Decoding Trust: The Trust Equation

The foundation for all relationships is TRUST. When we employ an individual, we trust that they have the skills and growth mindset to navigate through their work. The employee in turn trusts that they can depend on their team and manager for professional growth. Since this is a two-way process, how do we learn to trust each other and ourselves?

Credibility:

This can be increased by improving our credentials, experience, knowledge, asking informed questions, being transparent about what we know and don’t, and limiting passing of judgement to areas where we lack knowledge.

Reliability:

Do we do what we said we would do? Are we consistent with the quality we said we would achieve? There are two roots to increase reliability. Either we increase our delivery to ensure we always do things, or we adjust our commitment by being better at saying “no”, so that we only commit to things that we will deliver on.

Intimacy:

Intimacy has to do with how secure we feel in entrusting someone with tasks as well as personal information, particularly about our doubts and insecurities. We can increase the level of intimacy that we have with others by opening up about who we are.

Self-Orientation:

Refers to how much we align to the interests of others. Highly self oriented people are more interested in themselves than the interests of others. In order to reduce self-orientation, you need to change your level of self-interest by goal and objective alignment to the team/ customer, mentoring and altruism.

Most people tend to rely on Credibility and Reliability to build trusting relationships, however, Intimacy and Self-Orientation are the most impactful factors when wanting to improve trustworthiness.

Reflection- Rate how you see yourself in each factor, on a scale of 1 to 5. Notice in which areas you are skewed away from the ideal, and incorporate the above tips to re-align yourself to the Trust Equation.

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