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The Twin Sins of Trust

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You’ve probably heard “sins of commission, and sins of omission.” It is usually linked to Christian theology, particularly some of the New Testament gospels and Paul’s epistles , but it also has been used by writers like Moliere, and in discussions of Aristotle.

Anyway, it’s a simple enough idea to be broadly useful. A “sin of commission” is doing the wrong thing. A “sin of omission” is a failure to do the right thing.

Sins of commission tend to be more obvious by their nature – but sins of omission can be catastrophic. Think of a lifeguard failing to respond to someone who “sort of” looks like they are in distress. Think of the “good German” concept (failure to act against the Nazis).

But especially, think of the two concepts as they relate to trust.

The Drivers of Commission and Omission

The nature of trust is that it involves risk. If risk is not present, then we may be talking about probabilities, but we’re not talking about trust. Someone must take a risk for trust to arise.

The risk almost always consists in potentially committing a sin of commission. I answer a question you have; I observe something about you or your business; I tell you what I think you need to do, or I hold forth on some topic. In all those cases – I could be wrong. That is the risk.

Taking that risk opens me to a sin of commission. I might be wrong. You might be offended. I might not get the sale. Everyone might suddenly realize that I’m the blundering fool I’ve desperately been trying to keep hidden from people. And so, we do nothing, because it feels less risky. And in this we are wrong.

But by doing nothing, we open ourselves to the possibility of sins of omission. If I take no pain, I get no gain. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Wayne Gretzky said, “You’ll never miss a shot you never take.”

And the results are measured in lost opportunity. Love. Repeat business. Deeper, trust-based relationships.

The Calculus of Commission and Omission

Here’s the thing. People systematically over-estimate near-term results and underestimate long-term results; and they over-estimate the pain of commission vs. the pain of omission. We fear losing something more than we fear not gaining something. One bird in the hand is worth two birds  in the bush (i.e. 50% more valuable).

The result?  A systemic bias to absorb sins of omission, rather than suffer sins of commission. Applied to trust, that means the most likely reason for low trust is the failure to take a risk in the first place. And I see this every day, all around me.

I see it in technical and services professionals. They fear being wrong more than they fear appearing silent, and so they say nothing, or they blather on about the unimportant. They are so fearful of emotional connection that they attribute that same fear to the customers, telling themselves that customers really don’t want relationships, that they must remain “professional.” In this, they are painfully, systematically wrong.

I see it in relationships. People are afraid of being vulnerable or hurt, so they shut down, or they pre-emptively attack others.

I see it especially in sales. The fear of doing something wrong leads salespeople to do what they think is low-risk. That usually means sticking with credentials, filling in silences, talking about themselves, or “How ’bout them Bulls.” God forbid they have to answer a question to which they don’t know the answer, or engage the customer emotionally.

Institutional Trust

And then there is structural trust. The more we try to improve institutional trust by guarding against sins of commission, the more opportunity costs of trust we create. When we pass legislation to prevent abuses of trust, when we insist on more insurance clauses in our contracts, and when we build more steps into our business processes, we are chipping away at trust by failing to allow any risk at all. This is why business so easily confuses compliance with trust.

The moral of the story is this: if you strip out all risk, you end up with no trust. And that is not a happy world to live in.

Risk is to Trust as Vaccine is to Immunity

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Should you take the risk of mentioning price early on in a sales call?  Should you be candid about your less-than-perfect qualifications for a job?  When you notice the client looking a little distracted, should you take the risk of commenting on it?

In such situations I often hear, “That’s too risky, you can’t do that – you don’t have a trust relationship yet.” Or, “Well, sure you could do that, but only when you have a long history of trust.”

That is a big misconception.

The truth is, you can’t get trust without taking risks. In fact, it is the taking of risks itself that creates trust.

The Case of the Flu Vaccination 

Let’s say there’s a flu bug going around. You’re advised to get a vaccination. But it takes time out of your day, you fear getting a very small flu-like reaction to the vaccination, and you really don’t like needles. So you procrastinate, and never do get around to taking the vaccination.

Meantime, your best friend takes the vaccine the day it comes out.

Five weeks later, you get the flu.  Your friend doesn’t.  You feel miserable; you wish you’d taken the vaccine. In retrospect, the small pain of the needle, the minor inconvenience to your schedule, and the small risk of a mild reaction were nothing – nothing, I tell you – compared to the agony of the flu.

You should have taken the small pain – the vaccination – to prevent the larger pain – the flu. And so it is with trust.

