Trust on Purpose
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email charles@insightcoaching.com or ila@bigchangeinc.com.
We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Trust on Purpose
The Framework
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Join us as we explore a field-tested framework for building and repairing trust. Drawing from "The Thin Book of Trust," we break down the four essential assessments that shape our choice to trust others. Discover why some relationships feel like safe harbours while others leave us constantly on guard, and learn how to navigate the complex dynamics of trust in all areas of life.
Whether you're looking to strengthen trust in individual relationships or build more effective teams, this episode offers practical insights into one of humanity's most fundamental needs.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Hi there, my name is Hila Edgar and you're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose, and you're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose. Today, we're re-releasing one of our very first episodes and probably one of our top three most downloaded episodes of all time. It's the episode where we unpack the trust model based on Charles's book, the Thin Book of Trust. So, whether you're hearing this for the first time or returning for a refresh, I know that you'll find value in this episode as you learn about the model and how to build stronger trust with yourself, with those that you love, with those that you lead. It's a really impactful episode, and so I hope you enjoy it. Let's dive in episode, and so I hope you enjoy it, let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Hello, I'm Charles Feltman.
Speaker 2:And I'm Ila Edgar.
Speaker 1:And this is Trust on Purpose. Today, Ila, we're going to talk about the trust framework and language that we use when we're working with our clients around issues of trust, around building trust, maintaining it and, when necessary, restoring it. So this is the fundamental model that we use and work with. This is kind of an exciting piece for us because it's the starting point.
Speaker 2:I can honestly say this is a model and a framework that I use with every single client, no matter if it's one-on-one coaching, whether it's teamwork group facilitation. I find that this model gives such clarity and is so immediately and easily understood, so I'm really excited to go through this today too.
Speaker 1:I'm glad. Yes, I use the model in the same way and, as often, I have to say, before we go too far, I want to acknowledge that this is not new material. It's not something that either of us made up, that. I first heard some pieces of the model when I was going through a coach training program from the Newfield Network, and then I pulled in another piece of the model from people who do academic research in the area of trust and write about it in peer-reviewed journals, which are not necessarily easily accessible to many of us. But I was able to pull that piece, or a couple of pieces actually, from there. So I want to just make sure that I'm giving credit where credit is due. So I'd like to start with the definition that I use and that we use for trust, and specifically, this is a definition of trusting in a way, but we'll see how it fits with the whole process of building trust.
Speaker 1:So the definition that we use is that trust is making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. I'm going to say that one more time Trust is making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. So there's some important pieces to this. First of all, trust and vulnerability are clearly linked in this definition. So we are vulnerable when we trust someone. We can, of course, limit that vulnerability, but why would we even do that in the first place? Why would we make something we value vulnerable to another person's actions? What are some of the reasons you've encountered that people are willing to do that, in the workplace in particular, but in any place?
Speaker 2:I think where my brain immediately went is I believe in the good of others, and so I am open and believe that they're doing and being good people. I'm absolutely willing to give something or to show something or to be vulnerable because I believe in that. That's my relationship with trust, so it's easy for me to do that.
Speaker 1:I like that you use the word relationship, because for me, trust is part of every relationship. We have Trust or distrust or something in between, but it's built into the relationships that we have all of them. From my perspective. Quite often in the workplace, we trust other people for the sake of being able to work with them in a way and accomplish something in ways that we couldn't do alone. That's the whole point of working together with other people. If we could do all this stuff alone, we, in many cases, might choose to do so, or at least some of us. Others of us, though, look for that relationship and the joy of working with other people. Either way, whether we are going for the joy of working with other people or there's something that we want to accomplish that we can't accomplish alone, trust is critical. Trust is the lubricant that allows us to do it and do it well, and do it quickly in many cases, more quickly than, obviously, without trust. So that's often the why, but part of it, as you said, also, is that you trust other people because you want to connect with them. In a sense, it's part of that relationship. We also are willing to do this. We're also willing to make something we value vulnerable to another person in the workplace, because we believe that they will support us, they will take care of us. They have our interests in mind as well as their own, which is actually one of the elements of trust that we'll talk about in a little bit. But we believe that in making this thing that we value vulnerable to them, they're going to support it, they're not going to harm it, and so when we do that, of course, we then can work together much more easily, much more deeply, much more collaboratively than we can if we're putting up barriers, like people do when they distrust.
