Trends on Trust — and what you can do to build (and rebuild) trust to do about it

Part of the “Worth Your Time” Series — November Edition

In our conversations with organisations to become more fit for humans and fit for the future, it is hard to avoid the topic of trust. Moving away from a “control-and-command” managerial style a la Taylor to a more open community held together by platforms requires a fundamental shift. This shift addresses tensions that are extremely hard to hold if we don’t trust — trust our people in being the right people, trust the process in being the one that brings us forward, trust the leaders in aiming to fulfill our purpose.

Macro-level trust

If you look at trust data on a macro-level, it has been on decline. We’re not talking about a few months, we’re talking about a good 50 years of slow but steady decline — in our institutions, in our governments, and even in society as a whole.

Ipsos, 2019

That decline is, however, not the same across the board. There are a couple of mediating factors:

• There are a few nations across the world (mostly in the Nordic European region) that have consistently scored high on trust in society. A few possible explanations include a high degree of homogeneity in the population and high social capital. (read more here)
• Eurofund was able to show in their most recent report on “societal change and trust in institutions” that moderating social tensions, taking measures to decrease social exclusion and improving the quality of public services has helped some European countries in raising trust amongst its people.
• Trust in business around the world is not in a decline, but it varies tremendously from country to country (e.g. China 54% of people trust business, Japan 43%, US 33%, Germany 25%)
• Some even say that the trust in companies in emerging markets is increasing because of the inability or in-existence of a functioning government. So the only change that can happen needs to come from companies.
• Small business receives way more trust than big business on average — 68 as opposed to 23%. (see more details in this Gallup report “Confidence in big business”).

Ipsos tested eight drivers of institutional trustworthiness — and they all came out to be significant. So here is a first clue at where you could start on a macro-scale.

Micro-level trust

While trust in our institutions and in each other on a large scale is highly important for our systems to function and work, we also need to turn an eye to the trust we give and take in everyday interactions. Since we spend so much of our time at work, let’s keep the focus there. One of the buzzwords of organisations these days, when it comes to trust is:

Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking

Amy Edmondson, the “mother” of psychological safety, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999 and has validated her hypothesis that companies with a trusting workplace perform better than workplaces that are not. “Psychological safety isn’t about being nice. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other.”

This concept has now been around a while, and it’s difficult to refute. We think it’s pretty interesting to hear how Edmondson has applied it to the concept of “teaming” and how a combination of situational humility, curiosity lead to psychological safety and help helped groups of strangers find answers to the most remarkable challenges.

A triangle for trust building

The 3 pillars that need to be firmly in place for us to trust another person are:

• Authenticity
• Logic
• Empathy

Frances Frei tells us her theory behind building and rebuilding trust: To embrace differences in yourself and others to harvest authenticity, to communicate your point effectively to make sure that your logic is not lost in story-telling and to focus your attention on the people you are spending your day with to ensure empathy.

How do you work with building trust-based organisations where trust is a given, and doesn’t have to be earned?

We’d love to hear your practices, add them down below in the comments.