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Trust and Pornography: The Supreme Court’s Lesson for Business

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In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously opined in an obscenity case that it was exceeding difficult to define obscenity, “but I know it when I see it.”

It wasn’t a casual comment, but a carefully reasoned statement, which did and still does make a lot of sense.  Certain things—like obscenity—vary considerably across time, locale, and situation.  And another such thing is trust.

Trust Doesn’t Mean Much Without Context

I can’t think of another concept which carries with it such a wide range of meanings.  In context, we nearly always understand the concept being referred to—but the reference varies situationally.  Just consider:

– I trust my dog with my life—but not with my ham sandwich.
– I trust a stranger to sell me a book on Amazon—but that doesn’t mean I’ll introduce my daughter to him.

But business these days doesn’t like subjectivity.  The business community has come to insist on things like best practices, diagnostics, rankings and ratings, and—above all—behavioral indicators that can be metricized.  Because we all want to know how we’re doing, where we’re going, who’s doing best at it, and just how you know if you’re doing it right.  You can’t manage it, after all, if you can’t measure it. 

The business community has gotten hooked on the corporate equivalent of self-help manuals.  You know what’s next.  Ten Easy Steps to being a Highly Trustworthy Company.  Sign up for your Corporate Trust Ratings.  Become a Certified High Trust Company.  You get the picture.

Who Are the Most Trusted Companies?  It Depends

Beneath this rush is almost always the notion that One Size Fits All when it comes to trustworthiness at the corporate level.  Trustworthiness is a "thing."  Someone has the key to it, and others don’t.  For the philosophers out there, the operant belief is that there are Platonic Forms for things like Trustworthiness, Engagement, and Leadership. 

But in these matters, Potter Stewart was more right than Plato.  The bigger truth is–it depends.  It’s not that the emperor has no clothes–it’s that he has more than one wardrobe.

Who is more trustworthy: Apple Computer or Amazon?  Fidelity Investments or American Express?  Singapore Air or Dell Computer?  These are not sensible questions, I suggest, taken out of context.

It depends–on whether you’re talking to customers or to employees.  On whether you’re talking about reliability or other-orientation.  About transparency or collaboration.  About last year or about this year.  About a major transaction or about a corner-store impulse purchase.  About your car or about your oncologist. 

One attribute commonly associated with trust is transparency—but that’s not Trust Virtue One if you’re the CIA.  Teamwork may be a trust virtue for the US Army—but not for a law firm of litigators. 

At a personal level, you can make some generalizations about trustworthiness: I’ve done so myself in my Trust Quotient self-assessment survey.  But even there, I caution against reading the raw results without the context.

At a corporate level, trying to define the most ‘trusted company’ with a one-size-fits-all set of metrics is a fool’s errand.   That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful, valid, and meaningful exercise. It just has to be done situationally, in context.

Like obscenity, we regular plain old human beings have no trouble recognizing trust when we see it.  We don’t need a scalable model to understand it.  Attempts to force-fit trust into behavioral indicators that can be rank-ordered, weighted and incentivized are akin to the US movie ratings system.  The ratings tells you more about the rater than the thing being rated.

The Supreme Court already figured this one out and wisely gave up the force-fit approach.  At higher levels, such as trust, life overflows the petty boundaries we try to impose on it in the vain belief we can “manage” it.  Like a giant wave, we’re far better off surfing it than trying to control it.
 

Trustworthiness? Or the Appearance of Trustworthiness?

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I received an email from my friend (and ex-colleague) Martin, who retired to the Caribbean more than ten years ago.  He makes a point I agree with in language more accessible to him than to me (British, that is).  Since he’s brilliant (by which of course I mean he agrees with me), I thought I’d let readers hear another voice.  

Charlie, we’ve emailed a number of times about words like trust (which you pretty much own), trusting (i.e. when a buyer is trusting of the seller), trustworthy (i.e. what a buyer hopes the seller is).  As I read the commentary on Obama’s plan to improve the regulation of the financial services sector I am getting somewhat depressed. Not, I hasten to add, because I do not think Obama’s heart is in the right place.

My concern is that his regulatory approach doesn’t mandate nor does it seek to combat untrustworthiness. Too often this ‘Nation of Laws’ falls back to the common defense that ‘nothing I did was illegal’ even if it broke all sorts of ethical boundaries with the nadir being reached with the apocryphal words ‘it depends on what the meaning of is, is’.