Speaker 1:Distrust is the belief or assessment that what I value is not safe in this situation or with you, or with you in any situation. So that fundamental piece of making something you value vulnerable, it calls for a risk assessment, if you will. When we're thinking about that or even not thinking about it, but risking we're still doing some kind of conscious or unconscious risk assessment. The point of having this framework is that when we do that risk assessment consciously, we're a lot better off. When we are able to think about how am I choosing to make something I value vulnerable, we're trusting wisely and that's a huge benefit in work with other people.
Speaker 1:The last piece of this definition of making something you value vulnerable is the whole idea of what it is you value, what it is I value and I trust. For example, I trust you, hila. What is it that I'm making vulnerable? Well, in my case, I'm making some of my ideas vulnerable. I'm making my ability to get these ideas across to people vulnerable because I trust that you are competent and capable of working with me to do that and actually extending or expanding my capacity to do that, for example. So that's one of the things that I'm making vulnerable, and in the workplace, when I talk with clients about this, it's really fascinating to hear what it is or actually help them understand what it is that they're making vulnerable. So I am going to stop here and just say what are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really want to dive into the model, but one of the things, as you were describing our definition of trust and distrust, is that I feel, like many clients, many people that I've worked with, have a definition or a relationship with trust that it's either I trust you or I don't.
Speaker 2:There's no in between. You're either a good person, so there's a moral issue with some people and how you were raised to believe, or what you were taught about trust that there's a moral issue. So if I trust you, you're a good person, but if I don't trust you, you're a bad person, or there's something in our relationship and it's certainly not me, it must be you it creates this disconnection and either an on or an off I trust or I don't trust and what I really love is that it's actually okay and we'll see as we go through the model. There are places you absolutely shouldn't trust people, but it doesn't mean that there's a deficit or something bad. Where do I look transparently and make an assessment that works for me and what I want in the relationship, and I think that's why there's such ability to really see things clearly.
Speaker 1:The framework that we use actually points to this idea that trust isn't just one thing, one on-off switch, that the risk assessment that we're making we're actually making in four different domains, and I'll just walk through them and then we'll go back and describe them or talk about them in greater detail. The first one is the assessment that you have my interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take action, you want good for me, you intend good for me.
Speaker 1:That might not always happen, but fundamentally you intend good for me, you respect me and you want to support me. You have my back. That's the assessment of care, and we'll talk momentarily about how we make that assessment. There's the assessments in the domain of sincerity. That is and I break it down a little bit more if I assess Ila, that you're honest, that I can believe what you say, that I can believe, at the very least you believe and can back up what you say with evidence, and that you act with integrity, that is to say, when you speak, your actions align with that. So the assessments that we make in the domain of sincerity have to do with honesty and integrity of the other person. The third domain is reliability, which has to do with keeping specific commitments that we make. So if I say I will get a list of people to you that we need to contact or maybe a list of ideas to you for future shows, and I'll get it to you by Friday, but I actually follow through, that, I do it and I do it in the way that we have both agreed on that. I should do it. I'll email it to you. It'll be a separate document, so it's fulfilling commitments we have made to each other. That's the domain of reliability. And the last domain of trust assessment is competence. That is, I assess that you have the skills, the knowledge, the experience, the expertise, the resources to do whatever job you're claiming you can do or that I'm asking you to do, or alternately. If you don't that, you will say so and you'll ask for help. So those are the four assessment domains. We make assessments in each of those four domains and we can make positive assessments.
Speaker 1:Getting back to this idea of trust not being just one on or off, we can make positive assessments in one or two or even three domains and a negative assessment in a fourth. Also, when I'm making assessments about you, for example, and trusting you, you're also making assessments about my trustworthiness. It's reciprocal, so I can use these four assessment domains to say oh, how am I doing in the domain of reliability or in the domain of sincerity? Am I being fully honest? Do I really have your back? Oh, yes, I do. So I am trustable for you, I'm trustworthy. So I could look at it from both sides. I can look at it in terms of making a wise assessment of the risk of trusting you, and then I can also make sure that I am being trustworthy to you and other people around me, or, if I'm not, I have a way of thinking about that and the way of becoming more trustworthy.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about each one of these and how we make those assessments. When I use the word assessment, an assessment is not a fact. It's a belief or judgment or opinion and hopefully a what I would call solid assessment or grounded assessment, based in evidence, based in facts that I can point to. So when I'm making an assessment about your reliability, it's based on my experience with your reliability and coming through with the commitments that you've made and vice versa, flipping that you're doing the same thing. Let's go back to the domain of care. In what ways can we assess, or do we assess, care? How do we know that someone else actually has our back?
