How Important Is Trust, Really?
I attended a gathering last night where “trust” was the topic for a panel discussion. The panel talked about trust being event related—after a market fall or a scandal, trust usually drops. They discussed how there’s a moment of persuasive power just after admitting a weakness. The assumption of the evening was that trust is essential to business, and we need to learn how to engender trust.
My question is, How important is trust, really? If you don’t trust someone, does that mean you won’t associate with that person? If you don’t trust a business, will you not shop there? How much trust?
Trust is a state of mind that is difficult or impossible to measure. It’s an internal gauge we use to predict how another person or organization will act in a given situation. But each person’s gauge uses different inputs and different scales. It’s something like the doctor asking, “On a scale of one to 10, how much does this hurt?” One patient’s five might be another patient’s eight. Some people may be measuring trust in centigrade and others are measuring in ounces.
And the fact is we do associate with people we don’t trust completely. We do business with companies we don’t believe have our best interest at heart. We do this by building safeguards. When I shop online I pay through Pay Pal. When we engage with a business partner we sign a nondisclosure agreement. When they get married, some people sign a prenuptial agreement.
These proxies for trust enable us to function in relationships where, if we could measure it accurately, trust is not necessarily high. The problem is that functioning is not the same as succeeding. Do you want a functional marriage or a successful marriage? If two businesses come together—say a structural engineer and a contractor join forces to build a bridge over a river—with the right proxies for trust they can add their respective expertise together and build a functional bridge. But what if their trust of each other exceeded the proxies and they were willing to share thoughts and ideas and truly collaborate? They could build on each other’s expertise and design a bridge that is both functional and beautiful.
For two parties to move beyond a functional relationship requires a level of trust that exceeds the safeguards or proxies we have created for trust. Moving to a higher level of trust means each party needs to understand how he or she establishes trust of the other party. They need to know what their measures are, whether they’re using degrees of centigrade or ounces. And they must formalize those measures. Then they can apply the measures and know when it’s safe to move beyond a functional to a beautiful relationship.
Michael Astle
Tags: Collaboration, gauge, measure, partner, partnership, relationship, trust
March 24, 2008 at 9:45 am
Michael,
This strikes me as a good collection of insights about the nature and workings of trust. The general theme I’m hearing is the difficulty of measuring it, and the consequences of that difficulty.
As someone who writes and teaches about trust for a living, let me just add a couple of observations.
First is, you’re right about all that.
Second is, the inability to measure trust in a linear, quantitative, Aristotelian kind of way doesn’t mean we don’t measure it all the time–we just use subjective, internal scales. Interesting, that works pretty well; doctors will tell you that pain scale seems to give them pretty good information, for example.
I think the key point you raise is that trust is hugely varied, rich, and emotional and subjective at its heart. It’s not that we do business only with people we trust; we do business with people at different levels of trust. I don’t need to have a meaningful relationship with the barista at Starbucks. But I do have to trust that said person is not going to haul out a revolver and blast away at me; and that Starbucks is not likely to hire such people in the first place.
The world works on varying degrees of trust, just as it does with varying degrees of friction, or competence, or transparency.
I’m not clear what you mean when you say the measures of mutual trust must be “formalized.” For a trust-based relationship to succeed, I’d say the parties must understand each other’s measures of trust–but understand them in whatever terms are being used. That may or may not mean “formal.” It could be entirely idiosyncratic to the two people involved; it may be extremely informal and hard to verbalize.
The key is understanding; formal language or measurement systems are not prerequisites for understanding, it seems to me.
Thanks for a provocative post,
Charles H. Green
http://www.trustedadvisor.com
April 30, 2008 at 10:24 pm
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