Trust at Work

Dr. D and Dr. C discuss the importance of trust in the workplace, highlighting different approaches to cultivating and maintaining it. They explore the relationship between trust and integrity, accountability, and cultural norms. They also discuss challenges such as trust erosion and the need for leaders to model vulnerable behavior to build trust.

Transcript

Dr. C.: 0:00

Welcome to leadership dissected, where we examine the details of leadership strategy, workplace culture and decision making through the lens of behavioral science. I'm Dr. C

Dr. D.: 0:09

and I'm dr d. With our decades of leadership experience and PhDs in business psychology, we dig into the latest research trends and practical strategies to help you survive at work without losing your mind. Today, we're

Dr. C.: 0:21

gonna discuss important topic or workplace trust. How do we cultivate trust? How do we earn it? How do we maintain it? We'll also explore what happens when we lose trust, and when we should try to recover it, when we should cut ties and walk away. So let's cut into the topic. Let's talk about trust. Let's

Dr. D.: 0:36

talk about trust. Dr C, we have very different styles when it comes to building trust, I trust people immediately until they give me a reason not to. And you're the opposite. Yeah,

Dr. C.: 0:49

definitely the opposite. I am very much. You need to earn that trust. You need to show me that you can be trusted. People start at zero with me, and they have to earn that trust. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't earn it quickly, but coming into a conversation, coming into a relationship of any type, you you have to earn it. Has to grow. You have to foster that trust. Yeah.

Dr. D.: 1:10

I mean, the thing I know about you as well is that once that trust is earned, you are very forgiving when somebody violates that trust. I mean, somebody has to go pretty far before you're willing to not forgive them depending on the severity of the slight. Once you've built that trust, you are incredibly committed to that relationship, and that trust, once it's been earned, gets pretty consistent. Yeah, I think it's really

Dr. C.: 1:34

about level of commitment. And if I'm allowing you to have that level of trust with me, I have to give it to you 100% after that, you've proven yourself to be worthy of that trust. So that means I'm going to give you a little bit more space, a little bit more grace when it comes to violating that trust. Although there are thresholds, there are some non negotiables there. I think back to being a leader, and with the teams I manage, they got to earn that trust, and I try to build that trust up as quick as possible, because I need to trust my team members to do the tests that are assigned. I also trust my team members not to take advantage of that. It's really a give or take in it, and there's an ebbs and flows to the way I view

Dr. D.: 2:10

trust. I give trust really easily, particularly in leadership roles where I'm working with other people. I figure, hey, if you're going to start here, I'm going to trust you 100% immediately from the start, it's up to you to maintain that level of trust with me. And I know everybody's along a spectrum, but you might be surprised at how many people you work with, or people that you meet have a completely different point of view on how they build trust. Is it earned right from the start, or do you have to build it up from zero? Either way, for me, if somebody violates that trust, it's almost never coming back. It's very difficult for me to trust again, because I'm like, I gave you a gift at the beginning, and you squandered that gift. So why should I invest any more time in that relationship? Whereas I think your style or the earn the trust, it seems like a little bit more forgiving after the fact, because they've had to really demonstrate and really build up that level of trust. Again, not to say that a significant level of trust violation isn't going to change that point of view, that everybody has a threshold. It feels like it very different in both gaining and in losing trust. If I have a team member who significantly violates my trust, it's very, very difficult for them to earn it back. It's, I wouldn't say, impossible, but it is very, very difficult, and they have to try extra hard. It's probably how hard somebody has to try, or maybe even harder than when they're first meeting you, and have to build up that level of trust, because if they violate that, you've invested very little time, you can just walk away, whereas I have given a gift of trust that has been lost. I don't want to invest more time in recovering that, so I might as well just cut you loose. And

Dr. C.: 3:47

I think a lot of that comes from how we define trust. Every person is going to have a different definition of trust. We look at the Webster dictionary definition of trust, shared reliance on character, ability, strength or truth of someone or something. Now I prefer a different definition. It's a willingness to open oneself to risk by engaging in relationships with another person. And I think that's the crux of a lot of challenges with trust, is there's risk involved, and building this relationships essentially giving up a little bit of your power, because that's what a component of trust is. It's you're allowing someone else to have a semblance of influence or control over you. So when we think about trust, there's also that risk. And as leaders in the workplace, we have to give up a lot of power. We have to take a lot of risk, even joining a new organization, forming a new team. Risk associated with that manifests on how we trust people. It's

