We Talked About Trust

What does it mean to the future of work? Here are my takeouts…

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Recently, I have been working on a project that involves organizational trust with a client of mine. We went through cultural diagnosis and design sprints¹ to explore what is making and breaking trust at their organization. Incidentally, 3 other colleagues in the Reinventing Work Community were also exploring various aspects of the topic, and Tim Shand got proactive enough to invite us to a circle discussion on Trust.

Here are some of my take-ins, and take-outs both from the project, the discussion session as well as all the readings in between.

To begin with, one needs to narrow down what belongs to a concept and what doesn’t. Navigating some definitions, agreeing partially with each, here is the one that resonated the most with the context of my work so far. Feel free to disagree and/or to define it differently for your own work context with your team.

Trust — a willingness to be vulnerable to another person in a certain context.²

Some of us might lean towards categorizing it as a feeling, others as a practical score of risk and some cues of trust closely relate to the culture of psychological safety that Amy Edmondson wrote about in her book Fearless Organization.

Why is it very difficult and tricky to build trust?

Could it be due to the complexity of the trust as a construct? Our primitive risk-averse brains tell us that it can be a helpful defense mechanism sometimes to keep our guards high and use distrust. It helps in avoiding pain. And we learnt it as we grew up getting hurt, elbow kicked, back-stabbed or betrayed. Right?

That’s also what 80% of employees and coworkers think; a survival mechanism that they lean towards when they feel unsafe.

To John Mortimer, one of our colleagues in the community, the danger of this survival mechanism though is the behavior that follows feeling mistrusted:

People tend to project back into their systems what they’ve received.

And hence, it might not be very beneficial on the long run, neither to the one mistrusted, nor to their environment to have the lack of trust circulating.

What is a good approach to deal with distrust?

Mark Eddleston reminded us that maybe taking Trust as a learnt behavior helps in failing at it and trying again till we get it collectively right. We need to work on our own trustworthiness, exercise trusting others, and repeat the dynamic with trial and error in order for us to build trustworthy relationships and trusting spaces, slowly and collaboratively.

One way to track and improve trust in teams is applying the Trust Battery exercise; which is a term coined by Tobias Lütke, CEO at Shopify and it does conform to greater or lesser degrees with what we know from social neuroscience about how our brains perceive and exchange trust. Here is how I connected the dots on two layers of understanding:

A. Socially — Trust is expected to be among the basic norms in the Teal Organization according to Frederic Laloux , and it is rooted in three assumptions:

• We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent.
• Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement.
• Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin.

And from a more academic perspective, Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis and F. David Schoorman has developed an integrative model for organizational trust that is based on three factors in the trustee that makes the trusting party ready to take-risk in a relationship:

1. Ability,
2. Benevolence, and
3. Integrity.

Combined, they form a ground for trusting the person in a social setup.

And B. economically, adding the elements of time and scoring — A number of researchers have also suggested that the emergence of trust can be demonstrated in game theory as a reputation score that evolves from patterns of previous behavior. And over time, based on a series of observations and interactions, this score either increases or decreases and accordingly allows for either more or less cooperation.

Albeit the above relationship between trust and cooperation needs to be further investigated, game theorists tend to equate cooperation and trust. This is also what I understood from my discussions with Jack Rich, who used to be a professional poker player and embraces similar views.

But, do we really need to always work on maximizing trust?

I think one of the difficulties that has hindered us to think with clarity about trust dynamics is a lack of clear differentiation among factors that contribute to trust, trust itself, and outcomes of trust.

And despite the many explored perspectives on the destructive effects of distrust in leadership, I think it is healthy to aim for regulating trust, rather than always aim at maximizing it. What do I mean by regulating trust?

I am referring to asking the right questions, followed by the right alignments, and iterative experimentation with both;

• What are we talking about when we are talking about trust?
  Is it the difference in cultural cues that we need to talk about? Is it the alignment of perceptions of external promises of our organization vs. internal realities? Is it the cohesion of values, circulated thoughts and actions?
• What are our behaviors contributing to the context(s) we are in?
  Do they contribute to increasing/decreasing trust?
  Why are we choosing them?
• Whom can we trust on which topic, why, when and for how long? when should we stop trusting on which topics in which contexts and why?

In a later article, I would like to share a tool I developed mainly from the above insights, current and previous works on the topic as well as many pointers of Harold Jarche’s work. Stay tuned!

References:

1. I carefully used a version of the OCAI tool combined with insights both from the Business Culture Design tool and from Nora Bateson work; many theoriests in the field warn that culture is not something we design, but rather a byproduct of the interaction of structures and the collective behaviors.
2. PDF: A integrative Model of organizational Trust: Past, present and Future (2007). Schoorman, Mayer, and Davis. Academy of Management Review.