Life Without Trust

So let me ask you a question. When you drive through your neighborhood, and you look around, are there more front porches or are there more privacy fences? 

The answer is probably going to be privacy fences, and if there are front porches, they're ornamental and you can't even get a rocking chair on 'em any more. 

The reason I asked that question is because that is one of many indicators out there that we are suffering from an epic erosion of trust in our society today. The isolationist mindset, the transactional mindset, it's all a farce. Relevant human beings are the ones who can connect with other human beings...and there are a lot of challenges in front of us as rooftop leaders to do that.

Gallup took a poll in 1972 that asked a question, "Do you trust your neighbor?" One third of Americans at that time said, "I don't trust my neighbor". Just last November, Gallup asked the same question again. Now, two-thirds of Americans say they don't trust their neighbor. 77% percent of Americans say the country is divided. There are epic erosions of trust at the institutional level. Where we used to trust the media at an 80-some percent level in the 70's, it's now down to 20-some percent. Same with politics. Hell, Congress is down in the single digits. Corporate leadership, we trust them down in the teens when they were once in the eighties.

Think about the commercials when some of us were kids - we trusted a lot of these corporations. That's gone. What about community trust? The Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club, the Elks club, the Rotary Club, all of those memberships are dwindling. Community trust, the ability to trust your neighbor, is going down.

We had a similar erosion of trust in the early 1900s and it was bottom-up leaders, using community-based empowerment, that restored trust. I saw this happen in some of the most trust-depleted villages on the planet in southern and eastern Afghanistan by brave Special Ops who went in and helped people believe in themselves at a community level. 

Trust is social capital and that capital can be restored. But to do that, you've got to be serious about your leadership. I like to use this metaphor - think of trust as the tectonic plates of the earth shifting under your feet. You don't know the earthquake is on you until it's happened, but those plates have been shifting for a long time. That's what's going on with this lack of trust in our society. It's kind of like an aquifer, these rivers that you can't see, and they're carving through the bedrock, like a water cannon. And at some point, a sinkhole will open up. We worry about it when we see it open up, but the reality is that's been going on for a long time. Trust is the same way.

Look around your business. Look around your community. Look around your family, look around where you are in your life and ask yourself, "where are the trust gaps?" Where are they?

There are two types of trust, there's bonding trust and bridging trust. Bonding trust is the oldest form of trust in the world. It's where ingroups trust each other. Your family, your kin, your clan, your tribe, it's that group of people that you feel safest with. That's the old form of trust that goes all the way back to the primal days. You trust the people who are in your circle, who you gather resources with, and that's it. Everybody else is the enemy. That's a low-trust, high-conflict kind of thing.

Here in the United States, and in some modern parts of the world, we have bridging trust, where you can bridge beyond your ingroup and trust people outside of your in-group. That's what makes America such an amazing place. At least...it used to. That bridging trust is now eroding and what's happening? Trust doesn't just go away. Nature hates a vacuum. We're becoming primal again. America and the West is on a path back to tribal behavior in many ways. 

Turn on the news for 30 seconds and look at the kind of trust that's out there. Its ingroup and out-group trust bumping up against each other. That bridging trust that unified us with a primary identity as Americans - it's plummeting.

That doesn't mean we can't get it back. That doesn't mean you can't create bridging trust as a culture in your company, your organization, or your nonprofit. In fact, you should. But it takes effort. The leaders who can read trust gaps around them and then bridge those trust gaps and create better human connections, are the most relevant leaders on the planet. They're the men and women who are going to dominate the 21st century. 

The 'leaders' who stand around with their hands on their hips and say, "Because I said so. That's why".... they're going the way of the dinosaur. The trust gaps are just going to suck them in like a Florida sinkhole.

Learn to read the trust gaps, learn to recognize that we have a lower baseline of trust. Embrace those Rooftop Leadership skills that allow us to bridge beyond those trust gaps and make the connections we need to make and be the most relevant person in the room.

Learning to recognize those trust gaps in your organization, learning to recognize those trust gaps between you and your client or your prospect, learning how you bridge beyond it and make connections while the rest of your competitors are suffering and failing, is what's going to set you apart as a Rooftop Leader.