Dr. D.: 4:38

interesting because you think about our different leadership styles, our different trust gathering styles. But I can imagine an employee starting on their the end of their first month. Think about the end of the first month where you're just getting comfortable. Everybody's getting into the new rhythm of having a new person there, and a person who is starting as an employee is a type of person who trusts. Immediately, but the boss, or maybe the culture of the team, is filled with people who you have to earn that trust. How long is that employee going to feel out of place until they've developed that trust? And especially if that expectation of the trust style is set up first, and the employee doesn't know they're just gonna feel, perhaps, like they're not liked, or that everything's being scrutinized, or whatever imaginary thought processes that might be going through their head. And conversely, in a style like mine, where it's trust everybody immediately, give them 100% an employee who starts who doesn't trust immediately, this doesn't feel right. I don't know these people yet. Why are they treating me this way? What's the real story here? An employee like that might end up feeling skeptical or, again, equally out of place. And I wonder how many leaders and how many people have thought down and said, What is your trust side? What is your definition of trust? And what qualities of trust are important to me, so that when I'm working with a new employee, or I'm starting in a new job, I can articulate, hey, this is how I view the world from a trust perspective. It takes me a little while to warm up to somebody, and for me, reliability is very important in building trust. So if you say you're going to be somewhere and you don't show up, that's going to violate my trust, and I'm going to have a hard time trusting you, or if you constantly change meeting times on me at the last minute, I'm going to feel like you can't be trusted. And so that's going to erode trust. Having that inventory in your mind, first knowing your style, and second, knowing what those characteristics are to build or erode trust, and being able to communicate that really effectively could really help people build relationships in a way that's more meaningful than just jumping in and going with the flow and seeing how it falls out without that level of insight. I

Dr. C.: 6:49

think one of the areas that we as psychologists can really start to get into is, let's dissect trust. What are components that make up trust? I see three real big dimensions of trust that are pretty uniform across relationships. The first is integrity, the belief that the person is fair and just I think for a lot of organizations, a lot of leaders, we look at Integrity is this person doing the right thing. Second dimension is dependability. We live in a world that's interdependent with each other, especially in the workplace, you're dependent on someone else to finish a test, to complete your test. So it's really that belief that the person is going to do what they say they're going to do. And I think the third mention is confidence. That's really confidence in yourself, that you can trust the person, that you can create this space for the person who actually do what they're going to do. And I think for leaders and team members, the dependability and confidence is the two areas where people struggle. That's when you start getting leaders who become micromanagers because they don't have the confidence in their team member that they're dependable, or even in just regular team dynamics, that confidence and willing to take that risk, to say this person's going to actually follow through what they said. That's really fundamental for any team is finding the space, fighting and creating the environment for people to really build trust. And I've seen many teams just collapse, fail, or have a revolving door where people are coming in and out constantly because of trust. You know, recently I did a workshop, and with this group, I was having this conversation around trust and having a conversation about why people leave organizations. Majority of time, people don't leave organizations because work that they're doing. Generally, people are gonna get into a field unless it's like entry, and you're really exploring, people who are in a profession get into that profession because they enjoy it. Man, they don't like the people around them. They don't trust the people around them. And that becomes really challenging. So as leaders, we have to create that environment. We have to create that environment where people can set this foundation of trust now. Dr D, how can we set a foundation of trust? In your opinion, what do teams need to do?

Dr. D.: 8:47

I think it's a couple of things. I think one it is understanding each individual on that team, how you build trust and make that an active conversation, how people approach risk. You've brought up risk many times in this conversation so far. Dr, C and I think people's risk tolerance, since a lot of my research is based on how people perceive risk and uncertainty, I know I have a very high risk tolerance. I know you have a lower risk tolerance than I do. And so the fact that risk plays into our decision making process of how we're going to trust that doesn't surprise me when I think about the things that I need for somebody to build or erode trust, it's doing things that, as you said, the reliability for me is very important, showing up doing what you say you're going to do. That integrity component is table stakes. That's just the bare minimum. If somebody's going to look me in the eye and flat out lie to me about something that we both know is untrue or can be easily proven untrue. That's really hard to continue to build trust. You have to have that level of integrity, but the reliability is there. I'm talking about reliability showing up, being there when you're needed for the really important things. There are inadvertent slights or violations of trust that happen at work all the time. Cornerstone of the culture was integrity and accountability, and if it was anybody outside of the sales team that were operating with those same principles and same behaviors, if it was an accountant, they would have been cut from the organization long ago. So trust is not just performance based. We're going to trust you as long as you're trustworthy or you bring value to the organization, it has to be we're going to trust you because you live up to our values and you perform well performance without abiding by the culture that are necessary for team building in an organization. If you don't want that kind of behavior in your organization, you have to be just as willing to cut high performers as you are, to cut anybody else for violating those cultural norms. And if trust is a cultural norm within your organization, then you have to do everything that you can to protect it. That's

