186. You Can’t Demand Trust: What High-Trust Workplaces Do Differently

SPEAKER_00 0:33

So if you think I can help, contact me via LinkedIn. I am here to help you to find a decent ways to change the workplace. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to the Ways to Change the Workplace podcast. And I'm Prinasha, your host. Today I want to talk to you about something very important. The trust paradox. Why why building trust can actually destroy it. So I want to take a bit of a different lens, okay? Today? I want to come from it from a direction that you likely haven't considered before. Because when organizations talk about trust, they usually talk about it as something that people need to create, to build trust, to earn trust, to restore trust, to create a high trust culture, to trust your team, to trust your leader. And all of that sounds perfectly reasonable. But what if we have been looking at trust from the wrong direction? What if the most interesting question is not how do we people get people to trust each other? What if the better question is, have we created a workplace where trusting another person is actually a sensible thing to do? Hello? That's a very different question. And it takes us somewhere much more interesting in my humble opinion. Because perhaps trust is not something that you can manufacture through team building activities, value statements, leadership speeches or workshops. Perhaps trust is an outcome. I think trust is often evidence in the way that I trust people in my personal life anyway. It is what appears when people repeatedly discover that they're taking a small interpersonal risk at work does not come back to punish them. And if that is true, then one of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is trying to increase trust without changing the conditions that make mistrust or distrust rational. So today let's explore what I call the trust paradox. The harder the organization tries to demand trust, the more suspicious people can become. And strangely enough, one of the best ways to create high trust in a workplace may be to make it safer for people not to trust immediately. It's the tiny risks that we take every single day. So think about your working day. You probably take dozens of small interpersonal risks without even noticing them. You tell a colleague, I'm not sure. That is a risk. You say, I think we're heading in the wrong direction. Another potential risk. You tell your manager, I don't think I can get all of this done by Friday. Another potential risk. You ask somebody for help. You admit that you misunderstood something. You challenge an idea in a meeting. You give somebody information before you absolutely have to. You delegate something important. You tell a colleague that you're worried. You say that you really think rather than what you think the room wants to hear. You say what you think rather than what the room wants to hear. Every one of these interactions requires a tiny amount of trust. And we are constantly, often subconsciously, calculating the likely consequences. If I admit I do not know something, will people think I'm incompetent? If I disagree with my manager, will I be known as b being a difficult person? If I delegate this, will I get blamed if it goes wrong? If I tell something what is really happening, will they use that information against me? If I raise a problem early, will I be thanked for spotting or blamed for it for bringing the bad news? This is where I think the conversation about trust at works becomes far more useful. Because employees are not necessarily sitting around thinking, do I trust my organization? They're gathering evidence every frigging day. And then they are adjusting their behavior accordingly. So trust is a prediction, in my opinion, and likely if you look at your own behavior patterns, it is true. So here's the novel idea that I want us to explore. Trust is simply not a feeling, it is a prediction. When I trust you, I am making a prediction about what you will do when I make myself vulnerable to your actions. I tell you something confidential because I predict that you'll handle it carefully. I admit a mistake because I predict you will respond constructively. I give you autonomy because I predict you will use it responsibly. I disagree with you because I predict that our relationship can survive disagreement. And this means that trust is always connected to uncertainty as well. Think about your personal life. That's completely true. If I know exactly what you are going to do, I don't need trust. Imagine a workplace where absolutely everything is monitored. Sorry if that's your workplace. Every minute is recorded, every decision requires approval, every action follows a rigid procedure, every conversation is documented, every employee is measured continuously. Technically, that organization may be able to reduce uncertainty, but it has not necessarily increased trust. It may have done the opposite. It has replaced trust with control. And this creates a fascinating workplace paradox, in my opinion. Organizations often introduce controls because the trust is low. But those controls can send employees the message we do not trust you. Employees respond by becoming more cautious. Managers see that caution and think people are not taking enough ownership. I've seen this, I've heard this. So they introduce more monitoring and around we go. Mistrust creates control. Control signals mistrust. Mistrust grows. It's this vicious