Don’t Leave Trust To Chance: A Reality Check For CEOs And Organizational Leaders

Navigating trust in a complex workplace landscape

If you were to ask most business leaders whether they have a ‘trust issue’, the majority would answer no. However, global research by Ernst and Young found that less than half of full-time workers say they have ‘a great deal of trust’ in their employers, their bosses, and their work colleagues.

Put simply, at least half of us are finding it hard to trust anyone – at least in the workplace.

I know you already get the importance of trust in your life, and it’s a bit of a truism to say ‘trust matters’. However, a recent report by PWC found innovation and agility are core drivers of any organization’s success, but that trust will be the key driver of success over the next decade. The report stated: "A lack of trust is directly damaging for economic growth ... and for a company's success, holding back investments, entrepreneurship and innovation."

That ‘Feeling’ We Get

When we trust, it means we have this belief, feeling, knowledge, awareness, or maybe even hope, that a person (or in some cases, a material object) can be relied on, truthful, and have the ability to do whatever it is we expect and rely upon them to do.
 

Based on the teaching of Aristotle who suggested our actions and our behaviors are our morals shown in conduct, the Intentional Steps to Trust model is a practical resource for organizational leaders to share and take action on with their teams.

The premise of the model is this: People WILL get your truth! Over time your intentions, promises, actions and results will either promote you as trustworthy or expose you as not.

Intention – The First Step in the Intentional Steps to Trust

Whatever the relationship, whether it’s your relationship with your customers, colleagues, or other stakeholders, the first step is to start with intention by applying the simple yet powerful process of writing out an Applied Positive Intention Statement – a statement that clearly identifies what you want FOR someone and not just focusing on what you want from them.

When you’re clear about it, this clarity of having a positive intention to make life better for someone will become evident to the other person – that you have their best interests as your guiding motivation.

If you’re not clear about your intentions, then your actions and behaviors are left to chance – this is when unintentional actions and behaviors can lead to unintentional results that negatively impact others … trust and relationships are put at risk.

Promises – The Second Step in the Intentional Steps to Trust

Once you are clear on your intentions, they guide you to what you can and can’t promise other people. While it is important to know what you can promise others, it is just as important to know and articulate what you cannot promise; otherwise, the other person could make the mistake of assuming you have promised something.

This is all about being able to set and manage the expectations of everyone involved.

Actions – The Third Step in the Intentional Steps to Trust

This leads us naturally to determine more intentionally, mindfully, and more clearly, what actions we will need to do to ‘live up to’ our promises and to deliver on our intentions for others.

You’ve no doubt heard the old saying, ‘Actions speak louder than words’, and Aristotle reminds us, “Our actions and behaviors are our morals shown in conduct”.

Everything we say and do sends loud and clear messages to others about our trustworthiness … People WILL get your truth … over time, your intentions, promises, actions, and results will either promote you as trustworthy or expose you as not.

Results – The Fourth Step in the Intentional Steps to Trust

When we do good for others and intentionally make life better for them in some way, it is good for us too … we gain a sense of meaning, purpose, and achievement. This is key to employee engagement and motivation to achieve results that matter.

It is important to come to terms with the reality that not everything will always lead to the results we intended. Stuff gets in the way sometimes … other people can let us down, we can let ourselves down, and other unexpected or unplanned disruptions can just get in the way and upset our intended plans.

In M. Scott Peck’s classic book, The Road Less Traveled, he begins with “Life is difficult”. He follows with … “Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters”.

The not-so-easy part of that, of course, is ‘accepting’ that life is not easy. Because life isn’t easy, we experience many ‘little’ examples of how our intentional actions, based on our intentional promises, just don’t achieve our intentional results.

What I hope you can take from this discussion on the Intentional Steps to Trust is that it’s a process and guide to being more intentional about your choices and actions, and when you are, you’re more likely to achieve intentional results.

Even when your intentional results aren’t achieved because of some stuff that just gets in the way, at least you know that the negative outcome was not intentional.

This is important, and it leads to why trust is the final step in the Intentional Steps to Trust process.

Trust – The Final Step in the Intentional Steps to Trust

When your intentional results have in some way improved the lives of others in your professional and personal relationships, you’ve earned their trust.

However, when the results of your actions negatively impact other people, and those results were not intentional, you can still take the final step in the Intentional Steps to Trust and earn trust, because the other person realizes it was always your intention to positively impact their life, despite this negative outcome.

The key here, of course, is what you do next to maintain your trustworthiness. You see when you unintentionally make a mistake, and it is clear it wasn’t your intention to do so, you haven’t breached trust – you’re still trustworthy, you just made a mistake.

In these situations, it is not about rebuilding trust – it is reconfirming your trustworthiness through your genuine apology, a restatement of your intentions to make life better for the other person, to be clear about what you can and can’t promise, to be transparent in what you’re going to do to remedy the situation, and to keep the other person updated on your progress.

This is different from intentional professional and personal breaches of trust, based on intentional choices and acts of deception.

Rebuilding trust after an intentional act of deception, carried out with the hope of not being caught is difficult, if not impossible.

Author Bio

David Penglase, author of Living In The Light Of Day: How To Avoid The ‘Success Trap,’ Strive To Be At Your Best And Live A More Meaningful, Flourishing, And Prosperous Life, is a behavioral scientist, author and award-winning professional conference keynote speaker. Visit www.davidpenglase.com