Speaker 2:I think this comes back to me for how we show up with other people.
Speaker 2:So someone that actually is present in conversations, that actually listens, is here, and I'm pausing and slowing down on purpose, as I find in our world of busy, fast and faster, it's very easy to flip through a conversation or not be present because we have 81 other things demanding our attention, and it's something important to pay attention to.
Speaker 2:One of the most important things that comes up for me when I think about the assessment of care is how people choose to be present, and especially in this world of fast and faster and doing more with less, leaders can absolutely feel that they don't have time to have conversation or to be present, or they don't know how, and one of the biggest gifts I think you and I are both aligned on this one of the biggest gifts that we can give any person on the face of this planet is to be seen and to be heard. I don't need two hours of your time. I need three minutes where you actually connect with me. To me, that is I don't even know, I don't even know the words that's big enough to say this Like. That is the most important thing for me in the domain of care.
Speaker 1:I would 100% agree with you. I don't know how many times I've been talking to a client who talks about their boss or their colleague you know their peers in the organization and say he doesn't listen or she doesn't listen to me. I have a meeting with my boss and we're supposed to be talking about whatever it is we're talking about and at the same time he's responding to an email or he keeps getting interrupted and letting those interruptions take over our conversation and that sets up the assessment that my boss really doesn't care about me. So that is a fundamental piece and that's a fundamental way of showing I care about you.
Speaker 1:Another one is that people do not just listen but show up in other ways. So, for example, I was talking to a client the other day who said yeah, you know, I really believe that Joe, my colleague, really does care about me. He comes around and asks me how I'm doing on a regular basis and I get it. Looking at him, I can see that he means that, that he's not just asking in a shallow or surface way. He means how am I really doing? He wants to understand and hear from me how I'm doing. So those are a couple of key ways of demonstrating that there's care there.
Speaker 2:I think one of the examples that I use when I'm going through the model with clients is have you ever been on the receiving end of someone who clearly has a hidden agenda, or that their scope, their project, their whatever it is, is far more important than yours? Have you ever been on the receiving end of that? And I would say absolutely everyone has, and so is that someone that you want to engage with? Is that someone that you want to build relationship with? Is that someone that you want to collaborate with? And it's usually a full hard? No, because they don't give a crap about me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the difficult part is what if that person is a colleague you need to work with in order to get your job done well, or, even more devastating? Sometimes is your boss, who you get in that sense, does not have your back. Sometimes is your boss, who you get in that sense does not have your back, doesn't really care about you. They are making an assessment of distrust when that person all they talk about is themselves, their problems, their issues, their concerns. Or when you come up with a great idea and the next thing you know that person is representing that idea as theirs, sadly.
Speaker 2:I had a leader that I worked for and the first time it happened it was like oh, it was just an honest mistake. She forgot to reference me. And then, when it happened again and again, I actually chose not to work for her anymore. It was devastating to put your heart and soul into something and be so proud of what you had accomplished to have someone else take the credit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So those are all examples of how we can build trust in the domain of care or, alternately, things that we can do, behaviors that can damage trust in the domain of care. Let's go on to the domain of sincerity, that honesty and integrity piece, or those pieces. So I know a couple of things that are well. Actually, sincerity, and particularly the integrity part, is something we can often see in the moment when someone is talking, and we can see either that they're congruent what they're saying shows up in their body and their tone of voice and their facial expressions and all of that are completely congruent or alternately incongruent with what they're saying. So there's this immediate feedback loop. If we happen to be in their presence, expressions and all of that are completely congruent or alternately incongruent with what they're saying. So there's this immediate feedback loop if we happen to be in their presence.
