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Practices that Build Trust

“You can’t have success without trust.  The word trust embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed.  You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business, especially businesses that deal with the public.” – Jim Burke, Former Chairman and CEO, Johnson & Johnson

The skill of opening up to others and creating an environment for others to open up in return, requires deep trust.  Stephen Covey in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ (1990) compares trust to an “Emotional Bank Account” which takes time to build up but can be spent quickly.

According to Rodas-Meeker and Meeker (2005, p89), “Absence of trust has an extremely negative impact on groups, and at a very high organisational cost. When trust is absent, negative emotions and actions, such as suspicion and blaming, can steal from an organisation’s productive energy and undermine the positive work that people should be attending to.”

It is well acknowledged that it takes years to build up trust, and only a few seconds to destroy it.

What sort of practices BUILD trust?

• Say what you mean and mean what you say.
• Make decisions based on core values and principles rather than expediency or short term fixes which do not endure.
• Treat all people with courtesy, sincerity and respect, regardless of their status.
• Care about people, their well-being and be empathetic regardless of context.
• Avoid using people as instruments or stepping-stones for self-advancement.
• Be prepared to be vulnerable, willing to admit your own limitations & mistakes.
• Be accountable and assume responsibility for your decisions and actions. Be more concerned about your own accountability than your “rights.”
• Admit to and apologise for your mistakes.
• Be courageous - confront and take corrective actions when there is a problem.
• Under-promise and over-deliver.
• Always follow through on your promises, no matter how insignificant.
• Always clarify and qualify your promises to make sure that you don’t set up unrealistic or erroneous expectations.
• Take great care to maintain and nurture working relationships.
• Exercise self-control, and remember that an unkind word spoken in anger can cause irreparable damage to a relationship.
• Whenever a misunderstanding occurs, clear it up as soon as possible.
• Give honest but constructive feedback.
• Trust people first until they prove themselves untrustworthy.
• Communicate openly and honestly, and explain your decisions.
• Earn people’s trust by building a reputation for being competent & trustworthy.

Adapted from: ‘Creating a Culture of Collaboration’ IAF Handbook (2006, p243)

Recommended Reading:

“The Speed of Trust:  The One Thing that Changes Everything” by Stephen M.R. Covey, Stephen R. Covey & Rebecca R. Merrill (2008)

“Building Trust: How to Get It! How to Keep It!” by Hyler Bracey (2003)

“If you want people to follow you, if you want people to work beside you, then they have to trust you.” – Perry Pascarella

Trust-Building

Disputants' distrust of each other is almost always present in intractable conflicts. Although negotiations can occur, and settlements can be developed before trust is established, trust-building is very important for complete reconciliation, and it is certainly helpful in the negotiation process also.

Typically, disputants involved in an intractable conflict are very suspicious of each other, and may be suspicious of any proposed conflict resolution process as well. One of the first jobs undertaken by third party intermediaries (or even first-parties who want to try to resolve the conflict) will be to try to build up a certain level of trust between the parties and the process. Trust in the process can be developed by explaining the process very carefully, and allowing the parties to help design it so that it meets their own needs. If they help in the planning and process design, it reduces the likelihood that they will feel that the process was designed to work against them.

Trust in the opponent is built up slowly over time, as the parties work together, get to know each other better, and prove to each other that they are reasonable, predictable, and worthy of trust. Sometimes trust-building exercises are undertaken before formal negotiations or mediations begin. Disputants can be brought together to work on a joint project (independent of any joint problem solving they might do) or they might spend time together socially, or involved in special trust-building programs. In the United States, for example, groups are sometimes taken on multi-day outdoor adventure trips, where participants have to learn to depend on each other to provide food and shelter and find their way. These moderately stressful experiences can draw people together very quickly and can build a level of trust between former disputants that far surpasses any that they had before.

Mediators can help parties establish trust and work together effectively in a number of other ways during the mediation as well. Allowing all the parties to "tell their stories" - to explain how they feel and why - can generate a level of understanding and empathy that begins to break down barriers between people. Mediators can also help disputants to state their grievances in a non-accusatory way, and can help them redefine or "reframe" the conflict in an integrative or "win-win" way, rather than a "win-lose" way. Although such a reframing is not always possible, when it is, it makes the opponent much less threatening, and can be very helpful in establishing greater levels of trust between the parties.

Negotiation expert Roger Fisher warns, however, that trust can be a trap. "Behaving in a way that makes oneself worthy of trust is highly useful and likely to be well rewarded. But the more one trusts the other side, the greater the incentive one provides for behaviour that will prove such trust to have been misplaced. . . .Other things being equal, the less that an agreement depends on trust, the more likely it is to be implemented." (Roger Fisher, Beyond Yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Program on Negotiation, 1991, p. 124) This means that there should be some external source of enforcement, or that the agreement should be written so that each side has to do something before it gets what it wants.

Trust is important, however, for the establishment of normal relationships. The greater the trust between parties, the more effectively they will be able to live together and co-operate in the future, which will diminish the chances that the old conflict will re-occur, or a new unmanageable one will develop.