Dr. C.: 15:51

a great example of how organizations actually foster distrust, and it's important we have trust really a strong foundation for a successful team. But fortunately, some organizations create this environment where they're fostering distrust. One of the dimensions of distrust is credibility. People doing things ethically. Are people being held accountable? They do respect laws? Do they respect the policies, or are they just words on a sheet that creates a really tough environment for people to be connected with the other side is also malevolence. To your point, is there a willingness to allow people to lie or deceive team members in order to increase profits, in order to make more than that they're given. We've definitely had a shift for a lot of organizations in understanding that we tolerate this behavior. We're going to road at the step. And I love this quote, Lincoln on the organizational psychologist's name, our culture or an organization for a team, is the worst behavior that we're willing to tolerate. When a team doesn't have trust, they'll tolerate any behavior, because most of the time, people have one foot out the door. We're going to talk about some of the more common phrases that we hear right now. We have this quiet quitter mentality, but we have to really take a pause as leaders looking at the workplace, what are we doing to create this environment where we can't trust each other, where we feel we can have this integrity, this accountability to ourselves, accountability to our team members. I think this is something we haven't talked about yet. We talk about risks in relation to trust, but to that point, there's also a level of vulnerability you have to have when you have healthy trust. And I think there's opportunities as leaders, a model to behavior, as I tell my team members, and I've told them in the past, I only know what I know. I didn't take the class on mind reading, so I don't know what's on your mind. You got to tell them. You got to foster this environment of open communication. This takes a lot of risk. When you build the right trust, it makes it easier, this willingness to say, I'm wrong,

Dr. D.: 17:35

you're absolutely right. Vulnerability is of real importance in organizations, because so many decisions are made at an organizational level because of trust. You brought up quiet quitting, which is an organizationally leadership centric view of employees who shouldn't be trusted because they're not behaving in a way that is productive to the organization. It's viewed as a trust violation. That's why it's talked about in negative terms from an employee perspective. There's also whisper promotions, where people get a lot more work and a lot more responsibility, without the title bump and without the pay bump, a leader leaves. Roles get combined. A VP role is combined with the director role that the other person's already in, and they end up taking on a lot more responsibility while the organization wins out. That also erodes trust. It's good for the organization. So organizations don't talk about whisper promotions as much, but employees certainly do from an organizational perspective. There's also what I'll call the dark side of trust in behavioral science, there's this idea of in group and out group bias, but also there's something called familiarity bias, and this is when you trust somebody, you give them a lot more forgiveness than when you first know them. I worked in an organization that had a very loud and very aggressive and a very abrasive leader over a part of the organization, the things that he would say in meetings, talking about politics, talking about gender, having a very definite worldview that was not necessarily consistent or sensitive to other people in the room. He would just say things, and when it was brought up to his boss, they would say, That's just who they are. They've been here for years. We're not going to change that behavior. That's just who they are, and while that person's performance was good, I don't know, just forgiving it, because they had a long relationship and a lot of familiarity, they were basically on the in group for that group, and they were given a lot of forgiveness. And people on the outside would go, how can that person talk that way? Or how can they say something like that, because a person who's only been in the organization for a month, if they were talking like that in a meeting surrounded by senior leaders, they would be quickly escorted out the door. But because this person had been here for 20 years, they've accepted that behavior. Why was that behavior acceptable? And that would cause a lot of mistrust from employees, other people who would accept.

Dr. C.: 25:00

When it comes to work, a lot of what we do is a sum of our labor, not just one person doing one component. I think the neutral mindset only goes so far. As more complex to work gets, the more we start digging into what is the system of work? What are all the levers that are being pulled? Think that neutral mindset is not sustainable for an organization as lo and behold, we have personalities have their wants, people have their needs, people have their perspectives, and it's important that we see people's perspectives, we see their wants, their motivations, because then we can make this neutrality that you're proposing to make it more effective by finding those components, those levers to pull it actually is going to increase productivity, increase people's sentiment the workplace, I'll be honest, I don't want to work in a place that's neutral. Yeah, it just doesn't sound appealing.

Dr. D.: 25:45

I agree, and I've heard leaders, and the reason I bring this up is one, I think it's a good mental exercise. Would you really want to work in a place like that? I've heard leaders say this is a social contract. They're here to do work. We're here to pay them. We don't need to get along. They just need to do their job and let me do mine. And that really is a mentality of some leaders. I think about this idea of work from home and hybrid and the sense of mistrust that drives a lot of senior leaders to say, I can't see what they're doing, therefore I don't know what they're doing, therefore they can't be trusted, therefore we have to get them back into the office because we're missing out on something, whereas an employee who's working from home says, I'm working hard over here. I'm doing everything and more than I did while I was in the environment of the office only, I'm surrounded by people that I really like to have relationships with, and I'm not forced through circumstance to have relationships with. So that dichotomy of trust is leading leaders to make these wholesale changes, eroding engagement. The engagement of an organization is feeling connected to your work and feeling connected to the people around you in a shared purpose, and that comes from trust.