Speaker 1:But there's also many other ways that we make assessments about other people's sincerity and they make assessments about our sincerity, and I'll just bring up one of them and ask you what some of those that you've seen are. One of the ones that I've seen is that someone in a meeting says, yeah, I agree, and then the next thing you know they're talking to someone outside of the team or in some other context and talking about how this idea that they just agreed to is just a bunch of horse poopy, a bunch of horse shit, and you're going wait a minute. Why is this person doing that? Ah, oh, I know they are not sincere, they have no integrity here and they're not being honest. They're not being honest in the first place when they said they agreed with it in our meeting or our conversation, and they're probably not being honest with that other person who knows.
Speaker 1:So there's one of the many ways that people show up as insincere, or, alternately, when they do say the same thing to me and then to someone else. Oh OK, there's sincerity here, there's honesty here. How about you? What are some of the ways that you've seen people behave in ways that support the assessment of sincerity?
Speaker 2:in ways that support the assessment of sincerity. I've noticed how people will come into even a frank conversation so say, for example, you know we're coordinating a new project, so there's lots of moving pieces, and for someone to say, yes, I can take care of that piece and I've got all of these other things going on, so how do we collaborate together so that we can accomplish this? For me, there's an honesty and an integrity about I have a good intention and I want to help do this, and I'm also being transparent that I have other things on the go, so let's figure it out together. So there's this lean in, let's collaborate, and there's some maybe sticky or bumpy pieces we've got to figure out. That, to me, goes a really long way with creating that assessment of sincerity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and something that's very closely related to that is I had a boss once say to me that kind of shocked me because I didn't think bosses would say these kinds of things. He said one of the things that I want to be able to do really well is take feedback. I was his direct report in this situation. He was my boss saying I want to be able to take feedback from people better. I aspire to that, I'm working on it and I want you to know that sometimes I'm going to ignore that and that's my defense, and please help me with that. That was stunning when this boss said that to me.
Speaker 2:I just got shivers you saying that and I'm writing a note here for myself that I think that's another episode where we can talk about the ability to give and receive feedback from a base of trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Clearly, this particular person was very self-aware and in fact, I actually never encountered a situation where I went to give him honest feedback myself and he didn't accept it and really consider it. Just the fact that he would acknowledge that he was working on that, as opposed to this, is the way I'm good at that. It really gave me a strong sense of his integrity and his honesty. Sort of on the flip side of that, when I have worked with other people and they gave me good, honest, constructive feedback, Again, I assess this person is sincere with me, they're being honest with me. It's partly care. You can see where there's some overlap in domains. They care about me enough to give me honest feedback and it is honest feedback.
Speaker 1:I really can believe what they're saying and they're not just sucking up to me or whatever. They don't just want a favor and so they're saying something nice or even and we can go into this as another conversation but that sort of Oreo or shit sandwich of feedback. Oh, here's something nice, you know, here's something I think you do well. And now here's what I really want to tell you, which is that you're not doing this well, oh yeah. And here's something else that you do well, Pretty much that lends itself to an assessment of lack of sincerity, lack of honesty. I'm only going to listen to the middle part. That's all I'm going to hear. I'm not going to hear the other stuff because I know it's coming and then when it happens, it's, and then the other person is off on this insincere sort of encouraging whatever that I can't hear.
Speaker 2:And I immediately felt because I have a client right now who had probably the motherlode of a shit sandwich delivered to him years ago in his career and he's still when he hears the word. Can I give you some feedback? He braces for impact physically, mentally, emotionally. Braces for impact physically, mentally, emotionally braces for impact. I think that's a whole other territory we can go into and I think it'd be a really rich conversation.
Speaker 2:There's one other piece around sincerity that I want to point to, and sometimes when we tell little white lies to protect someone else because we don't want them to feel bad, we don't want to disappoint them, we don't want something for them that that little white lie actually creates fractures in our foundation of trust. And it can be something simple. I know it was a gut punch for me my son is now 16, but I think this is probably when he was five or six Mom, can we go to the park? Mom, can we go to the park? Can we please go to the park? And I said, maybe we'll see.