I am reminded (and this was more years ago than I care to remember) of my initial exposure to the English Legal System in the 17th and 18th centuries where, because of the rigidity of the ‘common law’ (i.e. I didn’t do anything illegal), a Court of Chancery grew up where by the Chancellor could grant some type of relief ‘in equity’ which was essentially "a manifestation of the ideas of justice entertained by individual chancellors."

While one could argue that the plaintiffs attorney business is a sort of surrogate for relief against the ‘nothing I did was illegal’ defense, I wonder if the US needs something similar to the Court of Chancery where there is some body where a person aggrieved by financial creativity could ask the question, "OK, I know what they did to me was technically legal, but was it ‘right’?"

I fear that unless the Obama approach to regulation adopts this sort of philosophy I feel sure that the brilliant students coming our of Law Schools and Business Schools will continue to act in an untrustworthy manner by finding ways of disadvantaging the unsuspecting and trusting buyer.

I know many of your clients are in the financial services industry. Is their aim to BE trustworthy or to appear to be trustworthy?

Best,
Martin

Martin, I could not agree with you more.

As a (lawyer) friend of mine points out, there is no concept of “truth” in the law as it exists in the US today – there is only evidence.  For the MBAs’ part, they (OK, we) replaced relationships with outsourced business processes, and management with metrics, effectively removing any sense of “ethics” by depersonalizing the behavior of human beings.  (Maybe it began when we started calling people ‘human capital.’ Note which is the adjective).  

The combination has been devastating, as you point out.   Look at any corporate org chart where you see “ethics,” and the next two words are “and compliance” – as if they were the same thing.  As you point out, they are–or ought to be–very different concepts.   

And while I too think Obama’s heart is in the right place, this effort was all too predictable.  He is doing precisely what America’s “best and brightest” are taught to do as “best practices,” namely create mechanical solutions to issues of human behavior.  Alter the incentives, redesign the institutions, create more Chinese walls, and–especially–more procedures to comply with.

Commonsense suggests that if you treat ethical violations with procedural solutions, you negate the very conscience that made us call it unethical in the first place.  Do that long enough, and the word "ethical" will become listed as "archaic" in the dictionary.

If you prefer the language of academics and empirical proof to commonsense, try this from Roderick Kramer of Stanford:

Gatekeeping measures may actually have contributed to declines in public trust in business.  These studies have found that “innocent employees” who are subjected to additional compulsory oversight measures often “become less committed to internal standards of honesty and integrity in the workplace.”

To flip Ronald Reagan’s words, the act of constantly verifying destroys trust.  Excessive compliance measures ruin ethics.  Big Brother is death on the human conscience.  The trouble with regulatory answers to misconduct is that they foster more cynicism, more degradation of the real issue into mere gotcha contests.  They trivialize issues that are, or should be, ethical at heart.  As you said.

Martin, I honestly believe that the best answer to the decline in trustworthiness lies not primarily in shifting incentives, or in classical regulation.  It lies in mass shaming of the untrustworthy by the consuming public.

The act of mass shaming galvanizes the public’s conscience.  Whether or not any particular Madoff then “gets it” or not is beside the point: a community itself needs to articulate, for itself, that there are standards that lie well above and beyond the common law of “I did nothing wrong.”  The best Chancery court may be the blunt instrument of public opinion.

Your concluding question should be read by every financial services senior exec, and passed out in the form of a quiz to the general employee base of his or her firm, in the following form:

“Your CXO has said that the aim of your company is not just to appear trustworthy, but to be trustworthy.  Do you believe he means it?” 

Now that’s a scary question.
 

The Trust Week in Review

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Introducing The Week in Trust: a weekly look at the world through trust-related eyes.

Part news-roundup, part mind-stretching and whimsical, part commentary that didn’t have enough zip to make it into the blog, but which needs saying.

Big Story Department.  

Regulation has got to be the story this week.   Regulation, at least to my schizophrenic view of things, represents the failure of capitalism to regulate itself.  I believe that business is a higher calling, and that it ought to be capable of long-term self-interested thinking.  But you couldn’t prove that by recent history.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Wednesday’s announcement represented “the most sweeping reorganization of financial-market supervision since the 1930s.”

