On Trust
Or, the trust-builder's guide to corporate life
One of the most interesting studies we did at Cisco during my time there asked the question: “What do we follow in a leader?”
We wanted to understand whether there was one set of leader characteristics that were simply superior to any others, or if there was something else going on. So we asked hundreds of people to describe their leader using any five words that came to mind, and then separately measured how confident these people felt in the future of the company (as that’s one thing we knew we wanted our leaders to move the needle on). And then, as you might expect, we looked at the relationships between the words people had chosen and the degree of confidence they felt.
Did people who found their leaders to be “visionary” feel more confident in the future? No.
Did people who thought their leaders were “empathetic” feel more confident? Nope.
Did people who thought their leaders were “inspiring” feel more confident? No, not that, either.
Nor any of the other words, for that matter. There were no particular words associated with the leaders who inspired more confidence—no particular leader traits, that is, that made the team members feel better about whatever was coming next.
What did make a difference, though, was the precision and the resolution with which people perceived their leaders. Those who tended to describe a given leader in a similar way—who chose similar words to those chosen by other team members—had more confidence. And those leaders who were described using fewer flavors of words—who had four or five themes, that is, not eight or nine—tended to inspire more confidence. Leaders who were behaving in such a way that more and more people had a clear idea—a precise, high resolution idea—of what they were all about created a greater feeling of confidence in their organizations, irrespective of the actual words chosen.
If you can be a high-res, technicolor, 3D version of yourself, you’ll help your followers feel better about whatever is hiding around the corner. The better they know you (or feel they do) the more predictable you’ll be; and the more predictable you are, the greater their confidence in how you’ll act in any particular situation will be.
Which is fascinating, and helps explain an important mechanism of leadership, and gives us a very handy piece of leadership advice: be yourself, vividly. But it also sheds light on the topic of trust.
To generalize only a little, trust is usually considered to be a characteristic of some other person or thing in the present. I trust (present tense) you (other person). She (other person) is (present tense) trustworthy.
Today I’m going to argue that there’s a more useful way to think about trust, particularly if we’re interested in building it. We can more helpfully think of trust not as a present-tense, other-focused thing, but as a characteristic of ourselves in relation to the future. In this, it is conceptually very closely related to the confidence-in-the-future quality that we discovered at Cisco.
That seems abstruse, so we’ll unpack it in just a moment. But let’s observe along the way that trust is an increasingly precious commodity at the moment. Trust in our national institutions has been falling for decades. AI and deepfakes are eroding our confidence in what’s real. Leaders lament the waning trust in their organizations from employees. The polarization paralyzing many parts of the world is a failure of trust in others, in a sense. We are living through a crisis of trust.
Being able to build it intelligently, therefore, is a precious ability. And we’ll get there faster if we understand what it is.
This is where the Cisco study comes in. Why should we expect to find any relationship between the clarity of people’s perceptions of their leader now, and their confidence in the future to come? A pretty good hypothesis would be this: that confidence is a prediction about the future; that the leader is a big part of shaping that future; and that therefore the better the data people feel they have about their leader—the more clearly they feel they see who he or she is—the better they feel about their predictions of the future. Confidence is a prediction about the future, and one that rests on good information now, in the present.
And so, of course, is trust.
To trust in someone, or something, is to feel more confident that they will behave a particular way in the future—that they will, say, do what they said they would do. To distrust someone is to feel less confident that this will come about. Trust is a way of expressing our personal level of confidence in our predictions about the future.
And it follows that if we want to increase others’ trust in us, we need to decide which predictions matter, and figure out how to give others more confidence in them—in the main by giving them better data on which to base their predictions.
Some examples will help.
You can build trust in your organization by sharing with your people what the leadership team is wrestling with, discussing, debating, or weighing—not just what you’ve decided. Tell people why you’re thinking about this and not something else, and what implications you’re seeing. You don’t have to disclose decisions until they’re actually made and until you’re ready to share, but there is huge value in narrating the present, so that people have better information on which to base their predictions of what will happen next.
(My rule of thumb for leadership teams, by the way, is to share twice the amount of information you’d normally feel comfortable putting out there. Give it a go.)
You can build trust in your personal leadership by speaking real words—words that will connect to reality the same way tomorrow as they do today, instead of biz-speak-jargon-words that don’t really connect to reality at all. Because your language is comprehensible, people have more information to inform their sense of what’s next than if you hide behind bogosity and cheer-speak.
You can build trust in your department or function by being yourself, vividly. If you have a sense of humor, don’t hide it. If you are super analytical, lead with that. If you’re decisive, foreground that. If you like weighing all the options, let people see you doing that. Wherever your character and traits take you, show everyone this in as much detail and transparency as you can muster. They will see that you’re not trying to be something you aren’t; and they will have better data about you now, on which to base their predictions of what will happen next.
You can build trust in any situation by following through—by doing what you said you were going to do. People remember when you don’t, and that information goes into their future predictions, too. And when you do follow through, connect the dots for people. Take them back to the prior discussion, revisit the decisions and commitments, and tell them how these have now made their way into reality. If stuff changed along the way, explain that as well. Narrate the journey.
And whatever you do, don’t ever say “trust me.” Because your audience doesn’t know why you’d say that, so now they have information which leads them to think their predictions are worse. “Trust me” draws attention to an information deficit.
This helps explain why the ideas of authenticity and vulnerability get so much attention, too—they’re different hands on the same elephant, but the elephant is trust. Authenticity isn’t that you say everything that comes into your head without filter, it’s that the people around you sense that what you choose to say emanates from who you are, and so improves the quality of their predictions about what you’d say in a similar situation in the future. Vulnerability works the same way—it gets us closer to who you are, which is interesting not because you’re now bringing your whole self to work or some other platitude, but because we feel our guess of which way you’re heading in the future is better. It’s all, always, about trust.
There are countless other ways to build trust—and to destroy it—but the thread connecting them all is this: trust is built by giving people any sort of information that makes them feel more confident in their predictions of what will happen next.
Because trust is a feeling about the future, built in the present.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.
Cheers to ending biz-speak-jargon and moving to clear and direct communications. Words have meanings for a reason.
What a brilliant description of authenticity, Ashley: "what you choose to say emanates from who you are." It comes from a place of being what you call "vividly" yourself. A poetic variation of the (perhaps slightly frightening) "radically human" we sometimes use in vertical leader development.
We all intuitively know that this makes for powerful, more engaged workplaces. And yet, people are hesitant to embrace the risk and reap the many benefits.