5 Reasons Why It’s Difficult to Build Trust in Business
Trust is a big, ongoing topic for organizations. The questions typically revolve around how to create it, sustain it, and what breaks it. Trust, like most things in life, is about the small everyday moments and less about the big, one-time, crazy events. The director who rolls her eyes when other people are speaking can undermine trust just as much as the CFO who is caught ripping off the company.
There’s no perfect equation for gaining and sustaining trust. It’s a constant effort that takes courage, vulnerability, and ironically, extending trust to other people before expecting to gain their trust.
Trust has direction — it moves out from you and back to you from others. This is why it requires courage and vulnerability. You must extend trust — meaning, you take the risk first — to really gain it. How you model trust will shape how trustworthy other people perceive you to be.
That said, below are 5 ways trust gets broken and what’s really going on.
- Competing values and no clear way to discuss it.
You may value punctuality but have someone on your leadership team who is always running late. You know that he has young kids at home and drops them off in the morning, but it still annoys you. You attribute it to being a lack of commitment on his part and he attributes your annoyance to you being judgmental and lacking understanding.
Behavior is driven in part by need and part by values. Your team member may need to drop his kids off at school at a specific time and value being a father who is part of his kids’ daily lives. You may need to start meetings on time because you have back-to-back meetings all day and value being a leader who is reliably punctual. These needs and values don’t naturally conflict until the behaviors show up and negatively impact perceptions.
What’s really the problem? Assumptions are being made, never questioned, and conflict is being avoided. When it comes to conflict, people lean much farther on the side of avoidance. Issues go unaddressed when people don’t know how to start conversations the right way. It drives resentment and lack of understanding. Is the problem another person’s behavior or that you don’t know how to bring it up without it feeling confrontational?
2. Fear of appearing to not know what you’re talking about.
This fear plagues organizations. It’s an underlying anxiety for adults, and one most people feel they’re supposed to hide if anyone is going to trust them to do their jobs.
What’s really the problem? That people aren’t being explicitly invited and then encouraged to share new ideas. Or that invitation comes after people’s ideas have been mercilessly sliced and diced by management. When someone fears they’ll be criticized or ignored when they share an idea, it’s difficult to convince them that sharing will be safe in the future. Once a person has been criticized or ignored, it’s difficult to convince them to take the risk again. Have you openly and consistently invited other people to share their suggestions and shared appreciation for their contributions, even when the ideas may have been wacky?
3. Making off-handed comments that offend others and never making it right.
Everyone slips up and says something that gets someone else’s hackles up. And sometimes you realize it at the time because you saw the look on her face change and other times you have no idea.
What is really the problem? You haven’t risked vulnerability in pursuit of great communication. Imagine if you told your team members, “I want to always be getting better at communication. Tell me a time when I’ve done it well and a time when I’ve done it badly.” And when they answered, no matter how uncomfortable you felt, you not only didn’t defend or explain your choices, you thanked them and gave their input serious consideration. What might happen next?
4. Not inviting everyone to speak during a meeting
Some people are naturally more quiet in meetings, either because they need time to process new ideas, they’re introverted and larger groups make them want to throw up, or they don’t feel safe using their voices. The employee who doesn’t speak up faces potential loss of morale because no matter how shy she may feel, the use of her voice is essential to her ability to contribute. The team loses out on the ideas that are kept sealed behind her lips. And people notice when one or two people never speak up.
What is really the problem? A space for everyone to contribute hasn’t been created. When you’re in charge of a meeting, make sure everyone has a chance to contribute. Even if you think the idea was off-base, pause for a second, and thank them for sharing. Acknowledgement goes a long way in encouraging people to speak up. When a leader consistently encourages everyone to share, it helps increase the emotional intelligence of the team. Is there someone you need to encourage to speak up more often?
5. Overlooking and not talking about the anxieties that people are having
Let’s face it, no matter how many meditation apps, yoga classes, or deep breathing exercises we do, anxiety is a part of our Western business world. The many varying versions of the underlying question “what if” drives all sorts of behaviors — aggressiveness, disengagement, gossip, and rumors.
What’s really the problem? People have questions that aren’t being addressed. Sometimes it’s an employee who got fired and you can’t talk about why, but it’s clearly sent a ripple of fear through the rest of the team. If you say nothing, does that calm the anxious question, “Am I going to be next”? Nope. If you overshare what the employee did to get fired, does that help? Maybe in the immediate moment, but it puts you in the position of being the person who can’t be trusted with sensitive information.
So, how do you address it without being cagey or oversharing? Address the fear itself, “When he was fired, there was good cause, none of which I’ll share just like I wouldn’t share your personal information. I know it’s created fear and worry that someone else is about to be next.” Pause here and let the other person speak. Wait longer than you think you should and let her speak longer than you want to. Anxiety sometimes just needs enough oxygen to dissipate.
In sales, it’s important for the salesperson to bring up the customer’s potential objections first. It keeps the salesperson from ending up in the defensive position. The same can be true of addressing anxiety. If you, the leader, bring up the anxieties that employees are feeling, it shows that you’re tuned in and willing to proactively address it. What anxieties do your employees have that need to be addressed?
When it comes to trust, we use the word as though everyone has the same definition. But we don’t. Different behaviors break trust for different people. However, there are ways to build trust and they all rely on a leader who is self-aware, proactive, and paying attention to the conversations going on in their employees’ minds.