Bruce Carton’s most excellent Securities Docket explains in not-that-complicated language why the WSJ is not being hyperbolic.  Credit cards, exotic derivatives, small banks, private equity, hedge funds, insurance—not to mention more energy behind enforcement.  It’s all coming down the pike.

And it’s not just the finance sector.  Let’s not forget (hey it was way back at the beginning of the week) that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA to those who can read alphabet soup) will be regulating tobacco.  That was a long time in the making, and a milestone of sorts.

Why such a sudden glut of regulation?  On some level sure, it’s the Democrats. But Democrats can’t just regulate for the heck of it, and not all of them want to anyway.

I contend it is, as I stated above, a failure of self-regulation.  Whether it’s mortgage brokers or CFPs or regional airlines or credit card companies, what precedes regulation is a mountain of self-justifying rhetoric, aimed at short-term benefit of market players against consumers: ironically, thus harming the industry long term.

But enough about regulation, it’s Friday.  Let’s raise our sights.

Who Knew Department. 

What do you do if you’re a government with an endemic social dishonesty problem?  If you’re Indonesia, you open up 7500 ‘honesty cafes,’or food stores where the responsibility of paying the right amount is left to the customer.    I don’t know of any larger-scale attempt at testing the old saw that ‘the fastest way to make a man trust you is to trust him.’  Early returns are it’s working great in schools; in government offices, not quite so much.  

Hey, it’s the principle behind vaccines—expose them to a little bit of trusting, and they’re inoculated against being untrustworthy.  Nothing new to readers of this blog.  But way more fun.

Do guns kill people, or – does lack of trust kill them?  One of those academic studies that makes you scratch your head a bit; you know there’s some truth there even if it’s cleverly hidden behind the English language.

Trust Angles Department.

It’s one thing when a bucketshop broker or a used car dealer gets accused of being untrustworthy—right or wrong, that’s the price of being stigmatized as low-trust. Ho hum.

But what if you’re known for high trust and you get accused?  Ouch.  Big Ouch.  For example, the Canadian Conference Board. Ouch, I say.

What’s it mean to trust your babysitter?  Find out.

You may think trust is down, down, down.  After all, that’s the drumbeat du jour.  But how many of you are happily using cloud computing?  What an act of trust that is.  And sometimes, maybe it lets you down.  But–have you stopped using it?  And what does that say about your level of trust.

Your Opinion Department.

PGA pro Vijay Singh is still wearing his sponsor’s golf hat.  His sponsor, interestingly, is mini-Madoff  Stanford Financial.   Hate it when that happens. 

Is he being loyal?  Or stupid?  You be the judge.  

Please give me some feedback: should The Trust Week in Review be a regular Friday feature of TrustMatters?  Enquiring minds (ours) want to know.
 

Trust Reader Volume 2

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Greetings.

This is the second in a series of ebooks I’m releasing called The Trust Reader. Each issue will feature a full-length article on trust-related issues, plus synopses and links to two other articles.

The Trust Reader will be published roughly every few months. Articles introduced here will be available thereafter on the trustedadvisor.com website, but you’ll see them here first.

Get the Trust Reader volume 2 here

In this issue, the featured article addresses a key question: Does Trust Really Take Time? Here’s why it’s key.

Purportedly, one of the great economic advantages of trust is the time it saves in the conduct of business. I make that claim, as does Steven H.R. Covey, Jr. Yet, the phrase "trust takes time" is routinely asserted by most businesspeople—including those who agree that trust takes time.

Well, does it or doesn’t it? The lead article answers that question, and is contained in its entirety in this issue.

The other two articles are:

Discounting, Price, Value and Psychology — a look at how buyers really think about money in buying. Worried about price cutting? Read this one.

Client Focus vs. Client Focus Lite — are you really client-focused? Or just faking it. Take a hard look in the mirror before you answer, and read this one.

Both these articles are abstracted in this issue, with links provided. All three articles will now join the permanent collection of trust-related articles on Trustedadvisor.com.

The Trust Reader series joins the Trust Matters Primer series—an occasional selection of the best from from the blog Trust Matters.Download the first edition of the Trust Reader here

Trusted Advisor Associates ebook Series on Trust

You can also find previous issues of the Trust Reader here, as well as copies of The Trust Matters Primer here:

Trust Reader Volume 1

Trust Matters Primer Volume 1

Trust Matters Primer Volume 2

Trust Matters Primer Volume 3

If you would like to receive email updates for the Trust Reader and Trust Matters Primer, please subscribe here.

