Practical trust

Is gifted, not demanded

Trust is not much talked about but, when it is, it is recognised as a vital component in any healthy, efficient and productive personal or working relationship. As such, we are all enjoined to trust. Yet trust has the characteristics of an ideal, the ability to do so being at the level of a virtue: often it seems trust either exists in a relationship or not, that it exists whole or not at all.

Yet, ultimately, to trust is to make a choice.

Trust is a quality that one party chooses to gift to their relationship with another party or parties.

It is a species of faith, in that it need not demand proof that being trusting is warranted, so long as there is an absence of disproof.

Thus, trust is not blind, but neither is it demanding of, nor able to be demanded by the other party or parties to the relationship. But it is divisible. Trust can be built, one layer at a time.

A mature approach – a practical approach – to building trust is summarised in a phrase from a simpler time, in the Cold War arms control principle of ‘trust, but verify’.

With cynical optimism

Entering into mature trust relationships is helped by a balanced combination of cynicism and optimism.

The cynic recognises that people are flawed. Whether because of accident, error, misfortune, ego, perfidy, or ‘friction’ – the sum of the mental and physical pressures on people working under stress – any trust relationship will be tested. But most of the time the root cause will be innocent or ignorant, rather than deliberate. A mature trusting relationship acts on this recognition by tolerating the innocent and using the ignorant as a learning opportunity. Rather than undermining the trust relationship, many of the incidences and consequences of human frailty are opportunities to strengthen it.

Excessive cynicism, on the other hand, inhibits and even destroys trust. In my experience, it tends to play out in varying degrees along three dimensions:

·      The wary victim: they know people will fail them so are looking for the proof that justifies them in holding back. In withdrawing, they provide the disproof to the other party that being trusting is warranted. 

·      The scared bully: they see any departure from what is required as a personal affront and a danger to their prestige, so they micro-manage and harangue. In failing to give the people around them autonomy and scope, they show these people that they do not trust them. While these people may still choose to trust them, the road to a high performing relationship is blocked.

·      The selfish abuser: they are in it for themselves and use the trust of others as a consumable resource to burn in their upward rise. These people give no trust and prove conclusively that they cannot be trusted. Worse still, they may teach the people they abuse to fear to trust again.

In contrast, the optimist, recognises that most people are striving for autonomy, purpose and recognition, and doing so within a social context. As such, their ‘Will to Power’ is really a ‘Will to Purpose’, and their natural impulse will be to contribute to efforts to give effect to that purpose. As such, where and to the extent that purposes align, it should be intrinsically safer to trust and easier to build on the initial foundation.

Excessive optimism pays insufficient heed to commonality of purpose at the beginning of the relationship, and to verification – being open to seeing and acting on evidence that trust has been broken, not merely bruised – over the course of the relationship. The poor judgement of the excessive optimist is prone to undermine themselves and to over-commit their agency.

The excessive optimist enables the scared bully and is the prey of choice for the selfish abuser. Their representation of a series of failed trust relationships discredits the whole notion of trust, reinforcing the fears of the wary victim through their example of the dangers of blind trust.

Similar to excessive cynicism, there seem to be flavours to excessive, or blind, optimism:

·      The lonely heart: the person who wants to belong, because being part of the group is expected to make them relevant, and treats the giving of trust as table-stakes instead of an investment to be nurtured.

·      The bulletproof monk: the person who has no concept of the harm that could befall them through miss-placed trust, or that this harm could happen to them.

·      The hopeful gambler: the person who knows trusting comes with risks, and has felt the sting of misplaced trust, but is sure that this time it will be different.

With flexibility and integrity

While cynical optimism is the pragmatic foundation for giving trust and offering the opportunity for reciprocated trust, it says nothing about the attractiveness of the offer to the other party. Flexibility and integrity address this dimension.

Building trust is a higher order form of negotiation. As trust grows, the contractual scaffolding that supports and slows and weighs down a more classical negotiation can be pared away. This requires a shared language and a shared history of benefit, which in turn requires that each party is able to hear themselves in that ‘shared’ language and see achievements they value among the ‘shared’ benefits.

Flexibility is about being able shift, reorient or defer elements of what you want, think, or want to do, to make room for some proportion of what the other party wants, thinks, or wants to do. Too little flexibility is a path to behaving liked a scared bully or selfish abuser: the relationship will degenerate into something transactional. Too much flexibility and the path is towards behaving like the excessive optimist: the relationship will be given greater value than the purpose and will be ineffectual.

Integrity is about being trustworthy: keeping your word; stewarding the interests of your partners and subordinates; doing the right thing even when no one is looking or you have the power to do otherwise. The person who demonstrates integrity enables their agency to trust them with its interests. They give their partners and subordinates confidence that any disagreement is for a good reason and, therefore, that that reason is something to be co-managed. They give their partners and agency confidence that any commitment they have made will be kept.

And personal maturity  

The mature behaviours that make reciprocated trust more likely are learnable behaviours.

Arguably, they are harder to learn than many because they depend, not on mastering some extreme level of performance, but on resisting the temptations of extremism and achieving some measure of balance: cynicism balanced by optimism; flexibility tempered by integrity. Similarly, these behaviours depend on being able to keep a bigger picture in mind, remembering the goal that energy needs to be directed towards achieving, and the value to be realised by achieving it. In particular, the future rewards of persisting in a carefully maintained trust relationship need to be contrasted with the petty – but instant – returns of defending pierced pride, venting over frustrated ambitions, deferring hard conversations, or just ‘doing it yourself so it gets done right’.

In the end, practical trust, mature trusting relationships, require mature trustworthy adults.