Risk, Trust, and Sins of Omission

Risk and trust work the same way.  A small risk taken early prevents much greater risk down the road. Trust only grows when one party takes a risk, and the other party responds in a trust-based way.

  • You take the risk of answering a direct question about price, even though you haven’t established your value proposition yet. As a result, your client may or may not like your price, but they’ll see you to be responsive and transparent; they’ll trust you a bit more.
  • You take the risk of being very open about a relative weakness in your qualifications for a job. As a result, your client may or may not give you the job, but they’ll note your directness and trust you a bit more.
  • You note your client is distracted, and take the risk of commenting on it. Your client may or may not be startled, but they’ll appreciate your willingness to behave in a personal manner.

A vaccination mitigates larger disease. A small up-front risk mitigates larger business risk down the line.

We might call failure to take these risks “trust sins of omission.” They are failures to take a risk; the result is a guaranteed absence of trust.  The small risk may or may not go your way, but if you avoid taking that risk, then it’s guaranteed that you’ll not get the trust (unless your client initiates it, in which case you’re depending on someone else to make your luck).

Risk and Trust

Do you find yourself constantly backing off from taking those early, small risks? The common excuses I hear are reputed professionalism, concern for propriety, and a fear that the client will be embarrassed.

And so you do nothing.  And so trust takes forever. Or a competitor comes in and creates trust by taking a small risk, and your relationship just fades away.

Don’t omit the risk. Take it. Get the vaccination. Make your own luck. Make your own trust.

Trust on the Rocks

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You know those exercises where you fall back into a partner’s arms and trust that he or she will catch you?  What if that person is a family member, like a 16 year old daughter, or 18 year old son?

Do you trust them?  What if your relationship is on the rocks?  Literally!

Our family spent Thanksgiving rock climbing, outdoors, at a local quarry.   I like to think of it as complex cliff climbing; though for experts like my kids, the 50-75 foot climbs were mere child’s play.

There’s a lot to learn about trust when rock climbing.  For example, see this three part series in July, 2012 “Three Things You Need to Know about Trust” by Charlie Green.  Three distinct topics emerged:

Trust Fall? Try this!

  1. Trust is a Two-player Game
  2. Trust Requires Risk
  3. Trust is Reciprocal

As Charlie notes:  one party must do the trusting, and the other party must be trusted.  That is true in business and personal life, as well as in climbing.  And it’s risky.  All involved must trust each other in order to do well, be safe and have fun. 

Securing the Ropes 

In rock climbing, if the rope isn’t secure at the top of the cliff – well, I don’t want to go there.   So the climber must trust the one who secures the rope.  That person must be credible, one of the elements of the Trust Equation.

Climbers might be comfortable climbing on the ropes they set themselves.  I, for one, am not yet experienced enough to know what a secure top rope should even look like.  However, I do know my kids who secured the ropes.  They are careful, and take calculated risks.  They learn before they do, and they learn from people who know what they are doing.  So I simply trust that it will be done right.  And I don’t worry about it.  How often do we do that in business?  In life?

On Belay – Belay On; Climbing – Climb On

Top rope rock climbing is about more than trusting that the foundation is secure.  It’s trusting that the partner belaying (anchoring and holding the rope at the bottom) you will not let you fall.  And it’s reciprocal.  When there are only two of you, you have to belay the person who belays you.

Belay me downRemember the trust fall exercise?  Try this: imagine you are 50+ feet high on a rock wall with a 90 degree slope, and the only thing between you and a hospital bed is your 16 year-old daughter.

As I leaned back, I worried needlessly about whether the fact that I weighed a lot more than her would send her flying off the ground if I fell.  After all, she wasn’t secured to the ground.  At one point while I was descending, she wasn’t even watching – just feeling the tension on the rope and releasing it at just the right speed so I could safely descend the cliff until I reached the bottom.

I belayed for her climb next.  She didn’t worry about anything.  She tried something.  It did not work.  She fell and trusted that I would catch her.  And I did.  Several times.  Once when she dropped a little further than she would have liked, I got the “how did that happen?” look from her.  But she trusted it wouldn’t happen again.  And it did not.

By trusting her, and her trusting me, we strengthened our bond.  We knew we wouldn’t let the other get hurt, and we got to prove it a few times.  It kind of made us reliable.  This was repeated with each of my other kids as well.  Among all of us, I was the least trusting – and they knew it.