Dr. C.: 26:54

And I think part of what creates that environment leaders not knowing what their team members are actually doing, and they're getting questioned by their leadership. Where are we on this project? Well, I can't, as a leader, run over to your desk and go take a peek or corner them and say, Where are we? I think in that example, it's more so they're interweaving of trust and power dynamics. It's semblance of control trust that also is a scale of how much control we're willing to give another individual, how much control we're willing to take from another individual. We talked about earlier, micromanaging. That's not trusting persons who are taking away all their control of autonomy and making decisions the right way, and that creates that environment where people can't do what they need to do depending on how we view trust, how much trust we're willing to give, how much trust we're willing to take. As leaders, you have to understand that there's an ebb and flow to it, and people return to the office just a semblance of control, and a lot of time it's because someone has questioned that leader's knowledge or has questioned that person's trust, so in turn, questioning your team's trust. Now, yeah, I

Dr. D.: 27:54

will stand behind this thought process. If you show me a leader that can't manage a team that's working from home, I will show you the same leader is one that can't manage the team while they're in an office together. I 100% agree with that. If you show me a team member who can't be trusted working from home, I will show you a trust a team member that can't be trusted working in the office. If a leader can't trust their team to work remotely, then those team members shouldn't be on your team. If they aren't trustworthy enough to be productive and do their job and live up to their social contract of I'm earning my paycheck and I'm going to deliver the work, then they shouldn't be on the team. And if a manager can't manage their team effectively to get the best out of their team while they're working remote, you don't need that manager on your team any longer. But many leaders won't admit to that because they're the manager that doesn't know how to manage a team remotely, and they might have to face the hard truth, they might be the manager that doesn't know how to manage a team in house as well. Good communication is agnostic to location, and that reminds

Dr. C.: 28:54

me of the movie Office Space, you got four different managers coming to the same person saying, if they read the memo, do you have my TPS report? I don't a 2k already passed, but I think that's an interesting conversation. What makes good leadership in house, remotely? Yeah,

Dr. D.: 29:09

one more thought exercise before we wrap. Dr C, you are building a new organization, or you're consulting with an organization, and they want to build into their culture a high level of trust. What guidance do you give them so that they really build that in and there's accountability around ensuring that core part of their culture trust is something that is sustainable, believable and trusted in their culture. So

Dr. C.: 29:32

there's a couple components that I would say would be the starting point. First of all, you have to be clear on why you exist as an organization, why the team exists, especially with a startup growth organization, it's making sure there's alignment with the teams in terms of, what are we here for? Once you have that alignment, it's important for leaders within the organization to actually have trust with each other. Is a lot of times, team members are going to look at leadership or cues on How should I behave with this team? How should I behave with this other team when we don't. That trust with the leadership team and early foundation, you end up having a lot of silos interdependent with each other, and you end up failing as an organization, failing as a team, or you're constantly trying to fix relationships, so building a strong foundation with the relationship, I think where a lot of organizations miss the target is not providing expertise and support the middle and frontline managers and supervisors on how to foster strong teams. Reality is they're the ones doing the work. They're the ones are going to have the revolving door of team members leaving, and now we have these increased costs when it comes to recruitment and retention sentiment, where there's no trust, trust in the product, trust in the system, trust an organization. It becomes reflective in our interactions with our stakeholders. So I think a big Miss for a lot of organizations is they don't actually create the space and have these real conversations about what is trust, and how do we foster trust as a team in the organization? How do we foster trust with each other? So having that additional perspective, having expertise come in to actually facilitate these conversations, so many times I see as a senior leader should be a participant in a conversation, facilitate the conversation. Yeah, consciously or unconsciously, they're stirring it the way they want it to be seen. So for an organization, there has to be attention to fostering trust and building a foundation of trust. For teams, I agree

Dr. D.: 31:15

100% and we've touched on a lot of really cool topics, like psychological safety culture, building, you just talked about how to de bias meetings, coaching emerging leaders in an organization. I think I'll just say this was a lot of fun. Absolutely, I think we've got interesting, relevant topics that you and I have a pretty good perspective on, and I'm really looking forward to continuing the conversation next time. Absolutely.

Dr. C.: 31:40

Dr D, excited, excited to have a conversation. All right. Well,

Dr. D.: 31:43

I think we're done here. Let's close it up. I'm dr d and I'm

Dr. C.: 31:47

Dr C, and we'll keep dissecting leadership. So your time at work sucks a little less.

Dr. D.: 31:51

That's all we can ever hope for, right, right? All right, until next time you.