Speaker 2:Knowing in my head, I had a ton of stuff to do and there wasn't a possibility we're going to the park that day. And he came back about five or 10 minutes later and he said mom, you can just say yes or no, it's okay. And so she had a sense right that I wasn't giving him an honest answer and that changed everything for us. It's like you know what? I can just give you the honest yes or no, and we can figure it out together. So those little white lies that we tell, thinking that we're not doing any damage to the relationship, we are, and it's something important to pay attention to.
Speaker 1:And I would bet that when you were saying to him maybe maybe you were not actually present with him you were still in your head doing whatever work you were doing and he could sense that very clearly. So he knew that you weren't being straight with him just from observing. That behavior Absolutely, and the honesty piece too, is important. That behavior Absolutely, and the honesty piece too, is important. At one point I had a middle management level position and I was often called on to talk about projects that I was working on or the people that worked for me were working on, and one of the things that I now readily admit upfront to people is that I don't have a head for data. I can't remember specific numbers. People is that I don't have a head for data. I can't remember specific numbers, sometimes specific names. So if I call you something else, hila, it's not because I don't remember your name, it's just that I don't remember your name. So I'm filling something else in. Well, until somebody called me on it Because it seemed important to have the data, I would fill in an approximation Without saying I think it's this. I would just say here it is, which is not honest by a long shot, and I usually would be pretty close and I thought that that was okay. That created a sense of distrust from those people who were listening to me that I could easily have fixed. I could easily have said I don't know, I'll ask. I could easily have come in with a whole bunch of data on pieces of paper that I could read off of. I had a story about how that was not professional in my role. It took somebody telling me hey, you know what you're shooting yourself in the foot if you keep doing this. So each of those are little behaviors and there's several more. I'm going to invite our audience to think about those for themselves.
Speaker 1:In the domain of sincerity, let's move on to the domain of reliability that keeping specific commitments we make to others and them keeping their commitments to us, because I find so often when I work with a team in particular, that is a sore point. That's a place where there's breakdowns. In fact, I remember working with a bunch of people who managed projects of different kinds in an organization and there was a big issue with getting the products of those projects out. They were delayed, they weren't meeting the promises they'd made to their customers as a company because they weren't getting stuff done on time. So a colleague of mine and I started working with them and we asked them so do people within your teams meet the commitments that they make? Do they keep those commitments? And they said no, not really we have to hound them, we have to follow them around all the time and keep asking them and keep bugging them.
Speaker 1:And so my colleague asked this brilliant question. She said what would happen if you didn't have to do that, if, when someone said to you I will have that data to you by four o'clock on Thursday afternoon, they actually did it and you didn't have to hound them about it and that stopped them. They all just sort of sat there. And then finally somebody said we'd be out of a job. In other words, a big, big chunk of their job was going around and hounding people because people just did not keep their commitments. Otherwise there was a huge break in trust there on a regular basis. So what we're talking about here is making strong commitments that people can keep and do keep.
Speaker 2:There's an organization I'm working with right now that they are having a horrible time with what we're calling accountability. But it's really reliability and it's so fascinating as we unpack what's going on. It's because the requests aren't clear. The people are competent to be able to do the work which we haven't touched on yet. We're going there. They're very likely sincere in taking on the work, but the scope, the deadlines, the level of details, whatever that is, but the scope, the deadlines, the level of details, whatever that is, hasn't been clear. And so there's assessments being made that Bob hasn't delivered. Well, he has, according to what he thought he needed to deliver, but there's a gap. And then this points back to our whole conversation about feedback. It impacts reliability, or what people are assuming is a lack of reliability slash accountability.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's interesting because some people get this whole thing very well. I worked with a team once where the complaint from the team leader was I have a superstar, he does everything that I ask him to do. He does it exactly how I ask him to do it. He's on top of everything nobody else does. They don't meet the deadlines, they don't. As it turns out, as we explored more, what came up was that this one person actually was very good, first of all, at listening and anticipating what his boss needed so his boss didn't need to be clear with him and then also being proactive in getting stuff done sooner than his boss might even want it. So he was really good at that, which allowed him to appear highly reliable and everybody else who was struggling with just exactly what you were just saying to seem unreliable. But that was not serving that team. It was not serving them at all. What the leader really needed was a whole team full of people who were highly reliable, and the leader needed to learn to make clear and complete requests.