Trust Yourself Too

I had difficulty with one of the climbs – all right, all of the climbs.  But on one of them, my kids gave me sage advice.  “Just trust that you can do it.”  “It will be ok.”  “Take a risk.”  “Try it – we don’t know what will work either until we do it.”  “Commit.”  “The worst that will happen is you will fall and I will catch you.“

They had me on the last one.  And each of them was very reliable.  After all, I got home safely and could write this.

Next time, I will practice trusting even more.  Because the more I can let go of fear and just trust that it will work out, the better I will do, the more I will be able to do, and the more I will enjoy it.  And with rock climbing, with my kids, the more I trust them, the more we connect, bond, and appreciate each other.

Funny thing.  Doesn’t that apply to most everything in life and in business?

 

 

Three Things You Need to Know About Trust: Part 2

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There are really only three things you need to know about trust. You can pretty much deduce the rest. The three parts are:

  1. Trust is a Two-player Game
  2. Trust Requires Risk
  3. Trust is Reciprocal

Part 2: Trust Requires Risk.

First, there is no trust without risk. Second, only one player takes the risk; this sets up a particular dynamic.

No Trust Without Risk

Ronald Reagan was blowing smoke when he famously said, “Trust, but verify.”  The truth is, if you have to verify, it’s not trust. If it’s trust, then it’s not about verification. (Tellingly, Lenin was fond of the same phrase).

At one extreme, trust is bordered by blind faith, which is unbounded by data or reason. At the other, we have statistics, where risk is strictly a matter of probabilities and assumptions, governed by the rules of mathematics.

Trust lies curiously in between faith and probability – and a little off the straight and narrow of the continuum as well.  A psychological relationship, it involves one party willingly putting itself in harm’s way of the other, with a significant but not perfectly quantifiable chance that the other may abuse the situation. No wonder we speak of it often with metaphors.

People say trust mitigates risk. That’s true, but it’s also true that risk creates trust. Without risk-taking, there can be no trust. We forget this when we try to create trust by eliminating risk.

Why is this important? If you remove temptation or risk, you create an artificial dependence outside of the critical trust relationship. For example, if you render financial institutions completely non-risky by over-doing tick-box compliance, you will also choke off trust. Trust eats risk for breakfast, and becomes stronger for so doing.

As with many things trust-related, this is paradoxical. Trust reduces risk, but it also thrives on risk. Robotic safety and predictability are components of trust, but small ones. A completely mechanical world may be risk-free, but it’s also trust-free.

One Player Takes the Risk

In its pure form, one party trusts, while the other is trusted. In my classes, it’s a running joke I play: would you rather get better at trusting? Or at being trusted? So far, every class has opted to get better at being trusted. Doh! That’s the non-risky choice.

It’s human nature to wish others to take the risk. Sometimes, we’re lucky. The other person asks us out first; the customer shows their hand first, reducing our fears about price; the interviewer shares something personal about themselves, setting us at ease.

If you’re willing to run your business dependent on the kindness of strangers, that’s fine. But if you prefer to make your own luck – or trust – you’re going to have to learn to take risks. As Wayne Gretzky said, you’ll never miss a shot you don’t take; but of course, you’ll never score a goal either.

One of the biggest barriers to trusting is the cult of trustworthiness. The professions in particular like to cloak themselves in the idea of a Trusted Advisor that is strictly about trustworthiness – but not about trusting.  Such ideas include the high-minded virtues of integrity, tell-it-like-it-is courage, and a professional remove. But they frequently don’t encompass vulnerability and emotional risk-taking.  They should.

———–

In the third part, I’ll talk about the reciprocity of trust – how the role of trustor and trustee gets traded back and forth, and what that means for the development of trust.

Three Things You Need to Know About Trust: 1 of 3

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There really are only three things you need to know about trust. You can pretty much deduce the rest.

I’m going to write about each of them in a separate blogpost, but here’s the one-liner version of each:

  1. Trust is a Two-player Game
  2. Trust Requires Risk
  3. Trust is Reciprocal

If you understand those three points, you can figure out things like trust recovery, rapid trust creation, and trust-enhancing cultures.

Trust is a Two-Player Game

For trust to exist, one party must do the trusting, and the other party must be trusted. That sounds dirt-simple, until you pick up the paper and realize how much talk about trust simply doesn’t mention it.

How many articles and surveys have you read that talk about “trust” as if it were some simple, unitary phenomenon?  Answer: most.

Those articles that say “trust is down,” “trust in banks has declined,” “people I know are more trusted–” all suffer one great defect: they don’t tell you why the trust is up or down.

