#47 - (Why) Should I Trust You?
Hello,
This week, I happened to have several conversations with or about people changing jobs and companies. While on the surface, everything may appear set up for success, the actual success - or failure - depends on the trust we are able to build with our new team and across the wider organization. Trust - or lack thereof - can make it or break it for us when we step into a new role.
So, should we start with trust or distrust? What does trust mean exactly? How to build it? Does it work the same in different cultures? And do we always need trust? This edition has a few ideas from very smart people that help answer these questions.
The Opening Bid of Trust: there is far more upside than downside by starting with trust. It affects how people behave in response and attracts the very best people (Jim Collins)
The Trust Battery is one of the best metaphors to think about our relationships with others (Toby Lütke, Jason Freed)
The Anatomy of Trust: Brené Brown breaks down trust into 7 distinct elements under the acronym BRAVING and makes it easier to discuss trust and issues around it. Trusting others is impossible without self-trust and self-love.
How to Build Trust: Do things that are in someone else's best interest. These and other ideas from Sam Hinkie.
The Head or the Heart: building trust works differently across cultures, and no one explains it better than Erin Meyer.
Do we always need trust? Horacio Falcao debunks the commonly accepted truth that trust is a must in negotiation.
The Opening Bid of Trust
Which stance to take when you first meet someone? Trust or mistrust? Jim Collins talks about the lessons from his mentor Bill Lazier on the upside of having an opening bid of trust. Though this stance cannot insure against occasional betrayal, the very best people will respond to the opening bid of trust.
"I’ve come to the conclusion when I think across the iterative relationships and interactions and aspects of life, that there is far more upside in an opening bid of trust. Then there is far more downside in an opening bid of mistrust. It all goes to the question of people. If you really basically want to have your life, whether they’re people in your company, whether they’re people in your life, whether they’re your friends, whether they’re people you rock climb with, whatever it is: the very, very best people will respond to the bid of trust. The best people will be attracted to that. And you want the best people to be attracted.”
And the second is, he said, “Have you ever considered the possibility Jim, that your opening bid affects how people behave? If you trust people, it’s more likely that they will act in a trustworthy way. So it’s a double win. It’s the best people, and they’ll behave in a trustworthy way. The flip side is if you have an opening bit of mistrust, the best people will not be attracted to that. Now, you may have to earn my trust on how good you are at something, right? Or earn my respect for your performance or that sort of thing. But if I’m basically like, ‘I don’t trust you, you have to earn it.’ Well, some of the best people are going to be like, ‘I don’t need to put up with that. I’ll go do something else.’”
Relationships vs Transactions, The Knowledge Project Podcast with Jim Collins
The Trust Battery
There are many metaphors and mental models that help think about trust. My favorite is the trust battery. It's charged 50% when people are first hired and then the charge is the summary of all interactions. The work of recharging relationships is mostly one-to-one.
"Ever been in a relationship where you're endlessly annoyed by every little thing the other person does? In isolation, the irritating things aren't objectively annoying. But in those cases it's never really about little things. There's something else going on.
The same thing can happen at work. Someone says something or acts in a certain way, and someone else blows up about it. From afar, it looks like an overreaction. You can't figure out what the big deal is. There's something else going on.
Here's what's going on: your trust battery is dead.
Tobias Lütke, CEO at Shopify, coined the term. Here's how he explained it in a New York Times interview: 'Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a 'trust battery'. It's charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise."
(...) The reality is that the trust battery is a summary of all interactions to date. If you want to recharge the battery, you have to do different things in the future. Only new actions and new attitudes count.
Plus, it's personal (...) the work of recharging relationships is mostly one to one."
Jason Freed & David Heinemeier Hansson, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
The Anatomy of Trust
Well, we have taken the opening bid of trust or set our trust battery at 50% when starting a new relationship. But where do we go from here? How exactly do we build trust? Brené Brown insists that trust is built in the very smallest, seemingly unimportant moments. She breaks the definition of trust down into 7 distinct and necessary elements, united under the acronym BRAVING. Understanding these elements of trust helps us talk about it. She also insists that trusting others starts with self-trust, self-love.
