Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show, this is Peter Green, and today I’m excited to share with you an overview and some takeaways from a fantastic new audiobook by Rachel Botsman called How to Trust and Be Trusted.
For a business, trust is oxygen. Without it, the business will die. Customers need to trust the business to solve their problems at a price that’s fair. Teammates need to trust each other to make and keep commitments. Leadership needs to trust first line employees to do their jobs in an ethical, engaged way. Employees need to trust that management is treating them fairly and considers their interests when making decisions.
Remove trust from any of those relationships, and everything about the business goes downhill, fast.
So what exactly is trust? It’s something that I thought I had a good understanding of. Then I came across Rachel Botsman, an Oxford lecturer and world expert on trust. And I found her descriptions and advice so compelling, I decided to create this graphic overview with my commentary of her new audiobook called How to Trust and Be Trusted. The audiobook is great, it’s short and really well produced. It’s done through Pushkin, who make audiobooks patterned after professionally produced podcast episodes, so if you find this graphic overview compelling, go buy it wherever you get your audiobooks. It’s worth your investment.
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How to trust and be trusted is organized around some of the big questions most of us have about trust–How to Trust the Right People, How to Be More Trustworthy, How to Repair Trust, How to Use Transparency, and How Trust drives Change and Innovation. Whether you’re on a team and you want to increase the trust level with your team mates, a manager that wants to have stronger relationships with your team, or an executive that wants to create a culture of trust, these five lessons will help you think more clearly about trust, and improve your ability to make good decisions related to it.
Let’s start with her definition of trust. Trust, according to Botsman, is a confident relationship with the unknown. And when we talk about whether we trust a person, a group, a company, or whatever it may be, she recommends we get much more specific. Instead of saying “I trust this person,” say “I trust this person to do this thing in this situation.” She uses the example that she hopes her readers trust her to provide useful information about this topic, in an entertaining way. But that you should not trust her to drive you safely anywhere. Another example is that you may trust a company to get you a product very quickly at a good price, but you may not trust that same company to treat its employees fairly, or to behave ethically towards other companies. SO, trust is a confident relationship with the unknown, and it helps to define the presence of trust in a specific context. With that as our foundation, let’s get to the five lessons.
Lesson one answers the question: who should I trust, and has some subtext of “why do we sometimes make bad decisions about who to trust?”
Botsman begins by pointing out that in any relationship, there is a trust giver and a trust receiver. The receiver can’t force the trust giver to trust them, it has to be given.
And when we are the trust giver, we make decisions about who to trust based on all kinds of signals, what Botsman calls trust signals. These are the sometimes subtle clues we knowingly or unknowingly use to make decisions about trust.
And some signals are much louder than others. She gives lots of interesting examples and research on this, but suffice it to say, if I look like you, or talk like you, or went to the same school as you, that is going to be a very loud trust signal–you’re automatically much more likely to trust me than someone who doesn’t have those familiar characteristics, *regardless of* whether or not I’m actually more trustworthy.
It’s why con artists will start getting info from us and fabricating similarities. Like “where’d you go to school? Oh, east high? Yeh, my cousin went to east high. What year did you graduate? Oh, he was a few years behind you.” And now, subconsciously, we feel like we know this person a bit. If we believe them, we trust them, maybe just a little.
Botsman also addresses the question about the role of intuition, our “gut feeling” on someone. The sad news? Our gut feeling about someone’s trustworthiness, which we usually form within six seconds of knowing them, has only a 50/50 shot of being right. So she recommends that we let our gut feeling about someone be the driver of a decision, but not the decider. “Oh, ok, I need to make a decision here. But let me think about what signals I’m considering.”
Just taking the time to think through that question is critical. It’s what Botsman calls a “Trust Pause.” Think through the actual facts beyond how you’re feeling about a person. What evidence do you have about their trustworthiness? What are the other trust signals?
Now you’re in a better position to make a good decision. We won’t always get it right, and sometimes even without strong evidence we’ll trust someone out of convenience, but taking a trust pause is great advice that I plan to remember. Now, what kind of evidence should we be looking for? We’ll get some categories in the second lesson–How to be more trustworthy.
But the second lesson starts with a great and, in my experience, somewhat controversial take, which is that we should stop talking about building trust, like “I’m going to go take these actions and that will make this person trust me more.” Instead of trying to build trust, Brotsman recommends we focus on trying to earn it. That simple shift from building to earning makes it clear that the trust giver we talked about in lesson 1 will choose whether or not we’ve earned their trust. We can’t force it.