Speaker 1:To start with and we can go into that in a different podcast what we call a cycle of a commitment or a cycle of the promise, and it starts with a clear and complete request that you were just describing. It says exactly what I want, when I want it and in what form I want it. In Little things like, oh I needed ASAP is pretty useless. Asap to me might be tomorrow afternoon and to you, you're thinking ASAP. Well, let's see. I have five other things to do. Friday yeah, friday I'll do. Or if it's my boss, I might go oh, asap, I better drop everything else, drop my commitments to all these other people and get it done right now, when the boss really doesn't need it.
Speaker 2:There's a big gap in understanding that currently with the teenager, because my ASAP is very different than his ASAP, so I'm realizing that I need to get clearer on my deadlines.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and probably also if it's anything like mine getting clear on the conditions of satisfaction. No, I want the trash taken all the way out to the street so that when the trash man comes around at 6.30 tomorrow morning the trash can is out there and they can take it away. Yes, we laugh about that. There's that teenage mind, but that happens in organizations all the time.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There's one piece with reliability Do you keep your promises to the best of your ability, and how you break your promises is just as important as how you keep them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So just talk to me a little bit about that term, how you break your promises.
Speaker 2:If we're coming from a place of care, sincerity, we're competent in our job, things are ticking along just fine, we're being accountable, we're keeping our commitments, but life happens. My kids have been up sick all night, or, you know, my mother-in-law is not feeling well, or my car broke down, whatever that is. What I notice, and was a pattern for me for many years, is you just sweep that shit under the rug and pretend it didn't happen, right, pretend no one notices that you didn't keep your commitment. But that causes a whole boatload of damage in the relationship. Life happens for all of us. So the minute that I know Charles I can't make that meeting that we booked, I'm going to let you know the second how can I make this up to you? Can I deliver information to you so that you're prepared, even though I won't be there? But how do I take care of the commitment and, more importantly, taking care of our relationship, knowing that I do need to break a promise or rescind it or renegotiate it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, how we break it is absolutely important is how we make a commitment or a promise, and, of course, in organizations there are so many things that can get in the way, including one's ability or inability to say no. Lots of people in organizations are constantly taking on stuff, not saying no, and pretty soon there's just more work than they can possibly do, and so they're missing deadlines and they're not fully completing the work that they've taken on, nor it's not really done to the conditions of satisfaction of the person who asked them to do it. What I'd like to do is maybe have a whole session on this, using perhaps one of the scenarios that we can bring in from one of our coaching clients or a couple of our coaching clients, because I think that we can illustrate this really well. So let's do a deeper dive into reliability to a different podcast and move on to the final assessment, which is competence. I have the skills, expertise, et cetera, et cetera, to do this or alternately and this is a big part kind of like how we break a promise If I don't have the skills, the expertise, whatever, saying so, acknowledging that and asking for help.
Speaker 1:For me, very often, when I come up against this in organizations where there's the boss saying you know my direct report here, I can't trust it. You know it's like well, what do you not trust? Well, they don't do stuff right and I ask them to do something and they don't get it right. Often that sort of competence is an issue of standards that aren't clear. You know what are the standards that the boss has or holds and what are the standards that the direct report or whoever it is they're asking holds? We're on a team.
Speaker 1:Many times there's the person who says my colleague, my peer on the team and I are supposed to be doing this together, but I do it all because he doesn't do it right. And again it's basically a lack of shared standards. They haven't worked that out and figured out for each other. What are the standards? A key to a trust assessment. A positive assessment of trust in the domain of competence is often to do with being clear on what we both are sharing as the standard for competence. What else have you seen in this domain that's important?
