lodged charges against him. If trust died quickly, the steady drip drip drip of evidence at Penn State, Enron, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson would have ended at the first drip.
Most examples of “trust lost quickly” turn out to be either just the last drip in a long series of drips or a delusion about trust’s existence in the first place. You don’t “violate the trust” of a subscriber to your email list by sending them a worthless referral. The relationship you have with a name on your email list may be many things, but “trust-based” is probably a stretch.
Trust formed quickly can be lost quickly. Trust formed at a shallow level can be lost at the same level; trust formed deeply, or over time, takes deeper violations, or a longer time, to be lost. The pattern looks more like a standard bell curve than a cliff.
But, you might say, so what? Why are you annoyed? Why is that harmful?
The Harm
If you believe that trust can be lost in a moment, then you likely believe you must be cautious and careful about protecting it. You are likely to think about trust as a precious resource to be guarded against being tarnished. You are inclined to institute rules and procedures to protect it and to give cautionary lectures about the risk of losing trust.
Yet these are precisely the kinds of behavior that result in trust lost.
I don’t trust the man who talks with me while pointing a gun at me—partly because he looks threatening to me, but also because he clearly does not trust me.
Trust, at a personal level, is like love and hate: you tend to get back what you put out. You empower what you fear. Those afraid of getting burned are the most likely to get burned.
This totally works at a corporate level too. I remember vividly the convenience store chain that gave monthly lie detector tests to store managers to prevent theft—and then wondered why the theft kept on happening.
Trust is a Muscle
Thinking of trust as something you can lose in a minute makes you cautious and unlikely to take risks. But the absence of risk is what starves trust. There simply is no trust without risk—that’s why they call it trust.
If your people aren’t empowered, if they’re always afraid of being second-guessed, then they will always operate from fear and never take a risk—and as a result, will never be trusted.
Trust is a muscle—it atrophies without use. And the repetition of the mantra “trust can be lost in a moment” just tells people not to use it.
Turns out the stupidest, craziest trust is the trust you never engaged in because you were too afraid of losing it. The smartest trust is the trust you get by taking a risk.
One person wrote me offline to say they found my characterization of people who disagree with me as “stupid and crazy” to be over the line.
Whoah, big mea culpa. I had intended the title as a contemporary pun on the popular movie Crazy, Stupid Love. As in, you know, the crazy stupid things we do and don’t do when it comes to love; the crazy stupid things we do and don’t do when it comes to trust.
It’s not the first time I thought I was making an “in” joke only to find out I was the only one “in” on it. I apologize to anyone whom it offended, and for that matter to anyone who found it offensive.
Trust requires a shared, sometimes implicit, set of rules about behavior and conduct. As a woman, my 30-plus years of experience in the business world has taught me that there are multiple sets of rules that operate between multiple subsets of people, for example between customers and salespeople, between corporate management and owners, between supervisors and line staff, between HR, risk management and legal counsel etc., etc. The one thing I took away from those years was that the only thing I could trust was that the rules changed and were dependent on which subset I was dealing with. The inability to openly acknowledge these multiple rule sets undermines organizations in my experience. I welcome your thoughts on this.
Kshank, I think that’s pretty sensible.
Trust is one of those things that is enormously contextual. My favorite one-liner to express this is, “I trust my dog with my life–but not with my roast beef sandwich.” The word very much depends on who you’re trusting, to do what, in what context, with what at stake, and so on.
I think you’re very right to point out that the villain is not one or another definition of trust, but the absence of rules–it’s the fuzziness, the unspoken, the gray areas, the elephant in the room, that is often the cause of trust breakdowns. Such vagueness allows people to pretend, to others and to themselves, that nothing is really going on, while in fact in many cases the things that are going on wouldn’t stand the light of day.
“The truth shall set you free” is an idea very relevant to trust. Sunlight, candor, transparency, truth-telling–these are all friends of trust. Blame and inability to confront are enemies.
You could equally state the same rational with respect to Love.