A Question of Trust

When I’m coaching leaders, the question of trust comes up frequently.

Trust in their colleagues. Trust in their board or CEO. Trust in their own knowledge and abilities.

Coachees talk about what it feels like to be trusted to get on with their work without being micromanaged, while still feeling supported. They also talk about the opposite: operational decision-making being moved into central teams; feeling judged or criticised for decisions before anyone has asked about the thinking behind them or the context in which they were made.

What’s abundantly clear is how experiences of being trusted and being able to trust those we work with impacts on our whole way of being and experience of work. And misplaced trust can be high risk, so this is a matter worth dwelling on.

When I listen to people talk about trusting and respecting their line manager, I hear ambition, commitment and energy. I hear people wanting to learn, improve, try new things and do a great job. I notice the laughter and smiles, the openness to share an idea, the willingness to help others and the confidence to say, “I’ve been thinking about this – what do you think?”

Lack of trust has a very different quality.

I can hear and sometimes see the tension building: shoulders rising, jaw tightening, voice becoming higher and thinner. There is anxiety and pressure, a struggle to imagine a different future and a tendency to cling to what is familiar because uncertainty feels increasingly difficult to tolerate.

And stress changes how we think and perceive. Under pressure, our attention narrows and we can literally become less able to see what is happening around us. It becomes harder to think creatively, consider alternatives and make good decisions.

There is some interesting evidence behind this too. Research into Real World Group’s model of Engaging Leadership has found that these leadership behaviours, including trust, are associated with higher team performance, greater wellbeing and motivation, reduced job-related stress, and greater readiness for change and innovation.

But how do we know when we trust someone? Is it just a feeling? How do we set about being line managers who can be trusted? And what exactly do we mean by trust?

Trust as an assessment

One of the distinctions I find particularly useful in ontological coaching comes from the idea of an assessment.

In the philosophical work on language that underpins ontological coaching, including the work of John Searle on speech acts, we distinguish between different things we do with language. One of these is making an assessment – an opinion or judgement about something.

When I say, “I trust you”, I am making an assessment.

We do this all the time, often without noticing we’ve made an assessment or making the assessment explicit.

Alan Sieler is particularly helpful here. In Coaching to the Human Soul, Volume I (2005), he explores the importance of grounding our assessments – examining the basis on which we have arrived at an opinion or judgement.

This matters because our assessments can have a powerful effect on what we see and what we do next.

If I assess someone as unreliable, I may check up on them more often. If I assess them as incompetent, I may take decisions away from them. If I assess them as trustworthy, I may give them greater autonomy.

And each of those actions can, in turn, affect the relationship and business risk management and outcomes.

So how do we ground an assessment?

Sieler gives us five useful questions:

1. For the sake of what am I making this assessment?
2. What standard am I applying?
3. In what domain am I making the assessment? (For example, work, family or a particular professional context.)
4. What evidence do I have to support my assessment?
5. What evidence do I have that might challenge my assessment?

The second question is worth dwelling on and even wrestling with – getting our standards explicit and shared. Whenever there’s an assessment there’s a standard, so let’s be clear about what that standard is.

You and I might both say that we trust someone, but have very different ideas about what trustworthy behaviour looks like.

I might expect someone to respond to an email within 24 hours. You might think 72 hours is perfectly reasonable.

I might think a good leader should tell me when they disagree with me immediately. You might value someone who waits until they have fully considered the issue.

But if we don’t make the standard explicit, we can be judging people against a standard they don’t know exists. We can probably agree that’s unreasonable.

And there is another important point: we get it wrong.

Sometimes we trust people and our assessment turns out to be misplaced. Sometimes we don’t trust someone and later discover that our assessment was based on assumptions, old experiences or incomplete information.

Which brings us to a more useful question than simply “Do I trust this person?”

What do we mean by trust?

Sieler’s work offers a useful way of thinking about trust as an assessment of how well another person is likely to take care of what concerns us. He describes four dimensions of trust:

1. Sincerity. Do I assess this person as genuine in what they say? Is there consistency between what they say publicly and what they are saying privately – what they actually think?
2. Competence. Do I assess this person as having the skills and abilities to do what they say they will do?
3. Reliability. Do I see a consistent relationship between what this person says they will do and what they actually produce – particularly in relation to time and agreed standards?
4. Involvement. Do I experience this person as being attentive to what matters to me? Are they attuned to my concerns? Do I experience them as being “fully there” with what is important to me and giving it the priority I need?

These four dimensions – sincerity, competence, reliability and involvement – are a useful way of making the rather vague idea of “trust” more observable.

Try this

Think about someone you work with and practise using the questions above. Give yourself a few minutes to do this.

How did you get on? In particular, how did you get on regarding the issue of standards?

This can be tricky, but it’s a crucial step for clarity and understanding, and essential for shared understanding across a team.

Having carried out this reflection, you may want to make a note of any action you’d like to take and follow up, so take a moment to do that too.

Trust in practice

I was reminded of Alan’s work recently when I was talking with a colleague from Zen Educate about how much he was enjoying working with his current team and manager.

Honestly, it was such a buzz to hear him talk about his one-to-ones. He enjoyed the time. He valued the questions. He appreciated being encouraged to reflect. He noticed how the conversations helped him develop and improve his thinking and ideas, and created more opportunities to share the work he was leading.

We were walking and talking along the waterfront near Stanley Park in Vancouver, which is a pretty lovely place for a conversation, and I noticed his energy. His enthusiasm. His commitment to the mission. His care about the quality of his work. There was a real sense of joy in good work.

It struck me again how much our working relationships matter. Work takes up such a significant part of our lives, and for many of us it is closely connected with our identity, our sense of contribution and our experience of ourselves.

We talked about relationships with clients and the importance of trust there too. I introduced these four dimensions of trust into the conversation and we explored how they might be used not only to assess whether we trust someone, but to ask a different question: am I someone that other people can trust?

A useful question for self-reflection and for thinking about the quality of the service we offer to clients.

I might think I’m sincere, competent, reliable and involved. But that isn’t quite the point.

Carl Rogers’ work on empathy is helpful here. His emphasis was not simply on the counsellor intending to be empathic, but on the client’s experience; whether the client actually experiences the counsellor as understanding their frame of reference.

There’s something important in that distinction for leaders too. Being trustworthy isn’t only about my intentions. It’s also about the experience I create for other people.

To what extent do they experience me as sincere, competent, reliable and involved?

The gap between what we intend and what someone experiences is worth paying attention to. The best way to find out is to specifically ask your team for feedback in these areas. Pulling for this kind of feedback helps create trust and an environment where specific and timely feedback is business as usual, valued by everyone.

So, to summarise

Trust is based on our assessments; grounding our assessments in standards and evidence helps build clarity about what trust in this context means.

The more explicit we are about standards, the easier it becomes to examine the evidence underpinning our assessments, including the evidence that might challenge them. This in turn helps us reduce risk and make good decisions.

Because building trust isn’t just about getting better at assessing others, it’s about becoming a leader who our teams experience as trustworthy.