The emergence of trust in organizational relationships

I recently came across a LinkedIn Group discussion on the ‘dimensions’ of organizational culture. Started by Robert Wimple, this homed-in on trust as the essential component for a sustainable culture. It drew on an interesting blogpost on his site, The Trust Ambassador.

Trust is regularly cited in this way as a critical factor in effective organizational performance. It frequently appears on lists of ‘corporate values’. And “creating an environment of trust” is often stated as a primary leadership task. But what do we mean by “trust”? Is it achievable in organizations? And, if so, how can managers bring it about?

Relational and interactional

First, from the viewpoint of organizations as complex social processes, trust is a property of relations and interactions. Managers often speak of trust as if it can be designed-in to an organization or imposed by decree. But people’s sense of trust is embodied – or not – in the unscripted detail of each and every interaction that they have with one another.  It is personally and socially constructed - both consciously and subconsciously - in these moments that people come together.  As such, it reflects participants’ past history of interactions, their future hopes and expectations about this and/or other important relationships, and the current immediacy of the exchange. At the same time, the emerging outcomes of this ongoing process shift the ways in which ‘the past’ is recalled, ‘the future’ is constructed and the present is lived - all in the here and now.

Multi-dimensional

Secondly, trust is multi-dimensional. For example, we might believe that someone is being genuine and truthful when they say that they intend to do something, and yet still not trust them to do it because we don’t think that they have the necessary competence.  Some of the factors that might contribute to our sense of trust in others – or detract from it - are suggested below:

• character (perceived integrity and trustworthiness) – “I believe your intentions are well meant.”
• community (whether the person is recognized as being ‘one of us’, with shared perspectives, common interests and sense of identity) – “I see you as having the same outlook and objectives.”
• communication (perceived openness, honesty and straightforwardness) – “I believe that you are being open and honest in what you say.”
• confidentiality (sense that it is ‘safe’ to share confidences) – “I believe that I can be open with you, without fear of you taking advantage of me or breaching that confidence.”
• credibility (whether or not the ‘story’ makes sense and is believable in it’s own right) – “I believe that your ‘story’ (proposition, strategy, system etc) is credible and makes sense in its own right.”
• capability (perceived knowledge, skills and abilities in relevant areas) – “I believe that you have the necessary capacity and competence to do what is needed in this situation.”
• commitments (dependability in keeping agreements and promises) – “I believe that I can depend on you to do what you say you will do.”
• context (whether the patterns of taken-for-granted cultural assumptions are tending to channel behaviour in ways that enhance or undermine trust) – “I believe that the organizational culture and climate fosters an environment of trust.”

Emergent

Thirdly, trust is emergent. As suggested above, people derive their sense of trust from the detail of the actions, interactions and transactions that comprise everyday life in the organization. The sense they make of their world, including the feeling of trust (or mistrust) that this evokes, emerges from this ongoing interactional process.  Also, the more that a particular ‘sense’ of trust is ‘taken up’ by others, through the diverse interplay of conversations across an organization (or fragments of it), the more generalized it becomes. It is then more likely to be taken up in similar ways by those same people in future - and, potentially, by others with whom they interact. 

This is what “the culture” of an organization is about, as described in Informal Coalitions. It is the self-organizing process of ‘shared’ meaning-making, through which patterns of assumptions emerge and become taken-for-granted over time. These patterns create expectancy and tend to channel ongoing sensemaking, imperceptibly, down familiar ‘pathways’.  It is this natural pattern-reinforcing tendency that makes ‘cultural change’ (pattern switching) more difficult to achieve than the maintenance of continuity.   

Leadership implications

Since this patterning process is self-organizing, it means that trust cannot be ‘designed and built’ by managers, as part of a structured ‘culture change programme’. However, a major influence on this ongoing sensemaking and action-taking is people’s observation of the behaviours of those in formal leadership positions – throughout the organization. 

So here, as elsewhere, role modelling the desired behaviours in their own day-to-day conversations and interactions is critical for all managers.  In Informal Coalitions, I referred to these instances as “moments of leadership truth”. And it is equally important for them to pay attention to the impact that ‘informal leaders’ have on the emergence of local patterns of thought and action – whether for better or for worse. Actively engaging with this ongoing sensemaking process, both directly and indirectly, is therefore at the core of leadership practice aimed at building a wider sense of trust. 

