I recently heard David Johnston, the former Governor General of Canada, speak at a conference. He talked about trust and its importance to our world, relationships, communities, and organizations. He posed the question, “How can we become trustworthy people?” Just as significant is the counter-question, “How do we learn to be trusting of others?” These aspects of trust are different sides of the same coin. If we trust others, we will authentically share our thoughts and emotions and become more trustworthy. Trust is the glue that holds relationships together and the grease that helps us get things done.
Trust is critical but fragile.
Trust is slow to build and quick to destroy. It is built when our sharing isn’t used against us. When people hold our trust respectfully, they are trustworthy. Businesses, media, legislatures, and nonprofits have discovered how trust can be ruined by a few small acts that become public and diminish the value of that organization or the involved person. From then on, all of their actions and decisions are seen with a critical and skeptical eye.
Though fragile, trust is critical in building teams, communities, and organizations. When it is present, people’s relationships are more productive and cooperative. Its value isn’t underestimated in generating high-performance teams, smooth productivity, and reputational capital. And yet, many leaders don’t fully understand how essential it is to their leadership and their work. If leaders did understand, more of their behaviors would reflect how much they value building, fostering, and protecting trust.
Change flows through relationships at the speed of trust.
Organizations and communities experience large-scale system change at the speed of trust. When trust is absent, other emotions like fear, distrust, skepticism, and resistance grind or lock the gears in any systems change. Many people have experienced initially trusting a systems change that turned out badly for them, which causes them to resist other proposed changes. As a leader, the proactive strategy for change management is to develop robust, authentic, and trusting relationships. When those are in place, half the work is already done.
We can assess the level of trust in our relationships by noticing where resistance and fear emerge in the network we are trying to influence. If change efforts get stuck in a specific place in an organization or community, then leaders need to look more deeply into what is happening in that part of the network. Has trust been broken? Are the relationships filled with conflict and distrust? Is manipulation and lack of transparency the norm? Whatever pattern emerges in those difficult situations, awareness helps leaders develop strategies to repair the damage hindering their change efforts.
Trust that sticks
Traditionally, our goal is to overcome resistance with positional power. We use strategies designed to dampen, overpower, or ignore resistance. However, those practices make our following change efforts more challenging because they increase distrust in the organizational system. If we want this change and the next one to go faster and smoother, with active support and engagement, then we need to focus on repairing and rebuilding relationships and trust in our organizations.