cycle. It's a surveillance trap. This has become particularly interesting as workplaces have becoming become more technically measurable. We can measure activity, we can measure login times, response times, attention, location, productivity, output, engagement, performance indicators. Dashboards can tell us extraordinary things nowadays. And measurement itself, measurement itself is not the enemy. Good information can make workplaces fairer, clearer, and far more effective. And we freaking need that. The problem begins when measurement quietly becomes a substitute for a relationship. Because if an organization says we trust our people completely, but then the organization or the design systems based on the assumption that nobody will do the right thing unless they are constantly watched, employees tend to believe that the system is the truth rather than we trust our employees completely. And perhaps they should mistrust you. Because the culture is not what the organization says it believes. Culture is what systems assume about human beings. That sentence is worth sitting with. Culture is what your systems, what you've enabled, okay, w assume about human beings? Does your expense system assume that everybody is trying to steal? Does your leave process assume that employees are exaggerating? Does your approval process assume that people cannot make sensible decisions? Does your performance system assume that employees only work hard when someone is watching? Does your meeting culture assume that information must be controlled? Or do your system say, you are capable, you have judgment, we expect responsibility, and if something goes wrong, we will deal with the exception rather than treating everybody as a potential offender. That is where trust becomes visible. Not in, you know, your town hall sessions where you talk about values. Yeah. It's in the architecture of your everyday work. But blind trust is not the answer. So there's an important complication here. I'm not arguing that workplaces just simply trust everybody with everything. No, that's not trust. That's just naivety. Trust does not require the absence of accountability. In fact, I think the strongest cultures combine high trust with high accountability. People know what is expected. Decisions have consequences. Poor behavior is addressed. Responsibilities are clear. But people are given room to exercise judgment with those boundaries. Think of it this way: low trust and high control says, I need to watch you because I assume you might fail me. Blind trust says, do whatever you want and I hope that it works out. Healthy trust says, I am willing to accept some uncertainty because I have reasonable confidence in you. And we both understand that what happens if something goes wrong. The final part is really important because perhaps trust is not really tested when everything goes well. It is tested when something goes wrong. The real test of trust is the aftermath. Imagine two organizations. In both organizations, someone makes the same genuine mistake. In the first workplace, everybody immediately asks, who did this? There are private conversations. People distance themselves from the decision. Emails are searched. Somebody produces the message proving that they warned everyone three weeks ago. I told you so. The employee who made the mistake becomes cautious. Their colleagues notice. The lesson spreads quickly. Do not expose yourself. Do not experiment. Do not be the person whose name is attached to a risky decision. Now, imagine a second workplace with a different scenario. The mistake is still taken seriously. Nobody pretends it doesn't matter. But the first question is what happened? What information did we have at the time? What assumptions turned out to be wrong? What part of the system allowed this to happen? What do we need to change? And yes, if somebody acted recklessly or dishonestly, that still needs to be addressed. Trust doesn't mean removing consequences, but the organization distinguishes between a bad outcome and a bad intent. That distinction is enormous because employees are constantly observing what happens to other people. I would say that trust is socially contagious, but so is mistrust. You don't tend to personally experience punishment for speaking up. You only need to watch it happen to someone else and suddenly you know the rule. That workplace has a memory. This brings me to another overlooked aspect of trust. Organizations have memories. A new leader might arrive and say, My door is always open. But employees might remember the previous leader whose open door turned out to be a trap. A manager may say, Please challenge me. But the team remembers what happened to the last person who did this. An organization may launch a campaign encouraging employees to speak honestly. But people remember the restructure, the redundancies that happened, the confidential information that somehow became public. The survey that was supposed to be anonymous. The promise that disappeared when budgets became tight. Leaders can become frustrated by this. I know it, I have heard them, I support them. They think, but this was years ago, Prina. Yeah, maybe it was. But trust operates through memory. And I've said this before. I feel that humans have memories like elephants, especially when we've been hard done by. You can't announce that trust has been restored. People decide that for themselves. And they decide it through evidence, through the repeated repeated evidence. It's