In this episode, Jenni shares research into how to rebuild trust. She discusses how a lack of trust leads to chaos, what factors need to be considered and offers some insights from reading about trust and leadership. Jenni shares her advice to help you take action and go from chaos to calm, including the six elements of rebuilding trust.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything by Stephen M. R. Covey
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
Blog: How long does it take to rebuild trust in the workplace?
Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Fear and Trust S1 E5
Blog: Trust and narrowing the say-do gap
Blog: Psychological safety and trust are not the same thing
Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Building trust and credibility S2 E7
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about how to rebuild trust. Now, I’ve been researching and reading more about trust because a few months ago, a client asked me, how do you rebuild trust? And I didn’t know the answer to that question. It wasn’t something I’d been asked before. And it led me to more reading, more research, and importantly, to asking my community.
So in this episode, I’m going to share how a lack of trust can lead to chaos. I’m also going to share some insights I’ve gathered from asking the question to my LinkedIn community and what I’ve learned from reading more about trust and leadership to help you think about how you might do things differently or where you might have some challenges around trust, how you might want to explore different ways of approaching that to rebuild it.
How does a lack of trust lead to chaos?
Well, if trust is confidence and distrust is suspicion, we can see how there is then chaos. Because if there isn’t trust and you spend your time second guessing someone’s intentions or their actions or their behaviours or words or all of those things, it’s then going to be a bit more chaotic because you’re constantly second guessing them. You’re constantly in a sort of state of suspicion, if you like.
And if that happens one to one, so one person to another person, there’s a problem. But if it happens en masse, so maybe employees are suspicious of the whole leadership team, we’ve got an even bigger problem.
So, that’s where the chaos can come in. And alongside this, the trust equation where trust impacts speed and cost is also where chaos comes in.
Now, there is an equation from Stephen Covey that looks at how trust and speed and cost are all connected. So it’s about looking at how when trust is low, speed is low and cost goes up. So it’s an equation that sort of has an impact on each of those component parts of trust, speed and cost. So trust is down, speed goes down, cost goes up. When trust goes up, speed goes up and costs go down. So you can see how that leads to chaos.
If we don’t have very much trust, things aren’t going to move very quickly and they’re going to be more costly. And the chaos inside organisations will come from all of the challenges that will happen because of distrust. People second guessing each other,
People trying to outmanoeuvre other people. It just becomes a horrible political atmosphere and a culture of an organisation that I think nobody really would enjoy working in.
What do we need to consider when it comes to rebuilding trust?
Now, what was really interesting to me was when I asked this question to my LinkedIn community, people responded with the assumption that the trust was broken from a leader to their employees, when the situation I was actually discussing with the client was more of a peer-to-peer issue.
Now, this assumption was interesting because I talk a lot about team friction and getting teams to work better together. And it’s something that’s really important in organisations where there’s difficult hierarchical relationships. But I’m not sure I’ve talked about trust enough in terms of team friction and in terms of leadership and the different component parts of those relationships inside the workplace.
Now, there were some great comments on the LinkedIn post with people talking about the fact that really, to rebuild trust, everybody’s got to want to do it. But it also depends on the reason that trust has broken down in the first place, because we have to understand how the trust has been damaged. Is it a skill or an operational element, or is it more of an ethical problem? Because that will probably determine how easy or how quickly it is to rebuild the trust. And you can rebuild trust. There are some schools of thought that say that you can’t, but you can. And we’ll talk about how you can do that as we go through this episode.
Is it really just about actions and words?
Now, several people commented that it’s about actions and not words. And I’ve recently finished listening to The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. And the importance of linking behaviours to words is referenced throughout the whole book. I think nearly every case study he talks about, he references examples where leaders are demonstrating clear behaviours and actions that lead to people feeling a sense of belonging and feeling trust.
And the need for leaders to embody, you know, the values, the purpose, the culture of the organisation is really important when it comes to trust, because you have to really represent that as a leader in an organisation. And if you want to rebuild trust, or if you’re looking to just gain more trust, being congruent to those values and purpose in the organisations, behaving in a way that matches those is so important.
Now, if we take Stephen Covey’s definition of trust from his book Speed of Trust, he states that trust is a function of two things: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, your motive, your intent with people. And your competence includes your capabilities, your skills, your results, your track record. And both of those are vital.
Now, this definition completely works for me. I really like it. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading The Speed of Trust, because it’s helped me continue reading and researching more into credibility, which is something I’m looking at for a project that’s happening behind the scenes.
And another concern that’s part of this issue of rebuilding trust is that somebody might not know it’s broken in the first place. And I think this was the example that I had with my client. I think some one person was feeling incredibly resentful towards the trust issue, but the other person had no idea that person felt this way. And I think that’s often what happens.