It’s simple, if you ask the question correctly. If surveys show that trust in banking is down, is that because banks have become less trustworthy? Or because people have become less inclined to trust? One is a problem of ethics and trustworthiness; the other is a problem of risk-taking, education and fear.

You can’t design policies or laws or actions if you don’t know which problem you’re trying to solve.

If you can’t directly address trusting and trustworthiness, then measures of “trust” alone can’t be trusted – they could be influenced by exogenous factors like GDP growth.  And they are.

Trusting and Being Trusted

Trusting is about intelligent risk-taking.  Being trusted is about trustworthiness.

When someone says trust is really an issue of character or integrity, they’re talking about being trusted, not about trusting.

And when someone says, “trust but verify,” they’re talking about trusting, not about being trusted. (Though notice: if you have to verify – it’s not really trusting).

When you talk about trust in your organization, or with your clients or customers, you would probably prefer that others get better at trusting – to save you the trouble of getting more trustworthy!

We don’t have a lot of control over others’ propensity to trust, though we can certainly influence it.  But we have a lot of control over being trusted. And by far the best way to be trusted is to simply be trustworthy. One way to think about that is through the Trust Equation.

Trust is a Relationship

Trust is a relationship? Well, that’s what being a “2-player game” means. Before you think this is another “Doh” moment, note what it implies. It means the absence of trust is the absence of a relationship. It means when we think about business outside the framework of relationship, we are not thinking about trust.

What do market share, competitive advantage, markets, cost reduction, and value chains have to do with relationships? Not much. And therefore they have little to do with trust.

One driver of the level of trust is, simply, how we view business. Our view of business for the last several decades has been about competition, not about collaboration; about opposition, not about relationship.

A big reason those articles show that “trust is down” is because we have stopped thinking about relationships, and focused instead on competitive marketplaces.

Wanna know why trust is down? Start with the absence of relationships.

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Next post: Trust Requires Risk

The Three Ps of Trust

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Trust is a complex concept in human relationships. In our Chapter 1 of the still-pretty-new The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, we explore ten fundamental attitudes that take aim at the complexities of trust, breaking it down so that it can be managed and more readily increased. Think of the Three Ps as the short list; they represent the core of our thinking on trust.

Trust is Personal

When trust is discussed, it usually refers to people. Yes, you can trust a company, but when you do, you are typically focusing on just one part of trust—dependability. It makes perfect sense to say a company or organization is dependable or reliable. It does not make much sense to say that a corporate entity has your best interests at heart or is sensitive to your needs, or is discreet. Those are things you would usually say about people. Even when it does make sense to say an organization is credible or careful or focused on your interests, the reference is usually to the people in it. At root, trust is personal.

Trust is Paradoxical

Over and over again, you will discover that the things that create trust are the opposite of what you may think. That is why we say trust is paradoxical—in other words, it appears to defy logic. The best way to sell, it turns out, is to stop trying to sell. The best way to influence people is to stop trying to influence them. The best way to gain credibility is to admit what you do not know.

The paradoxical qualities of trust arise because trust is a higher-level relationship. The trust-creating thing to do is often the opposite of what your baser passions tell you to do. Fight or flight, self-preservation, the instinct to win—these are not the motives that drive trust. The ultimate paradox is that, by rising above such instincts, you end up getting better results than if you had striven for them in the first place.

Trust is Positively Correlated to Risk

Ronald Reagan, the fortieth president of the United States, was known to quote a Russian proverb, “Trust, but verify.” For our purposes, the opposite is true. Real trust does not need verification; if you have to verify, it is not trust.

Sometimes businesspeople forget this and try to ameliorate or mitigate all risks. This is particularly true in professions like law, finance, or banking. But the essence of trust contains risk. A trust relationship cannot exist without someone taking a chance—and it is your job to lead the way. If you think, I can’t take that kind of risk yet because there’s not enough trust in the relationship, check your thinking. It is the very taking of risks that creates trust in the relationship.

Ready to start your new trust-based mindset? Mind your Ps.

 

Good Things Happen When you Swing the Bat

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At a talk last week, new friend Petter Østberg told me an old story with a new twist. It takes a great sports metaphor for achievement – and steps it up a notch to leadership.

First, the metaphor at Level One.

If You Don’t Do A, You Can’t Get B

You’ve heard this one before as, “If you leave the putt short, you are 100% guaranteed to miss the putt; never leave it short of the hole.”