usually boring evidence, a promise that has been made, a promise that has been kept, a difficult conversation which has been handled fairly. A bad news received without retaliation. A mistake treated proportionately. A confidential conversation remaining confidential again and again and again. This is why dramatic trust building initiatives sometimes can disappoint. Trust tends to grow through hundreds of small moments rather than one big intervention. The trust battery. I like to think of this as a trust battery. Every interaction either adds a little charge or drains some away. Your manager says that they'll get back to you on Tuesday, Tuesday arrives. Nothing. That's a tiny drain. A colleague tells you privately that they're struggling. You listen and keep the convers the conversation confidential. This is a tiny charge. Leadership says that employee feedback matters, but nobody ever hears what happened to the feedback. That's a drain. Someone raises a concern in a meeting and the leader says, That's useful, tell me more. That's a good charge. None of these moments feel enormous, but eventually the battery reaches a point where the behavior changes. And this explains something really important. When trust is high, people often look more courageous. They speak, they experiment, they question. They admit mistakes. They share incomplete ideas, they make decisions. When trust is low, the same people can look disengaged, political, or just passive. But perhaps they're not suddenly less capable, perhaps they're just responding intelligently to the environment that they're in. That's an uncomfortable thought for leaders, I know. Because sometimes what we call an employee attitude problem is actually an employee adapting to the city situation that they're in. Mistrust can actually be intelligent. This might be the most provocative idea in this episode. Mistrust is not always a cultural failure from a workplace perspective. Sometimes mistrust is evidence that employees have learned the culture accurately. Think about that. We often describe low trust as employees being cynical, negative, resistant, difficult. But suppose that employee has never watched commitments disappear. Suppose they have seen people punished for honesty. Suppose information is routinely withheld. Suppose decisions are made behind closed doors or explained afterwards with language that nobody even understands or believes. Is that mistrust irrational? I don't think so. Or have they become very good at reading the room, reading the environment? If we treat mistrust as a personality problem, we may not try to fix the person. If we treat distrust as information, we start examining the system. And that leads to a much more powerful leadership question. Instead of asking, why don't my people trust me, ask, what are they seeing that makes mistrust useful? That question really takes courage, but it can tell you far more than another engagement initiative ever will. So you have the right to verify. There is another way that we can rethink trust. We often imagine trust and verification as opposites. If you trusted me, you wouldn't need to check. I'm not sure that that is true. Healthy trust can include verification. In fact, allowing people to verify information may even increase trust. So imagine a leader saying, You don't need to take my word for it. Here is how the decision was made, here's the information that we used, here's what we still don't know. That is really fucking powerful. Transparency gives people the ability to form their own judgment. And paradoxically, when people are allowed to question, examine, and verify, they may become more willing to trust as well. Forced trust is fragile, informed trust is much stronger. This matters particularly during organizational change. Leaders sometimes worry that admitting uncertainty will reduce confidence. So they overstate certainty. They say, we know exactly where we're going, we have a clear plan, everything is under control. Then the reality changes, the plan changes, and people think, hmm. Were you wrong before or were you just lying to us? Were you were you just not telling us the truth? So there is another option. Say, here is what we know, here is what we believe, and here is what we do not yet know, and here is when we expect to know more. That really is not weak leadership, that is calibrated trust. You are giving people an accurate map rather than pretending that the fog does not exist. So we have to make trust reversible as well. So here's a final idea that I want to share with you that deserves much more attention. If you want people to trust more, make trust less dangerous. In other words, make decisions reversible where possible and where practical, you know? People hesitate to delegate when one mistake could be catastrophic. They hesitate to experiment when experiments are difficult to undo. They hesitate to speak honestly when one badly received comment could damage their career. But when people know that decision can be reviewed, corrected, reversed, they can take more of an interpersonal risk. So rather than asking how do we persuade managers to let go, we could ask, how do we make letting go safer? So instead of saying trust your team to make the decision, say let your team make the decision up to this point. Then we will review it in two weeks. Instead of giving people the complete autonomy, try, define the boundaries clearly, and then give people the freedom to work inside them. This is a trust safety