4 Helpful Laws of Trust to Develop
A simple way forward to stronger, more beneficial relationships
Trust is invaluable in human relationships, whether professionally or personally. It’s often straightforward to understand yet can be complex to grasp at times too. Learning about it on a deeper level is time well spent.
In 5 laws for leaders who want to build trust, an article at Big Think, the writer (who was not named) shared the checkpoints that can impressively help us. I will briefly go over four of the five laws as I feel they are the ones that most work on a personal level yet still are important in a business context.
Big Think interviewed Joel Peterson, the former chairman at JetBlue Airways, who learned how trust makes big differences in organizations and for leaders and the people that they oversee and serve. If you’re interested, there are videos of him on YouTube teaching a class at Stanford that I saw some years ago. Highly recommended.
I’m going to share four laws that I picked out for you and this brief.
Invest in respect: “High-trust leaders show respect in every interaction. They consider and appreciate low-level employees, new hires, competitors, suppliers, lenders and shareholders,” Peterson said.
It’s not that difficult to do if you fully recognize the value, don’t rationalize doing differently and commit to it. This doesn’t mean, of course, that you won’t ever be annoyed, frustrated, angry or boil over emotionally on the inside. It does mean that you choose sufficient poise, assertiveness and perseverance over combativeness.
That will earn and keep respect and trust from others.
Communicate lavishly: “High-trust leaders keep the flow of information immediate, current and transparent,” Peterson said. “They communicate bad news and good news; and before, during and after events.”
If you communicate too little and hide what your team would like to know or needs to know, you’re going to pay in diminished trust or eventually, ruin it. Be forthright and as the first law says, be respectful in doing it.
“As Peterson’s architecture example shows us, obscuring information leads to distrust as each party feels the other to be altering the arrangement to benefit them,” Big Think wrote. “Even if it’s a simple miscommunication or someone accidentally not being informed, you risk the other party feeling cheated.”
Communicate responsibly and be respected, be trusted.
Strive for win-win negotiations: “High-trust leaders think of negotiations as conversations. Then solve for fairness.”
Negotiation doesn’t have to a zero-sum fight to the death. It doesn’t have to exploit other people for us to be successful. Fair is a relative term. You and I may have different definitions of what is “fair” yet people know when we’ve done right by them.
Better to focus on interest-based bargaining, a fancy term for researching why people want what they want and determining a way to satisfy that “why” in a way that allows you and I to get what we need for our “why” too. Ethical negotiating is a win for trust.
“If we listen with an ear toward understanding, we can negotiate terms where both parties become richer from the experience,” Big Think wrote.
“Even if a negotiation doesn’t pan out, if both parties communicate with transparency, they can still lay the foundation of a trustworthy relationship to be drawn from later.”
Listen, learn and improve: “High-trust leaders show humility,” Peterson said. “They accept that we are all vulnerable.”
While there are leaders who choose humility with themselves and show it in words and actions with their people, not everyone does.
What such people don’t realize: you can be confident and humble at the same time. You can listen respectfully, learn respectfully and improve (with humility) and still be respected yourself and thus, be considered trustworthy and receive it, in abundance.
Trust makes our work and lives far easier and more enjoyable.
Eroded, badly damaged or destroyed trust makes human interactions much more difficult, stressful, displeasing, infuriating or a failure.
Knowing better how to build, nurture, protect and repair it and taking those steps is going to almost always going to strengthen our professional and personal well-being.
Michael Toebe is a reputation and communications specialist at Reputation Intelligence and writes the Reputation Intelligence newsletter here on Substack and on LinkedIn. He helps individuals and organizations proactively and responsively with matters of trust, stakeholder relationships and reputation.
He has been a reporter for newspapers and radio, hosted a radio talk show, written for online business magazines, been a media source, helped people work through disputes, conflicts and crises and assisted clients with communications to further build, protect, restore and reconstruct reputation. LinkedIn profile.
Great points.
There's another trust-destroying 'behaviour' I've seen in the worst leaders I've encountered; it's connected with the laws relating to Respect and Communication but it also involves honesty and consistency.
I'm talking about those leaders/managers who have very different 'versions' of situations, which they communicate/share with certain sections or levels of staff.
As well as creating confusion, this type of behaviour, when discovered, destroys trust in the organisation and its credibility as well as showing the leader in his/her true colours.