Building a platform of Trust, assumptions...

In my previous post I referred to building a platform of trust, and you are probably thinking, well that's obvious.  If we can't trust each other and the people in our organisations, how do achieve our organisational goals? You are absolutely right, yet, very few organisations actually get this right. and actually operate from a default position of trust.

Let's look at a couple of (wrongful) assumptions we tend to make:

As employers:

• During our recruitment process, while we deem trustworthiness as a default and critical characteristic of a candidate, we tend to assess this characteristic based on their experience and level of skill.  Let's be honest, how many times have you recruited a person because they "wowed" you in the interview, their CV was impressive, and you never backed it up with proper reference checks? 
• We deem ourselves to be trustworthy to our staff because we pay them a salary?  We think to ourselves "how can they not trust me, I'm paying them a salary?" I call this trustworthiness by virtue of payment. 
• And then one of my personal favourites, as the CEO of the business, carrying all of the responsibility of the business on my shoulders, "I emanate the very essence of trust by virtue of my role and responsibility.  I wouldn't have had this role if I wasn't trustworthy."  Yet, somewhere in the corner of the office, someone does not trust you at all, because you failed to recognise them when doing shopping at the mall over the weekend.  Trustworthiness by virtue of role and responsibility.

Now let's flip the coin to the other side, as employees:

• We deem ourselves trustworthy as we are meeting our goals and KPI's.  We are skilled in our jobs and have worked hard to get where we are.  Dare I say it, we deserve trust!  Trustworthiness by virtue of achievement.  This is a big one!
• Earning in the top 90 percentile of people in my job profile I can obviously be trusted.  The flip-side of trustworthiness by virtue of payment. 
• As a specialist in my field of expertise I am trustworthy as I have studied and are a recognised though-leader.  Trustworthiness by virtue of knowledge.  Knowledge is power right?

I'm sure I can think of 100's more examples but for the sake of brevity will stop here, I think you get the point.   I also haven't even touched on the examples of trust between teams  and peers.  

You see, all of these examples looks at trust from a workplace perspective, but we tend to miss the human element in it all.   We tend to assume people are trustworthy or even assume we are regarded as trustworthy while we don't take steps to ensure that those assumptions are correct.  Now we all know the definition of assumption...yet it seems like we make a lot of assumptions about having a platform of trust in our organisation as stated in the opening paragraph of this post.

I recently read a remarkable book which touches on the lack of trust as one of the challenges in a team context in business.  I strongly recommend "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni if you want to learn more about it.

Next post on trust and a lack of information...a short story