net. And safety nets do not necessarily make people less brave, but often they actually make bravery possible. So five experiments for your workplace. So what could you actually do with all of this? Okay? Here are five experiments. First, audit your workplace for unnecessary proof. Where are people constantly being asked to prove that they are working, prove that they are sick, prove that they've made a sensible decision, or prove that they can be trusted. Some of that may be necessary, but ask whether all of it is. Second, watch what happens to bad news. The next time someone brings you a problem, pay attention to your first response. If people learn that delivering bad news is painful, eventually you're gonna stop receiving bad news. The problems will still exist, but your people are not gonna tell you about them. You're just gonna hear about them after shit has hit the fan. Third, separate mistakes from misconduct, please. A genuine error, a poor judgment call and deliberate dishonesty are not the same thing. If your organization responds to all three in the same way, people hide all three. Fourth, make uncertainty speakable. Leaders can say, I don't know. Managers can say that may be wrong. Teams can say we need more information. Information when us when uncertainty can be acknowledged, people no longer have to manufacture false confidence. And fifth, ask, what would make mistrust a rationale here? This might be the most useful question of all. Ask your team, what happens in this workplace that makes people cautious about trusting each other? And then listen, don't explain, don't defend, don't correct their interpretation. Just listen for evidence that they are using. Because that evidence is your real trust strategy. So a few questions that people often ask about workplace trust is what I want to go into now. So there's some few common questions that I've heard as well. So, question number one: Can you trust someone without liking someone? Absolutely so. Trust isn't a friendship. You might particularly not like a colleague or a manager or a leader, but you may trust them enormously because they are predictable, competent, honest, and consistent. In fact, using trust with likability can create serious problems at work. I have seen many of them. The second question I often get asked is should leaders trust everyone equally? Not necessarily. Trust can be specific. I might trust someone completely with that confidential information, but not yet trust their judgment on a technical decision, for example. That doesn't make the relationship unhealthy. It just makes it the trust precise. I often get asked what destroys trust the fastest. Often it is not one dramatic betrayal. It is inconsistency in my opinion. Saying one thing and then rewarding another. Asking for honesty and then punishing uncomfortable answers. Promising autonomy and then interfering with every fucking decision. Telling people that well-being matters, why rewarding overwork? Inconsistency is what forces people to work out which version of the organization is actually real. Another question I get asked often is what builds trust the fastest? I'd be cautious about the word fast. Trust doesn't always need acceleration. It needs evidence, it needs consistency, fairness, competence, and appropriate transparency. And the experience of taking a reasonable interpersonal risk and discovering what and why it was safe to do so. The question to take away. So I want to leave you with the one question, not do people trust each other in my workplace. Ask this instead. What does our workplace make it rational for people to do? Does it make people does it make it rational to tell the truth? To ask for help, to admit a mistake, to challenge authority, to share information, to give someone autonomy, to say, I don't know, to experiment, to disagree, or to trust. Because people adapt to systems remarkably quickly. If caution is rewarded, then people are gonna become cautious. If silence is safer, guess what? Your people are gonna become silent. If control is everywhere, your people are just gonna wait to be controlled. But when people repeatedly discover that honesty is safe, responsibility is rewarded, mistakes are treated intelligently, and commitments mean something, something else begins to happen. Trust emerges. Not because you demanded it, not because you put it in your values, and not because everyone attended a trust-building workshop. It emerges because people have enough evidence to make different predictions about each other. And perhaps that's the real paradox of trust at work. You cannot force people to trust, but you can create a workplace in which mistrust gradually becomes unnecessary. And that might be one of the most powerful ways to change the workplace. Let me know what you thought of this episode. Because trust is rarely built in any grand gestures, it is built in what happens next. I thank you for tuning into this episode about trust. If you want to hear more about trust, then listen to the previous episode to this with my brilliant friend Petra Zing on the return of investment on all things trust. Over an hour for now, and I will see you in the next episode. All details about this episode are in the show notes. If you like this episode, I'd like you to take a moment and think about at least two people who might enjoy it. And please share the episode details with them too. Also, don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and on Instagram. See you there too.