Finally, in a related post, High-expectations leadership - moving from vicious to virtuous circles, I stressed the importance of managers maintaining high expectations of people's willingness and ability to contribute:

"Success requires managers to make a ‘leap of faith’: raising their expectations of people and enabling greater levels of self-management, even where (or especially where!) the evidence ‘on the ground’ makes this appear foolhardy. The required shift will occur if, as a result of what staff see managers doing, the patterns of their informal conversations change in line with the changed levels of expectations."

Comments

[Simon Bostock]

Interesting post. And I think it's important to unpick terms like 'trust' in an organisational setting.

Trust is one of those words that is buried under the weight of assumptions. We use it carelessly and it's clearly context-dependent. When it comes up in recriminatory conversations, there is a tendency for discussion to descend into the 'narcissism of small differences.'

For me, I've always used a working definition of 'shared risk'. You can't have trust without it.

[Tom Gibbons]

Thanks for this post Chris. As you have said, and Simon as well, this word trust gets thrown out with the assumption of shared understanding and rarely is anything shared at all. I completely agree that trust cannot be ‘managed’ into an organization or relationship.

I also agree that trust is context dependent but I think it can also be of value to consider trust outside of context. I think too often people are waiting to see if they can trust someone by experiencing the other person’s behaviours and then more or less judging whether or not they can be trusted. This can put too much power in the behaviour of the other person at the expense of the choice you can make about trust.

Years ago I ran a workshop called Trust and Compassion at Work and one of the things we did was to treat trust as a choice, independent of context. With this as a start point you either chose to trust someone or not. By playing with the choice to trust someone, regardless of context we then investigated where and why any discomfort might come from in making that choice. This then brought context back into the equation but by investigating the discomfort felt by choosing to trust first, we were able to get a better understanding of what elements of the context were most important in choosing to trust or not. Typically what was identified was some fear that you would be let down in some fashion by the other person and when you really looked at that fear it was nowhere near as important as the impact it was having on the choice to trust someone or not. In some ways we were taking back the right to choose to trust someone more readily by questioning what was important in our choices to trust.

It was somewhat of a back door approach to thinking about trust but often seemed to free up people to trust more readily. From a leadership perspective it also helped to shed some light on those behaviours that could be modeled to potentially help the choice to trust be more evident in the organizations they worked in.

[Chris Rodgers]

Many thanks, Simon and Tom for your comments.

If I understand your interesting “narcissism of small differences” point correctly, Simon, this reflects what I see as a central dynamic of self-organizing processes (which is how I view organizations). That is, the tendency to polarize. Both Edward de Bono (in his early writings on the “mechanism of mind”) and Ralph Stacey (in relation to organizational dynamics directly) have influenced my own thoughts in this area.

As I see it, the patterns of thinking and acting that emerge from our interactions can often be based on relatively arbitrary perceptions and interpretations of people’s behaviour. However, once formed, these patterns tend to become self-perpetuating. The act of categorizing someone/group (as either trustworthy or untrustworthy, say) makes polarization inevitable. Even though there might be a very thin dividing line between the competing patterns, there is a tendency for one of them to be chosen and the other ignored entirely. ‘Evidence’ that fits within the category is emphasized and that which doesn’t is ignored. Differences between experiences within a category are disregarded – people are either trustworthy or they’re not. At the same time, any similarities that exist, between one’s experience of those categorized as trustworthy and those who are not, are overlooked. In this way, small differences polarize into deep chasms, in an ‘I am right, you are wrong’ sort of way.

As regards your comment about the need for a percetion of “shared risk”, this seems to mesh with Tom’s about people's fear of being let down and the important point he makes that, when this is exposed, the fear (and hence the risk) is often seen to have been blown up out of all proportion.

On this point, Tom, and the idea of choosing to trust ahead of the evidence (or even in spite of evidence to the contrary), this was what I was trying to get at in the final point in my original post. For a leader, choosing to trust staff actually helps to create a different context from that which would be evident if the original decision had been not to trust them. The latter fuels a vicious circle of low expectations, tight control and alienation, which results in dysfunctional behaviours that seem to reinforce the original assumptions about people’s unwillingness and inability to contribute (i.e. their lack of trustworthiness). QED.

However, as I’ve found in practice as well as principle, starting with high expectations of people’s willingness and ability to contribute (i.e. starting from assumptions of trust) generates a virtuous circle of behaviours, in which the removal of excessive extrinsic controls enables contribution and commitment to flourish. This earlier post relates to that specific point: http://bit.ly/8fO9EU.

Cheers, Chris