Ok, so what can we do to be more trustworthy? Botsman’s research shows that there are four traits that determine whether someone is trustworthy or not. Two of the traits are about the person’s capability, how they do things, and two are about their character, why they do things.
On the capability side, we have competence, the time, skills, and experience to do the thing we are asking someone to trust us about. Reliability is about doing what I said I’d do, and communicating clearly what can be expected, then doing what I communicated. Reliability has a strong time aspect to it–do I make deadlines? Do I show up on time, or even, can people rely on me to always be a few minutes late, but they know that and can rely on me being late but then present.
On the character side, the WHY we do things, integrity means I walk the talk. If I say I value direct feedback, do I welcome it when it’s given or do I get defensive? If I say I have a strong boundary on work hours and non-work hours, do I then go sending emails and Slack messages to my team at 2am?
Finally empathy is used here to describe a curiosity about what’s going on for the other person. Managers pay close attention here. Bostman points out that this trait is not really the kind of empathy where I feel what you’re feeling, but just that I’m curious about your experience and actively seek to be helpful to you. In one interview, Botsman pointed out that she liked the word “care for” here, because it’s an active way of describing the same idea. So we tend to trust people that demonstrate active curiosity in our experience and point of view, and a desire to help us get what’s important to us.
So if you want be more trustworthy, consider the four traits and where you may be falling a little short. Depending on the context of the trust, what you want someone to trust you to do, one of the four traits might be more important, so this isn’t a blanket statement to try to increase all four at once. For example, if I’m picking a surgeon, Competence is probably more important to me than the others. Not that I don’t want an empathetic surgeon, but it’s not the primary driver. ON the other hand, if I’m decided whether to trust a romantic partner, empathy and integrity may outweigh the capability skills, especially the more serious and long term the relationship becomes. So, context is king when considering the four traits.
I found these really helpful in thinking about how I could be more trustworthy, but also in diagnosing why I may struggle to trust someone else. It was like shining a light on something that was hidden before. I could now be a little clearer about what was preventing me from trusting them, and, if it’s important to resolve, it provides a clue into the type of conversation I’d need to have if I wanted to increase my trust for that person in that context.
Which brings us to lesson 3–how to repair trust. Brotsman has a nice companion definition in this lesson: Distrust is a Confident expectation of things feared. I love the precision in her definitions.
In any relationship, our level of trust is more like a river than a fixed container, where we dump the trust in, and then we’re good. So we’ll use this image that has some flow in and out.
When we connect with a person, our trust level tends to go up. But our trust level can drop when we have some kind of a disconnect in any of the four traits. Did someone demonstrate lower competence than we previously attributed to them? Trust may drop. Did they drop the ball, proving less reliable than we’d hoped? Trust may drop. Did they act inconsistently with their stated values or beliefs? Trust may drop. Did they act in a way that showed no empathy or curiosity about our experience? Trust may drop.
And as trust drops, Botsman describes three levels of distrust. First is defensiveness. This is the initial stage of distrust, where the trust giver may feel attacked or undermined. Common signs here include reacting to requests or feedback as personal attacks, feeling the need to constantly justify or defend actions, blaming, judging, complaining, or criticizing others, and overall a sense of "pushing against" others in interactions.
If distrust is not addressed, it can progress to level 2, disengagement. This stage is marked by pulling back from relationships or interactions, reduced energy and enthusiasm in tasks or teamwork, avoiding collaboration and withdrawing from meaningful communication, and a shift from paying attention to actively turning away from engagement.
The final stage is disenchantment, where distrust becomes deeply ingrained, often resulting in resentment and rivalry. Characteristics include of disenchantment include viewing others as competitors rather than collaborators, even on the same team, harboring feelings of resentment and vindictiveness, spreading distrust to others, leading to fractured relationships and group dynamics, and eventually reaching a point where the relationship or collaboration may become irreparable, often prompting people to "clean quit" (leave the relationship, team, or organization).
The three levels of distrust illustrate a progressive breakdown in trust and relationships. Addressing distrust early, during the defensiveness stage, is critical to preventing it from escalating into disengagement or disenchantment, where it may be too late to repair.
