Trust: Building Relationships Versus Claiming Rights to Them

Last week I mentioned “karmic panhandlers,” those people who hope to benefit from large concepts of trust and respect without proving themselves worthy of such investment.

A few years ago I was approached by a mother from my kid's school. She said she'd worked for years in marketing and, as they were newly relocated, asked if she could have lunch with me about freelance work prospects here in town. Long story short, what began as a professionally extended invitation boiled down to this:

Me:             “So have you tried cold-calling prospects here?”

She:             “No.”

Me:             “Have you tried interviewing with the big companies in town?”

She:             (shifting uncomfortably) “No.”

Me:             “What is it you'd like me to help you with?”

She:             “I just thought, maybe, if you had some accounts you needed help with...or, um, clients you

wanted to offload....”

I can't recall the last time—before or since—that someone had the gall or naivete to ask me to just hand over some clients. A more professional response from her would’ve been along the lines of, “I was wondering if we could consider partnering up to go after opportunities we might not otherwise get on our own.” It would imply a willingness to work, to share risks and skills-building, and to take the time to build a collaboration.

Instead, when I demurred, she got into some remarks about how, as professional working moms, we automatically belonged to a network of mutual respect and support (ie, you owe me your help). She struck me as wrongheaded—far more aware of the standards to which she held other people than herself. And I didn’t understand the resistance to cold calling. As awful as cold calling seems, it is actually the initiation of new relationships. It seems less horrible when you regard it that way.

Trust is no different than loyalty or credibility—it has to be built and earned. It may have a stated value (“Seriously, you can trust me”) but the real proof is in how each individual takes action. They have to demonstrate they know how to help themselves. They have to know how to initiate, versus relying on others to do that for them. (And it helps to know how to follow up, because how do you learn to trust someone who never follows up with you, or does so in a spotty way?)

Trust and Psychological Safety

Last year Linda Bishop (www.thoughtransformation.com) and I presented a webinar series on relationship-building strategies. Figuring prominently in this was the notion of trust—the sense of psychological safety essential to fostering strong, durable bonds, and highly productive collaborations.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be discussing trust.

Trust is an instinctual response. Policemen often refer to a gut-level reaction that sends up red flags when they sense—they just know—a suspect is lying. Something just doesn’t feel right (“hinky”). A cop’s professional skepticism and wariness would be a finely tuned radar; unlike the rest of us, they’re trained to not trust so readily.

No wonder: according to strategy + business, “…People start trusting someone before they even realize it. To some degree, at least, the placing of trust is not the result of a deliberate assessment, the researchers say, but of subconscious cues.”

Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff used this quite brazenly: by dropping famous names, he created an illusion of trustworthiness for his investors. (“Hey, if Spielberg’s investing with him, he must be good!”)

But what makes trust real and solid, and when is it bogus? What happens when trust is broken? How do you restore it? How can we tell if someone’s trustworthy or not?

In my work life, I’ve worked with people who were trustworthy to varying degrees. I’ve worked hard to make myself worthy of my clients’ trust and confidence. So I know this to be true: without trust, the world becomes a dark place, the simplest actions fraught with tension. With trust, you can get just about everything done, and have fun too, because relationships come out stronger at the end of every collaboration.