You can find previous articles published by Charles H. Green at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen.articles/

As always, if you prefer not to receive our series, simply email me or click the unsubscribe link below to let us know.

The Trust Reader Volume 2

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Greetings.

This is the second in a series of ebooks I’m releasing called The Trust Reader. Each issue will feature a full-length article on trust-related issues, plus synopses and links to two other articles.

The Trust Reader will be published roughly every few months. Articles introduced here will be available thereafter on the trustedadvisor.com website, but you’ll see them here first.

Get the Trust Reader volume 2 here

In this issue, the featured article addresses a key question: Does Trust Really Take Time? Here’s why it’s key.

Purportedly, one of the great economic advantages of trust is the time it saves in the conduct of business. I make that claim, as does Steven H.R. Covey, Jr. Yet, the phrase "trust takes time" is routinely asserted by most businesspeople—including those who agree that trust takes time.

Well, does it or doesn’t it? The lead article answers that question, and is contained in its entirety in this issue.

The other two articles are:

Discounting, Price, Value and Psychology — a look at how buyers really think about money in buying. Worried about price cutting? Read this one.

Client Focus vs. Client Focus Lite — are you really client-focused? Or just faking it. Take a hard look in the mirror before you answer, and read this one.

Both these articles are abstracted in this issue, with links provided. All three articles will now join the permanent collection of trust-related articles on Trustedadvisor.com.

The Trust Reader series joins the Trust Matters Primer series—an occasional selection of the best from from the blog Trust Matters.Download the first edition of the Trust Reader here

Trusted Advisor Associates ebook Series on Trust

You can also find previous issues of the Trust Reader here, as well as copies of The Trust Matters Primer here:

Trust Reader Volume 1

Trust Matters Primer Volume 1

Trust Matters Primer Volume 2

Trust Matters Primer Volume 3

If you would like to receive email updates for the Trust Reader and Trust Matters Primer, please subscribe here.

You can find previous articles published by Charles H. Green at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen.articles/

As always, if you prefer not to receive our series, simply email me or click the unsubscribe link below to let us know.

 

Carnival of Trust for June is Up

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Carnival of Trust

The Carnival of Trust is up for the month of June, hosted by Dave Stein, and it provides a wealth of perspective on the state of trust at the midpoint of 2009.

For those who don’t know him, Dave Stein  is a consummate student of sales. A former sales consultant, trainer and author, he now runs ES Research Group http://www.davesteinsblog.com/esr/ from the hardship environs of Martha’s Vineyard. Think of ESR as the JD Powers or Consumer Reports of the sales training field.
I have gotten to know Dave over the past year and found him to be ethical, smart, insightful, sober (thinking-wise anyway), and possessed of fine judgment.
Just the person to host the Carnival of Trust.

Dave has selected a tasty sampler of things trust-related. Just a few:

And that’s just five. Check the full Carnival of Trust to read those items and the other five, and Dave’s commentary on all of them.

Many thanks to Dave Stein for hosting a solid, content-rich and thought-provoking Carnival. Drop on by and treat your brain to a feast.

Managing Trust Metrics

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Trust is hot; particularly in the last year.  Measurement has been hot for the past 10 years.  So it shouldn’t be surprising that lots of people are getting excited about measuring trust.

The question they should ask themselves is: why?

One knee jerk management mantra these days is, “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it,” or “what gets measured gets managed.”  Well, yes—and no.

Early (by which I mean 5 years ago) trust measurements included things like buyer ratings on eBay, and they made sense.  Today, measurement/management mantras get applied in undiscriminating ways.

Trust Trends: Precisely Measuring—What?

Consider the statement: Trust in CEOs is down.  Does it mean that people are less trusting these days? Or that CEOs are less trustworthy?  Or both, and the second interpretation caused the first?

And what do you do about it?  If people are less trusting, then fixing CEOs won’t much help.  If untrustworthy CEOs are the problem, then it will.  But which is it?

My accounting professor, Richard Vancil, when asked the definition of “profit,” replied, “it’s the last line on an income statement.”  Meaning it was a question with no good answer.

I think longitudinal trust attitude questions are much the same: what they measure is the shift in answer to a given question over a period of time.  The question itself isn’t clear, nor does it suggest clear policies.

