Understanding Trust

During my teens I was reserved, worrying that people would make fun of me if I let them get too close. There were a lot of hormones, pimples and angst. The experience of being a teenager sucked. It wasn’t until university that I learnt how to trust people, and that was largely due to joining a martial arts club.

Practicing Shorinji Kempo, was how I managed to get over my sucky teenage years. Kempo is based on pair work. You attack me, then I attack you. First you make yourself vulnerable for me to hit you, then I make myself vulnerable for you to hit me. It was scary, I didn’t want to get hurt. However, over time I started trusting that my training partners wouldn’t take advantage.

What I learnt was that most people are basically decent human beings.

Once I started trusting people, inside and outside of the dojo, my life improved significantly. By showing vulnerability and letting people know the real me, people reciprocated and allowed me to get to know them too.

I learnt that trust is a key ingredient for developing meaningful relationships with friends, partners and colleagues.

However, trust can feel like an abstract concept – and when feeling uneasy about a relationship it can be difficult to reason about it.

Is there a way to go beyond intuition?

One attempt at a framework for reasoning about trust, or more correctly trustworthiness, is Charles Green’s trust equation. It breaks the concept down into four components:

Credibility: how knowledgeable, and believable, someone is.
Reliability: how consistently someone does what they say they are going to do.
Intimacy: how openly you can talk to someone and feel secure that the information you share will not be misused.
Self-Orientation: how much focus a person places on themself over focusing others.

The first three components add to trustworthiness and the last one takes away from it.

When I first learnt about the trust equation I immediately liked it. It helped me understand why I didn’t trust my manager at the time. It also gave me a framework to audit myself, to reflect on areas where I could improve my own trustworthiness.

I hope you find the trust equation useful too. Stay awesome! 😃

Best wishes,
Tjelvar

PS – Below are links to two recent posts of mine that feature the element of trust.

The value of understanding management styles even if you do not want to manage people. Your boss’ management style has a direct impact on your day-to-day life. Developing a basic appreciation of management styles can help you understand this impact. In this context trust is an essential component in moving from a management style where you discuss your work with your manager, to one where your manager empowers you.

How to create a culture of paranoia, cynicism and self-interest. Cooperation and teamwork are emergent properties of people being able to trust each other. In “Leaders Eat Last” Simon Sinek describes this phenomenon using the term “Circle of Trust”. Sinek argues that weak leaders are those that only invite a select few into their circle, leaving others outside it, resulting in a culture of “paranoia, cynicism and self-interest”.

PPS – Feedback on these newsletters is really valuable to me. Please feel free to let me know what you’ve liked, and what could be improved by replying to this email.