Building Trust

 Trust issues are important to relationships everywhere -- from emerging face-to-face relationships to hammering out associations in the global order. Trust issues invade our politics and are the number one criteria used by CEOs in selecting top corporate leaders in America.  Trust recedes to the background as we focus on other relationship issues. But in understanding and not being blind to trust issues, we can build it and maintain it. Old institutions are being left behind in part because their power and hierarchy were institutionalized forms of distrust. Most companies move too slowly to compete, thus losing out on opportunities that trust can open. The following notes reflect themes I've been thinking about for a long while. Many of these issues were addressed in a wonderful little book by Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores, entitled "Building Trust". 

• Trust, like love and freedom is an important value.. until it comes to putting it into practice, whereupon many seem blind to trust issues
• It's hard to define, though trust seems to involve predicting that another person will come through for you when it counts
• People confuse liking and trusting. What passes for trust in many places is more a matter of cordial hypocrisy (pretending) or cynical resignation
• Many are blind to trust. They assume it's there or not. If people are trustworthy, we trust them, If not, we don't. We trust without thinking "To wonder is to worry" -- so they don't. Then they behave in ways that produce distrust and don't understand when they feel betrayed
• We tend to take trust for granted and only notice it when breached
• Trusting is something that we do; something we make, create, build, maintain, sustain with promises, commitments, emotions, and a sense of personal integrity. It is not an atmosphere, a glue, a lucky break. It's an option; a choice, an emotional skill requiring judgement
• Embodying trust in our daily behavior involves making and honoring commitments
• In a global order, our need to trust strangers increases exponentially, In the absence of familiarity, nothing is more important than an impeccable reputation
• People who don't make and honor commitments make their emotional lives together incoherent
• The problem of trust is not so much the loss of confidence but the failure to make commitments. Commitments do not limit freedom; they are it's expression
• Trust is not so much tied to the past as pregnant with the future
• A naive conception of life in which one expects more than they are willing to give produces selfishness, resentment, distrust, and inauthenticity 
• If we take trust for granted, if trust suffers from lack of commitment, relationships can explode with the trauma of misunderstanding, disappointment, sense of betrayal. Our failures at trust are more than matters of disappointment. 
• Trusting, like loving, must be learned
• Authentic trust is not blind or naive, and it's aware of the possibilities of failure
• Past the ethical and moral issues, telling the truth establishes trust and lying destroys it
• Executives usually experience overt respect and obedience, but trust is a different matter
• True leadership, whatever else it may be, can be based on nothing less than trust
• In my experience at top corporate levels, interpersonal trust is seen as the very most important criterion for assessing leadership potential
• There is a great deal of distrust around these days in government. Government is largely misrepresented in labeling evil, wasteful, oppressive, misguided, inefficient. This lack of trust in government is as dangerous as blind trust would be. Without trust there can be no policy at all. Those seeking freedom don't talk about taking up responsibility. 
• Trusting begins with discomforting talk about trust, combined with commitments. We "simply trust" -- shyly avoid opening up those area where trust is in question
• Mutual commitments, small at first, can build trust. Fulfillment may never put an end to distrust, but can build an authentic (not blind)  trust with it's eyes wide open
• Trust talk is paradoxical - If I tell you to trust me, you can expect a con job; if I say I don't trust you, I make the situation worse -- asking "Can I trust you" shows my distrust. To say "I trust you" is to put a burden on the other person
• We make promises and commitments overt or tacit, and we see them through
• Trust is a kind of freedom to realize all sorts of possibilities in relationships. Distrust limits one's ability to act, speak, even to breathe easily. Trust then, rather than being a risky dependency, opens things up
• Trust means entering a relationship in which control is no longer the issue. At entering, we fear a free fall into dependency, but a more effective interdependency (cooperation) is only possible with trust
• We hope we can trust, but it cannot be taken for granted. Cautiously evaluate. Trust involves taking risk; risks should be taken wisely. Trust opens new worlds
• What we create by your leaps of faith into trust are the solid security of a relationship
• Seeing trust as vulnerability makes it foolish; as an opening, trusting strangers becomes the heart of wisdom - an investment in the future
• The costs of trust may be devastating, but those of distrust are virtually guaranteed.The right kind of conversations, not weapons, are the only tools we need
• "Things didn't work out" comprises a large category of disappointments. These raise issues of trust, but can usually be stepped around. We understand and forgive -- "Never Mind!" 
• Another large category of disappointments involves real or imagined mistakes. These branch to those for which someone can be blamed and honest mistakes. In both cases there is always a need to achieve understanding and recommit.
• Disappointments related to bad luck and no blame  are overcome or overlooked when understood
• Disappointments from mistakes put us in the realm of apologies and excuses. Failure to communicate (indifference), insincerity, apparent misrepresentation, or fraudulent excuses are widely taken as evasions of responsibility
• Apologies are an invitation to conversation, a sign of respect and commitment to make amends
• Once established, trust tends to recede into the background and become invisible. We have more to focus on though trust works in the background until we need to make a decision, and to ask what we're doing
• Self-confidence is central to trusting others. For authentic rust, one must be unafraid of the negative assessment of people you respect. Trust is destroyed by flattery and cordial hypocrisy
• Robert Frank's research on economists finds that those who believe most stridently that people act in their own self-interest leave fewer tips in restaurants than any other profession. This amounts to a bad faith refusal to trust people