How’m I Doing?  Measuring Trust Improvement is Tricky

New York’s Mayor Koch was known for asking ‘How’m I doing?’ at every juncture.  I don’t know how it worked for Koch, but it doesn’t work so well for trust.  

You can often measure things like quality (defects per million), or efficiency (output over input) with great precision, and with great frequency.  But try asking your significant other whether (s)he loves you, in myriad ways, every hour.  It won’t take long for the process flow approach to measurement to ruin the love you were so intent on measuring.  Not to mention: just how did you define ‘love’ anyway?  What would you do with the answer?

Measuring Trust to Drive Motivation Can Backfire

A common way to use metrics is to reward certain outcomes.  Applied to trust, this can generate perverse results.  Trust is partly about unselfish attitudes and actions–think about the ethical schizophrenia that results from using monetary incentives to encourage unselfish behavior.

The Best Trust Measurement Encourages Diagnosis

If measuring ‘trust’ alone is like squeezing air; if the act of measuring alters the measurement; and if incentivizing trust metrics can destroy trustworthiness itself; then what are trust metrics good for?

I think they’re good for a great deal—if defined in terms that respect the inherent breadth of meaning of trust, and in ways that allow concrete actions to be taken to improve trustworthiness.

Want to measure trust? 

Start by defining what you’re measuring: the capacity to trust, the quality of trustworthiness, or the presence of both.  (See Trust, Trusting and Trustworthiness). 

Then clarify whether you’re evaluating personal trust, organizational trust, or social trust.  (See Realms and Manifestations of Trust)

Then ask whether respondents will gain practical insights and actions from the measurement to improve their trusting-ability, or their trustworthiness.

At the risk of appearing self-serving, the Trust Quotient is an example.  It measures personal trustworthiness in 20 inter-related ways that provide self-insight to the test-taker, as well as offering practical suggestions for self-improvement. 

The Trust Audit  is another example, this one measuring trustworthiness at the organizational level.   It too uses 20 inter-related measures—not one—that together suggest specific opportunities for improvement. 

Measuring trust is not like other measurements: it’s less like measuring liquid flow or efficiency than it is like measuring love.  It deserves its own metric system.  
 

The Power of I’m Sorry: the Four R’s of a Trustworthy Apology

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Do you remember the last time you felt like you deserved an apology but didn’t get one?  Maybe…

  • The waiter forgot about your table
  • They shipped you the wrong product
  • Your significant other embarrassed you in a group setting

Fill in your own blank.   What impact did that have on your level of trust?

As sure as death and taxes, we will mess up.  How we respond, regardless of fault, can have a monumental effect on our relationships, yet apologizing is rarely discussed in business development circles.  

I recall an audience member asking a sales trainer, “What do we do when we make a mistake”?  The trainer responded, “Be careful about apologizing.   If you admit to the mistake, you could have legal liabilities”.  While technically correct, that advice somehow didn’t feel right to me.

Shifts in thinking on this topic appear hopeful.  Even state governments, hospitals and insurance companies have abandoned legal posturing in favor of an apology approach.  “I’m sorry” legislation has been approved in 29 states and is gaining momentum.  To reduce the risk of litigation, New Jersey recently started the Sorry Works! Coalition.

Gaffes, slip-ups, and blunders present a fork in the road to relationship depth.  The proper apology, even in the most egregious circumstances, has the ability to strengthen relationships.   Even seemingly insignificant faux pas like arriving late for a meeting, mispronouncing someone’s name, or failing to include someone, present a moment of truth to building trust. 

We’re a “fix it” society.   Somehow, we convince ourselves that if we just correct the problem – without an apology – we’re back to our original balance in the trust bank account.  That’s a myth. 

So how do we build a worthy apology?

Experts like Aaron Lazare and Nick Smith, in their book On Apology, point to four essential parts of the apology, and we can remember them as the 4 R’s: Recognition, Responsibility, Remorse, and Reparation.

1.    Recognize – First, the offender must show they recognize their misbehavior by restating the offense as objectively and specifically as possible.   Repeating what happened and why will show that the offender understands not only where and how they went wrong, but why the offended is hurt.  Be direct, i.e., "I apologize for whatever I did to hurt you" won’t cut it!