You know, we’re not often comfortable stepping forward and saying, you know, you’ve just done this, and this is how I feel. And I think that’s a really important thing to do in working relationships, we have to get comfortable with that uncomfortable conversation, if we want to move things forward. And I do think when it comes to trust, if we’re not telling someone that they’ve done it, that relationship is then going to deteriorate even further. I can’t fix something I’ve done if I don’t know that I’ve done it.
And you don’t know my intention behind what I was doing, which might lead you to thinking I’ve done something with malice, which was never my intention. So there’s a lot of complexity in trust, which we could talk about for hours. But we’ve only got 15 minutes today. And I want to really delve into the six elements that will help you rebuild trust and go from that chaos to calm.
What are some of the things that can be repaired within the workplace?
So, I’ve already mentioned that you can rebuild trust, you know, it will take time, but there are some things that can always be repaired, there are some things that can’t be repaired. But it’s usually because one of the parties doesn’t want to sometimes you can feel so betrayed by a situation that you don’t want to rebuild that trust. And that’s completely fine. But we have to think about whether or not we want to and in the workplace, this is really important.
We have to acknowledge in ourselves whether we can continue working with someone who’s broken trust in our relationship. You know, if we work together and I don’t want to rebuild the trust after it’s been broken. Then I have to kind of accept the fact that I probably need to leave that relationship and therefore that organisation.
I don’t believe you can stay in a place of work, you know, be aligned to the direction of travel, engaged in the vision, if you don’t trust the person leading you or the whole organisation. I think it’s fundamental to our success in the workplace.
So it sort of feels like the answer to my client’s original question is the normal answer I seem to give to many questions about communication and business, which is it depends, you know. It depends whether people want to rebuild it, it depends why it was broken, it depends how you define trust.
There’s lots of “it depends” in there. But there were consistent themes in the comments on LinkedIn when I asked the question. And that, alongside the work I’ve been doing around reading and researching, brought me to the six things that I think you need to consider when it comes to rebuilding trust.
Both parties must want to rebuild trust – and we’ve talked about this quite a lot already.
Actions are more important than words – you have to really demonstrate the fact that you want to rebuild trust, and that’s really important. I think people respond so much more to actions than they do always to words, so being able to demonstrate that is really fundamental.
Being accountable for anything you’ve done that has damaged that trust in the relationship. Now, if someone came to me and said that I damaged the trust in our relationship, I have to be accepting and accountable for whatever has created that. And being accountable is something that is often uncomfortable for us, but is really important when it comes to rebuilding relationships.
Being genuine about what you will do and can do to rebuild the trust. So, once I’ve taken accountability and acknowledged how that trust has broken down, I’ve got to be genuine about how I can fix that. And whether or not I want to obviously is part of it, but it’s got to be very authentic.
It takes time – and that really in that time, you’ve got to consistently do things to show that you’re doing things differently. All we have is time in our relationship. So, if trust is broken down, we’ve got to accept that overnight it’s not going to suddenly be better. It’s going to be probably months, if not years, to rebuild if it’s possible to do that.
Trust starts with trusting yourself. You know, if you can’t keep commitments to yourself, how can you keep them with others?
And that’s really important. It was one of the things I read in the Speed of Trust book that really stayed with me, from the little things around trusting yourself to setting an alarm in the morning to go to the gym. If you’re going to just ignore that, you’re not kind of trusting yourself and that commitment you’ve made to carry out and get to the gym and do that. So if you’re going to not trust that in you, how can you have trust with others?
In other words, as Stephen Covey says, for the most part, the difference between those who change behaviour and those who don’t is a compelling sense of purpose. When your purpose is to accomplish results in a way that builds trust, suddenly the behaviours that build trust are no longer just nice to do’s.
And I love that comment from Stephen because I think it helps us acknowledge the importance of changing behaviour, but also how it’s intrinsic to our sense of purpose and our reason for doing things. It makes us realise how easy it is to make something part of our habits and make something part of our everyday. And if we’ve got that core sense of purpose, that reason for doing something, then changing our behaviours to enable trust and rebuild trust are going to be much easier to do.
Thank you for listening!
Now, I’ve popped some links in the show notes to some of the related podcasts and blog posts around trust and leadership and obviously the books that I’ve mentioned as well.
Now, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about what an internal communication function does. Now, I know there are people listening who don’t have one in their organisation and some who are considering adding it after some growth. So, having set up four communication functions in my career, I want to share how to do that, what should be in and out of scope for that function, and when to know whether or not you need one in the first place.
So, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue the conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, and you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and as always, details are in the show notes.