B. Boundaries. There is no trust without boundaries. We are clear about each other's boundaries and we respect them.
R. Reliability. I trust you when you do what you say you will do, repeatedly. You cannot be reliable just once.
A. Accountability. I trust you if, when you make a mistake, you own it, apologize for it, and make amends.
V. Vault. What we share with each other, we hold in confidence.
I. Integrity. We can trust each other if we act from a place of integrity that comprises three things: choosing courage over comfort, choosing what's right over what's fun, fast, or easy, and practicing your values, not just professing your values.
N. Non-Judgement. I can fall apart, ask for help, and be in struggle without being judged by you, and vice versa.
G. Generosity. We assume the most generous interpretation of each other's words, intentions, and behaviors, and then check in with each other.
"if braving relationships with other people is braving connection, self-trust is braving self-love. Self-respect, the wildest adventure we'll ever take in our whole lives. And so, what I would invite you to think about when you think about trust is if your own marble jar is not full, if you can't count on yourself, you can't ask other people to give you what you don't have. So we have to start with self-trust (...) a lot of times if you find yourself in a struggle with trust, the thing to examine first is how you treat yourself. Because we can't ask people to give to us something that we do not believe we're worthy of receiving. And you will know you're worthy of receiving it when you trust yourself above everyone else."
The Anatomy of Trust, by Brené Brown
How to Build Trust
Another interesting view on building trust and valuing a few long-term relationships where trust compounds, comes from Sam Hinkie, venture capitalist and former NBA executive. He has several key strategies that he shared in the conversation on the "Invest Like the Best" podcast.
"Try to do things that are in someone else's best interest. Tell people things that aren't in your own interests. It doesn't mean that you can't benefit from it. But I'm a big softie for some of this, admittedly. I'm a softie for unconditional love, and showing people that you care unconditionally. And I'm a believer that over a long enough time period most of the unconditionality goes away. People reciprocate and people flourish in that kind of environment. And the harvest from those kinds of things are super meaningful.
But most of the people I look up to, mentors of mine or people I've read about or people I sort of admire or aspire to be are just like that. They have someone else in their life that they view as more important than them. They're quick to self-deprecate about who they are, and they'll tell you the hard, true thing, versus the short, maybe transactional thing that is wildly in their interest. "
Find Your People: Invest Like the Best podcast with Sam Hinkie
The Head or the Heart: Cultural Differences in Building Trust
What makes building trust even more complicated is that it works differently in different cultures. Erin Meyer describes it brilliantly in her book "The Culture Map", placing different cultures relative to each other on the Trusting scale that ranges from task-based to relationship-based trust. She also highlights that outside friendliness does not necessarily mean relationship-orientation and distinguishes between peach and coconut cultures.
Here are my key takeaways from "The Culture Map" on building trust across cultures.
The dimensions of the Trusting Scale originates from two different kinds of trust: cognitive trust that comes from the head and is built through business interactions, and affective trust that comes from the heart and arises from feeling of emotional closeness, empathy, friendship.
Some countries tend to separate cognitive and affective trust (US, Switzerland), others connect the two (China, Brazil)
The position of different countries on the Trusting scale is a spectrum between Task-based and relationship-based trust.
Task-based: trust is built through business-related activities. Work relationships are built and dropped easily, based on the practicality of the situation. You do good work consistently, you are reliable, I enjoy working with you, I trust you. US, Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, Germany Finland, UK, Poland, Austria
Relationship-based: trust is built through sharing meals, evening drinks, and visits at the coffee machine. Work relationships build up slowly over the long term. I've seen who you are at a deep level, I've shared personal time with you, I know others well who trust you, I trust you. Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Mexico, Russia, Japan, Italy Spain, France
Friendliness does not equal friendship and relationship-orientation. The concepts of peach and coconut cultures (Kurt Lewin) explain it well.