2.    Responsibility – Second, the offender must accept responsibility for the action that caused offense.   No excuses here!  He can’t blame the beer or the bad mood.   The apology is all about THEM and how they feel.   It doesn’t matter if the actions were intentional or not, the end result is the same.

3.    Remorse – Third, the apology must show, sincerely, remorse for the misbehavior. Sincerity can’t be faked: we know it when we hear it.  We’ve all heard non-apology apologies.   Include a statement of apology along with a promise not to repeat the behavior.  Remember Don Imus (see  Imussed Up: Anatomy of a Failed Apology)?

4.    Reparation -The fourth essential component may be the trickiest: reparation. The offender has to give something back, atone in some way for his offense. This is easily said, but hard to do. How, indeed, do we mend a broken heart?

“The apology represents a common frailty –we are all human, we all make mistakes, perhaps even hurt someone, intentionally or not, then face the dilemma of where to go from there?” states Susan Morrison Hebble.  “For starters, the offender needs to listen, openly and earnestly.  They need to hear what the person has to say; let them talk; let them suggest what might be done to restore harmony to the relationship”. 

As Martha Beck writes, "The knowledge that one is heard and valued has incredible healing power; it can mend even seemingly irreparable wounds."

Here’s a hard truth: we must first admit that our own pride poses the biggest obstacle to apologizing.   I would propose, then, that the apology requires us to shift our focus from ourselves–our own discomfort, our own embarrassment, our own sense of guilt–to the person or people we’ve offended–his hurt, his sense of betrayal.   It requires us to act selflessly rather than selfishly. 

It is a daunting task, one that forces us to look at ourselves, at our own flaws, and then look beyond them to the person we’ve hurt.  But anyone who has offered up a real, solid, true apology will attest that in doing so they released themselves from the very pain, discomfort, and shame they’d been avoiding all along!

The 4 R’s aren’t rocket science, yet like most risk – reward propositions, they take practice.

Who do you need to apologize to? 
 

How Can I Get Them to Trust Me?

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The trust equationHow can I get them to trust me? 

It’s an important question for lots of people: financial planners, TV news anchors, IT help desk people in companies, HR folks who want a seat at the table, pharma company management, and parents and teenagers.

There are three broad approaches to getting others to trust you.  They are not mutually exclusive, and are probably not exhaustive—but they come close.

Of course, you can’t control another human being.  Trying to do so will paradoxically destroy their trust in you.  Which is why all three approaches involve full acceptance of the one whose trust you seek.

Trust Creation Strategy 1: Trust Them. 

We are powerfully wired as part of our social instincts to engage in reciprocal exchanges with each other.  These acts of reciprocity create networks of cumulative obligation—or of enmity. 

If someone behaves well toward me, I “owe” that person parallel behavior.  This simple fact underlies the social role of etiquette, as well as things like gifts, Don Corleone’s power, or ritualistic forms of greeting like secret handshakes.

We are powerfully motivated to return in kind what we are given.  If you want to be trusted—first seek to trust.

Trust Creation Strategy 2: Be Trustworthy. 

It sounds trite, but it’s not.  It is a strategy of attraction, not promotion.  To be trusted, try to be worthy of that trust.  All else equal, people trust those who are worthy of trust.  And people have finely honed capabilities of discrimination that far exceed our abilities to articulate them.

Which begs the question: what constitutes trustworthiness?  Steven M. R. Covey,  following consistently in his father’s Seven Habits behavioral pattern, identifies 13 behaviors—phrased as imperative-form verbs like ‘get better,’ or ‘confront reality.’ 

Much though we may like verbs–they suggest definitive actions we can take–they are misleading.  You don’t make people trust you, they choose to do so.   You attract trust by being who you are, not by acting upon others. 

I prefer the Trust Equation: it is couched in the ways people see us—as attributes.  Four of them pretty much sum it up: credibility, reliability, intimacy—and whether we are seen as self-oriented, or other-oriented.

This definition of trustworthiness underpins the Trust QuotientTM self assessment test—take it here and find out how trustworthy you are.

Trust Creation Strategy 3: Listen.  

The single most powerful trust-creating action we can take is to give to another the fine gift of our own attention.  To listen—intently, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, without simultaneous cogitation, and devoid of judgment. 

