Summary: How do you build trust on a team or across an organization? In this article, Mark S. Kenny explains why trust isn’t built directly, but accumulated through the small, everyday interactions between people.
We all know how important it is to build trust. Without it, teams lose the ability to execute together, unnecessary friction and turbulence become all-consuming, and great ideas and solutions get lost.
But you can’t actually “build trust” directly. What I mean is that you can’t walk out of your office thinking “I’m going to spend time building trust today.”
You can host an offsite. You can conduct a team-building activity. You can create more opportunities for people to connect. Those things can help.
But none of them builds trust on its own. It’s what people give each other while they’re there that matters.
Trust isn’t built directly. Trust is accumulated through thousands of small interactions.
I think of those interactions as passes: small moments when we choose what we will give to one another and what we will withhold.
Trust is built when we give someone our presence, stepping into their world, without trying to fix them.
Trust is built when we are willing to share important truth with healthy candor and courage. It’s built when we invite truth in the form of feedback, and respond to truth with vulnerability instead of defensiveness when it shows up.
Trust is built when we decide not to let past wrongs run future interactions.
Trust is built when we believe in someone by setting clear expectations and giving them room to figure it out themselves, without hovering and overcorrecting too quickly.
All of these are small interactions that happen every day when we choose what we will give to each other and what we will withhold from each other. It’s the result of those choices, in the thousands of interactions we experience, that build trust.
So instead of heading into your day trying to “build trust,” pay attention to the interactions in front of you.
Give someone your presence. Tell an important truth. Extend grace. Show someone you believe in them.
You don’t build trust all at once. You build it one pass at a time.