In peach cultures like the US or Brazil, people tend to be friendly ("soft") with others they've just met. But after a little friendly interaction with a peach person, you may suddenly get to the hard shell of the pit where the peach protects his real self. In these cultures, friendliness does not equal friendship.
In coconut cultures, people are more closed (like the touch shell of the coconut) with those they don't have friendships with. It takes a while to get through the initial hard shell, but as you do, people will become gradually warmer and friendlier. While relationships are built up slowly, they tend to last longer.
Whatever the culture, building informal relationships can go a long way. You can start from finding common interests.
Remember, in many cultures, the relationship IS your contract. You can't have one without the other. Showing your non-professional self and letting go of your guards around meals and drinks is a good approach in relationship-based cultures.
Japan is again an interesting example: during the day, people can be very task-oriented, but in the evening they switch to relationship-based mode. Everything said in the evening stays in the evening.
When it comes to the means of communication, email as the first communication as OK in the task-based cultures; however, in the relationship-based cultures choose the means of communication which is as relationship-based as possible. Seek informal warm introductions ("wasta" in the Middle-Eastern cultures).
When making phone-calls, the more relationship-based the culture is, the more is the share of informal talk that surrounds business-related conversation.
Do We Always Need Trust?
In his book "Value Negotiations", INSEAD professor Horacio Falcao busts the commonly accepted truth that trust is the most important element in negotiation. While we may not have and even not need trust to start negotiating, we should realize our interdependence, and stay positive, but not naive.
"There may be no more commonly accepted truth in negotiation than that its most important element is trust. People from all cultures tend to come together behind this one statement. And even more so if we are talking about win-win negotiation. However, we are almost afraid to say, this statement is not true. Actually, we would go as far as stating that trust is not needed at all in a negotiation, win-win or otherwise.
We do believe that trust makes negotiations easier, but trust is merely nice to have/ Trust alone cannot be responsible for the success or failure of our negotiation (...)
Trust is built over time. Trust is not like microwave popcorn that is ready in two minutes. Because it takes time, while we are building it, we find ourselves negotiating already. Actually time and again, people decide to trust someone by how they behave in the negotiation, so parties have to be negotiating already. This alone indicates that many people can negotiate without trust.
An interesting question that follows is: how do people normally negotiate with someone they do not trust? The answer is usually through a win-lose approach. How can we build trust with someone we are trying to beat or defeat, usually at any cost? The truth is we can't. The need for trust to negotiate is the very thing that pushes trust away. if we don't trust, we negotiate win-lose; but if we negotiate win-lose, we do not build trust. Here is negotiation's own version of the famous chicken-and-egg problem. Negotiation, however, does have a solution to its version of the riddle.
The idea is to start without trust and to avoid win-lose approach. No chicken or egg - we reject them both. What do we do? Like Tit-for-Tat, we should start positive, but not naive. Why interdependance?
Independence happens when we do not need anyone else. Therefore, we do not need to negotiate. Even if we trust them, we can just do whatever we want on our own.
Dependence happens when we need them or vice-versa. Therefore, neither us nor them need to negotiate. Even if we trust each other, they can just order us to do what they want or vice-versa.
Interdependence happens when there is a mutual need or benefit in working together. It requires negotiation. Even if we do not trust each other. if we need something from one another. we negotiate to make it happen. Interdependence is more quickly communicated than trust. it can actually be done in two minutes. When there is a negotiation, there is at least some level of interdependence. All we need is to identify it clearly.
As interdependence makes the parties more likely to negotiate win-win, it becomes much easier to develop trust with someone who's working with us; as opposed to people working against us in a win-lose approach."
Value Negotiation: How to Finally Get Win-Win Right, by Horacio Falcao
To end up as always in music, here is one of my favorite voice of the moment - Celeste - and her songs about complicated relationships
Trust yourself to build trust with others, stay positive but not naive
Arina
Illustration: Unsplash