When you notice that disconnection, that defensiveness in yourself or in someone else, and if the relationship is important, it’s time to have a difficult, productive conversation. Now, there are entire good books on this topic, including Crucial Conversations and Non-Violent Communication, but Brotsman sums up the steps that need to be taken in any of these patterns, which are to first identify what’s at stake, why the conversation matters, why it’s important to address, second to find some common ground, what you can agree about, then to be specific, don’t talk about patterns or identities, like “you’re always so…,” instead use a specific recent example. Fourth, make sure to demonstrate empathy by listening to their perspective and experience of the situation. It’s important to be aware of and remember the fundamental attribution error at this step, which is that we attribute “bad behavior” in others to “just who they are”, and bad behavior in ourselves to “all the reasons I had to behave that way in that specific situation.” Then, having moved through those steps, look for a path forward that allows you to increase trust, even as an experiment.
Ok, on to lesson 4, which was the initial hook for this book for me. And that is about the role of transparency in trust. I’ve always assumed that transparency increases trust. But if we go back to the definition of trust as a confident relationship with the unknown, then we can see that a demand for more transparency is a desire to control, not to trust. So, does that mean transparency doesn’t matter? Well, not quite. Botsman describes two approaches to transparency. The first, what she calls blanket transparency, is to just be transparent about everything, like spraying a firehose of transparency on the wall. The second, what she calls intentional transparency, is very targeted. We want to share specific information about specific things to demonstrate the traits of trustworthiness where they may not have been obvious. Botsman suggests that if an organization wants to be more transparent, to start with the specific trust issue you hope to fix with the transparency. Then, ask, “what’s the intention here? Are we trying to demonstrate competence? Reliability? Integrity? Empathy? ANd then what type of information do we need to disclose to align with that intention.
Then, if we’re going to share information, it needs to have the “3 Cs of transparency”: meaning that it is consistent, credible, and comprehensive. Then ask, if we share this information, how will it drive accountability, and for whom, and finally, what changes do we expect to see by sharing this information, and how will we measure the change?
This lesson alone is worth the price of the book for an executive team. It will save you untold hours of missteps if you follow its advice well. Making information available comes at a cost, it’s not free to create systems to share information. So use it in an intentional, targeted way to address specific trust issues.
On to the final lesson, the role of trust in creating change and innovation. All changes, including creative, innovative changes for a business, involve doing something we haven’t done before. Botsman calls this a “trust leap” where we are in a place that’s known and we’re going to jump to a place that’s unknown. We have to jump OVER the uncertainty to see what things are like over there.
Depending on how confident our relationship is with that unknown, we are more or less likely to be willing to take that leap. And, depending on the risk we attribute to the unknown future will determine how high and how far we’re willing to leap.
As we try to lead change or innovation, it’s unhelpful to just push and encourage people to make that leap. Instead, it’s useful to consider what the barriers might be, what Botsman calls trust barriers, then see how we might help reduce those barriers. The first barrier is simply a low trust state in general. If people have had their trust broken recently or frequently, their overall willingness to trust may be low. A low trust state will be a barrier to trust leaps, regardless of the inherent risk or benefits of the leap. So before considering a change, it’s useful to start with considering the people involved and what their current trust states might be in general, with you, and in the situation you’re considering a change.
Next, people may be unwilling to take trust leaps when they are more worried about negative results than any possible benefits. We love using the 5 Layers of resistance, that we described in episode 35, which describes different angles on negative results. Working through the layers before asking someone to take a leap can reduce or eliminate this barrier.
The next potential barrier is that we may assume everyone else understands why the change is important, but, due to the curse of knowledge, we may be wrong. It’s important to be really clear, visionary, and purposeful in every conversation about change. Describe the future you hope for. Describe how it will be great for whoever will benefit, and especially “What’s In It For Them” referring to the person you hope will take the trust leap.
The final barrier is a lack of control. People need a sense of choice if they’re going to leap, otherwise they’re just being pushed off the proverbial cliff. How can you give them more control in the situation? What can they own? How can you prepare them to own it well? See our episode 67 and 165 for our advice on how to prepare people for this.
Helping remove trust barriers frees people to take trust leaps that create change and innovation. And while I’ve described these from the lens of a manager trying to lead change or innovation, each of these work for an individual who wants to unlock the same. You can look at all four trust barriers and do some journaling or talk to a trusted friend or advisor to get some coaching on how to improve your overall trust state, work through the potential negative results and find ways to test their likelihood, get clearer on the benefits you’re hoping for, and find ways to increase your control of the situation, usually through small slice, calculated experiments.
Those are the five lessons from Rachel Botsman’s audiobook How to Trust and Be Trusted. Which of the five lessons seems particularly important to you right now? What’s one action you’ll take to improve trust in your life? I hope you’ll take that action. In a world where trust seems to be dissolving all too rapidly, we can all chip away at that trend by being more trustworthy ourselves, and working on ways to safely give our trust to others.