Or maybe you know The Great One, Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”  It’s not just about scoring percentage, in other words, it’s also – very much – about shots on goal.

You also know, “No pain, no gain.” “You’ve got to pay to play.” One of my favorites is the thundering voice from heaven that comes down to the whining loser who is kvetching about never winning the lottery: “Do me a favor – first, buy a ticket.”

All these metaphors remind us of the need to take risks. In our misguided efforts to avoid the risk of doing the wrong thing (call that Type 1 error), we end up not doing the right thing (call that Type 2 error). And in life, as in nearly every sport, it is that Type 2 error that ends up being the Big Bomb.

To not take a risk is the biggest risk of all.

Petter’s story started out this way. A deceased dear friend of his helped run the Little League programs in their town. One of the lessons he taught kids was, “Good things happen when you swing the bat.” If all you do is “take” the pitch, you’re likely to end up striking out.

(Apologies to the non-baseball countries out there, but you get the idea).

Good, good. The youngsters are being taught this Big Truth as well, all’s joy in Mudville.

Getting People to Take Risks

But as David Maister points out powerfully in Strategy and the Fat Smoker, the trick is not cognitive. Just realizing you’re fat and shouldn’t smoke doesn’t mean you’re going to stop gorging and emulating a chimney. Would that it were that simple.

The failure of most corporate training programs (not to mention the people who take them) is to believe that cognition implies action. Entire classes of professions (lawyers come to mind) believe that if they can simply understand something, they have acquired the only thing they need to act upon it.

When it comes to algebra, fair enough.  Maybe even learning a foreign language.

But when it comes to altering substantive human behavior, that belief is So – Not – True.

So it is with golf, hockey, baseball, and I’m sure with cricket and futbol. Armchair athletes from the business world nod sagely as they receive this wisdom from Tiger, the Great One, His Airness, you name it.

“Yup,” they say, “that’s just how it is in my world; you gotta take that risk.”

But they don’t. They really, really don’t.

So: how do you get people to take risks?

Leadership and Role Modeling are Key to Change

Answer: you do it through role-modeling, and you do it young.

Back to Petter’s story.

The Little League coach didn’t just encourage his team to swing the bat. He told the kids’ coaches and the kids’ parents to tell their kids to swing the bat, and with the passing of this dedicated coach just before this year’s baseball season, you now hear his mantra – “Good things happen when you swing the bat” – echoed on every playing field in his town.

The kids got the message, but here’s what he told the coaches:

Look, guys. I know you all mean well. But when a kid swings at a pitch a foot over his head, what do I hear you tell him?  “Lay off the high cheese,” you yell, gesturing with your hand high above your head, “wait for a good one – wait for your pitch. ”

And that is just wrong. These kids look up to you. You’re their leader. This is one of the few remaining times in their lives they’re going to listen to someone, and it’s you they’re listening to now.

These players are very young, and they’ll get more coordinated, that’s nature, but they won’t become better batters unless they swing the bat. There are plenty of other people who will teach them over and over the dangers of taking a swing; don’t you add to that.

Because if they wait for life to serve them up “their” pitch, they’ll lead wasted lives, waiting for that pitch. In life, that pitch rarely comes.

Don’t do that to them. Instead, teach them that if you swing, all things are possible. If you don’t, nothing is. Don’t you wish someone had taught you that?

I know I do. Thanks Petter for that story, and lesson.

25 Warning Signs You Have a Low-Trust Organization: Part 2 of 5

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It’s not impossible to find a high-trust team in a low-trust organization – we’ve seen a few – but not too many. For the most part, low-trust organizations are made up of low-trust teams.

This is the second in a series of five, totaling 25 warnings signs in:

Team Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look around the teams in your environment. Do they have some of these characteristics? Then you might be a member of a low-trust organization.

1. A low-trust team isn’t productive.

  • It misses milestones. It doesn’t deliver on time, or on spec. The team doesn’t do what it says it will do. The team is unreliable.
  • It produces mediocre work. It settles for what looks to be low risk, getting the lowest common denominator. It chokes off innovation in the name of risk, often masking jealousy and NIH (not invented here) Syndrome.
  • It fails to achieve its goals. Goal failure is more than milestone failure writ large. It speaks to a failure of common purpose and common commitment.