This has nothing to do with the content of what is being heard.  It is simply about the act of offering attention.  It translates, to the one being listened to, as an act of respect.  As such, it triggers the reciprocity reaction: we are willing to listen to those who have listened to us. 

All three strategies, to work, must be done cleanly.  While we can all become more trustworthy, or better listeners, or better trustors ourselves, we have to keep our motives intact.

If we want others to trust us solely as means to our own ends—they won’t.  The concepts of giving freely, and without attachment, are key. The paradox is: if you do these things, you become trusted.  But if you set out to do them in order to be trusted, so that you can etc. etc. etc.—you don’t.  
 

Trust, Trusting and Trustworthiness

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The word ‘trust’ gets used in many ways.  Consider the simple joke, “I’d trust Bill Clinton with the economy—just not with my daughter.  On the other hand, I’d trust George W. Bush with my daughter.  The economy, not so much.” 

Considering that we tend to use one word to cover so many duties, it’s surprising we ‘get’ the meanings as well as we do.

The Word ‘Trust’ Gets Used Imprecisely

Let’s break it down.

There are three ways we talk about ‘trust.’ 

1.    There is trust, the verb: to trust.  The one who trusts, the act of trusting. 

2.    There is trustworthiness, a noun.  A characteristic or trait of the one who is trusted.

3.    There is trust, the noun: a quality of the relationship between people, the level of trust that exists between them.

Here is Steven Covey, a well known writer on trust, using the same word to describe all three situations: 

•    “Trust is a competency…There is a risk in trusting people, but there is a greater risk in not trusting them.”  (Meaning 1, the verb: to trust)

•    “Trust is a form of both character and competence….Investors invest in and customers buy from brands they trust.”  (Meaning 2, the noun: trustworthiness).

•    “Low-trust, low-performance organizations typically exhibit [certain] cultural behaviors” (Meaning 3, the noun: the state of trust).

We usually infer the intended meaning well.  Still, it creates confusion about trust itself when we are not clear. 

I hear all the time, “Trust is nice to have, but this is a tough environment, and you can’t take that kind of risk around here.”  When someone says that, I know they are confusing trust and trustworthiness. 

To trust someone is to take a risk.  There is no trusting without risking, in fact.  (As long as we’re talking Presidents, Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” was a bit of political rhetoric: if you have to verify, it ain’t trust.)   

Yet to be trustworthy is the opposite of risky.  Others strongly trust those who are honest, believable, candid, unselfish, high integrity, direct, and so forth.   It’s a lot less risky to be trusted than it is to have people suspicious of you. 

The confusion grows when people focus on trusting or being trusted to the exclusion of noticing high-trust environments (where people both trust and are trustworthy). 

You Can’t Manage Trust if You Can’t Define It

To accurately assess, describe, measure and manage trust, we have to get clear on the concepts, the language. Trusting creates trustworthy people, who then attract more trusting from others; pretty soon, you’ve got a whole lot of trust going on.

You can’t build trust if you don’t know which meaning you’re playing with.  Try figuring which meaning of trust is intended in this typical quote from the Edelman Trust Survey: 

Trust in business around the world is, generally, lower today than it was a year ago, according to the Edelman report. And, generally, CEOs and other leaders aren’t held in especially high esteem.

Does this mean buyers are less willing to trust these days?  Or that businessmen are less trustworthy?  Or that the state of trust in the world has declined? Is there causality here or not?  If so, what drives what?

And therefore what are we to do with such data?  Educate people about risk-taking?  Step up regulatory enforcement?  Or increase engagement between business and customers? 

Asking “do you trust XYZ” over time offers the appearance of precision—“it’s up X%, it’s down Y%”—but without any context, it’s hard to say what it all really means.  

It’s no surprise that “trust” has such a “soft” image; casual use of words creates the impression that trust itself is soft and fuzzy, hardly the stuff managers should busy themselves with.

The fact is, all three meanings can be defined, measured, taught and managed—but only if we’re clear just which meaning is being measured and managed.

For examples of metrics that deal strictly with trustworthiness, see The Trust Equation – in its online self-assessment form, the Trust Quotient (go on, it’s free!).

For an example of how to teach and manage trusting, see this on the risk management tool of  Name It and Claim It.

For a good example of the state-of-trust, see a sampling of economists’ and social scientists’ views earlier this year at Trust Trust Trust.

I trust you’ll find me trustworthy enough to help increase our mutual trust.