2. Low-trust teams typically form sub-groups and cliques within them.

  • There are flurries of private emails and hushed conversations. This is sub-team bonding, not even tribal – it is transient, shallow, and superficial – Mean Girls bonding.
  • Team members are guarded in their communications. They are concerned someone else might hear, and that would be in principle a bad thing. It’s the ‘in principle’ part that’s worrisome.
  • Information is hoarded as a source of political power, rather than shared to create greater team power and organizational success.

3. Low-trust teams are less than the sum of their parts.

  • A great team – even a just pretty good team – can accomplish so much more than simply the sum of its parts. But a low-trust team can’t.
  • They choke off innovation and personal growth – things that happen organically even in a neutral, social organization. A low-trust team isn’t benign, it’s toxic.
  • People are massively influenced by those around them – a group of low-trust people can bring even a strong team player down to their level of low trust.
  • If the team is bureaucratically protected from competition, it will have low turnover among a core group and high turnover from the occasional newcomer. If the team is in a competitive environment, it will show high turnover everywhere. No one likes staying.

4. A low trust team is addicted to faux team-ness, happy talk, not real team walk.

  • We can’t prove this, but we sometimes wonder if the presence of those motivational posters isn’t negatively correlated with team behavior (or is that just us being cynical?)
  • Lip service is the coin of the realm, because to be honest would be to acknowledge the existence of low trust. Honesty is what distinguishes a merely critical team from a low-trust team; the latter is disengaged.
  • The opposite of low-trust teams isn’t competitive, meritocratic teams; it is teams who know enough to wish they were trust-based, and try to pretend to appear so.
  • There is frequently a high-performer, one who achieves great results but does not follow the values. This manifest unfairness results in resentment among the rest of the team.

5. A low-trust team has trouble collaborating.

  • Low-trust teams are likely to prefer individual compensation schemes; they don’t believe in, or trust, the ability of the team to do well for them, preferring to fend for themselves.
  • Collaboration drives innovation; but low-trust teams exalt solo work, thus buying into the “solo inventor” myth of innovation.

If teams in your ecosphere look like this, you may be hanging around a low-trust organization.

For some ideas on how to improve trust, see Three Strategies to Improve Business’s Trust.

In the next post we’ll explore Five Warning Signs in Leadership that suggest a low-trust organization.

 

Stupid Crazy Trust

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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.

Putting the “I” into “Intimacy”

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“Intimacy” belongs in business.  Yes, intimacy. Not the kind that was the subject of classic ‘40s movies, but the kind that is essential to building trust.

The Trust Equation

The Trust Equation is familiar to many of you, both regular and even occasional readers of this blog.  It’s a formula for measuring our own trustworthiness through the Trust Quotient assessment.

For many people, Intimacy is the hardest piece of this simple formula to grasp and to put into practice.

Deconstructing Intimacy

We look at Intimacy in business relationships as having three components:

  • Discretion – the wisdom to know what to do with information another shares with us
  • Empathy – the ability to see another person’s point of view from the inside out; to identify with another person’s feelings, and
  • Risk-taking – vulnerability

The first two are about the other person: safeguarding their sharing, picking up on their feelings and acting appropriately.

The last one – risk taking – is about you.

The “I” Part

The “I” part of intimacy means opening yourself up to the other person.  It means becoming vulnerable.  It really is all about you, and the risks you’re willing to take.

We often get asked what Intimacy sounds like or looks like in business settings.  I would argue that it doesn’t require knowing the name of your client’s or colleague’s kiddos or pets (though for some people that works as Intimacy too), but rather saying or doing the thing that feels risky.

It may be as simple as asking for feedback, when you really don’t want to hear bad news:  “I don’t feel that I’m doing this job to your satisfaction.  Can we discuss it?”

It may be revealing something personal about yourself, perhaps saying at the start of a big presentation:  “Although I am completely convinced that our plan is a good one, I find myself a little intimidated talking to this senior group.”

It may be a matter of just voicing something you both know to be true:  “I believe your boss didn’t think we were the right supplier for this job, and you went out on a limb to get us approved.  What are your particular concerns?  How can we make you look good?”

The I in Risk, and in Trust

A good rule to remember about trust in business is that it’s generally not about you.  Except, of course, when it is. And when it comes to intimacy, it is about you.

In our White Paper we show with hard data that the “I” factor drives more trust than the other three.  And it is where risk shows up: taking the risk of Intimacy is what creates the reciprocal exchange that is trust.

If you’re lucky, your client or colleague or boss will lead by taking the first risk. If you don’t trust to luck, make some luck of your own. Take a risk. Lead with intimacy. Create some trust.

You can do that.