Speaker 2:I'm laughing a little bit on the inside because I see over and over and over again. I'll point to one client I'm working with right now there's a whole lot of shoulding going on. That person should know how to do that. It shouldn't be done that way. I can't believe that that's the way they did the project. That's not how we do things. They should know better. Every time I hear the word should when addressed to someone else, or we also should on ourselves, to me, that's a clear opening to what's the missing standard, because it's so easy for each of us to come from our different perspectives and have our own way of doing things or the own way that we've learned or been taught or been given feedback. This is how you do this and you will have a different way of how to do that. It doesn't make it good or bad or right or wrong. They're just different standards. So how do we come to alignment and shared agreement on what that is? And that's often just a missing conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just a missing conversation. Just a missing conversation, just Just, just yeah. One of the other things, too, in terms of building that sense of trust and competence is I find that when someone comes to me and acknowledges I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 1:I actually assess competence in that person, even though they're saying I'm not competent. I assess that they're competent enough to know that they're not competent for one thing. And going back to care and sincerity those other assessments I'm assessing along with that that they care enough to let me know that they're honest and sincere with themselves. That often, or that always, in fact, boosts my sense of trust in their competence. But I think the biggest piece in competence is just demonstrating that you can do it and that you know that you're doing what's actually expected. So, having had the conversation but one of the things too that I notice in the whole domain of competence that's very common in organizations.
Speaker 1:The classic you have an individual contributor who is highly technically competent. Suddenly that person's boss moves into another role or whatever, and that person's boss's position is open, so that person gets promoted into the position of manager. They often are still working off the idea that being a competent manager is the same as being competent technically. They don't recognize that management, managing other people, is a whole new set of competencies that they are going to have to learn and they may know some little pieces of it. They may be sharp enough to have learned some. They may have even had a manager who was competent at helping them develop towards that direction, and the simple recognition that it's a different competency of skills.
Speaker 2:I see that over and over again. Simon Sinek has a great video called Leader vs Manager, talking about the transition from a doer to a leader and how we don't really set people up for success. Well, but it makes me want to go back to even how we started our whole conversation and this framework and this model making it so easy to know not just where to trust and how to trust, but also where not to trust. I love this word and it means so much more to me after working and navigating the world of trust is the word prudence or being prudent, as an example that I share often when I'm going through this model with people is that you can trust me as a coach.
Speaker 2:I'm credentialed, I'm in good standing with the International Coach Federation. I have hundreds of hours in my experience. You absolutely should not trust me as an accountant. You shouldn't trust me to cut your hair, to fix your car, to pull your tooth. Those are all areas where I don't have competence and I might show up with enthusiasm, I might be very sincere in offering, I can show up and be reliable and I might come from a place of care, but you should absolutely not let me do any of those things because I don't have the competence. That doesn't make me bad or have a deficit, it's just not where my competence is. So then it's prudent for you not to trust me there, and we can develop our trust in all of the other beautiful areas that we do.
Speaker 1:We can actually help. In the case of the individual contributor who's now been promoted to manager and clearly doesn't have that competency yet, and clearly doesn't have that competency yet, we can support that person in developing that competency which is, as you were saying earlier, so often missing. No, you can't yet trust that person to be a really good manager of people. In noticing that, in recognizing that you can help them become that, that's, I think, one of the key pieces here in saying, if I'm making my company's success or this department's success or this team's success vulnerable to this person's actions, sometimes I need to recognize that that's not a good choice in the situation as it is and that I may have the power to intervene and change that situation.
Speaker 1:So two things going on here. One is recognizing wisely. I can't just assume that because they were a really good software developer, that they can be a good manager of software developers or a really good salesperson. Therefore they're going to be a bang up sales manager Just bad idea. It's not where I want to make that aspect of that team vulnerable and I can do something about it. I can change that Right.
Speaker 2:We can have an open conversation and put together a plan to build your competence.
Speaker 1:Just like we have been talking about being able to do something in the domain of competence to change a situation so that we can increase trust or even repair it if we have distrust. That can be done in any of these four domains of trust. We can identify the behaviors that are leading to distrust and we can interview, we can have the conversations we need to haverust and we can interview. We can have the conversations we need to have, whether it's about standards, it's about your reliability and the fact that you're not actually meeting the commitments and what's going on. What's behind that.
Speaker 1:We can have a conversation about, like someone did for me, about not actually having the facts that I claim to have.
Speaker 1:We can have a conversation about care about. Hey, I don't really feel like you have my back, you don't listen to me, whatever it is, but we can have a crucial conversation with someone in any of those domains and it's a lot easier to start with hey, the last three times that you said you were going to have something completed by a certain date, you didn't. Or hey, you know, I don't think we have the same set of standards we're working off of. Or even you know I'm concerned about your support for me in this. It's a lot easier to have that conversation than to have the conversation that starts. I don't trust you. People run away from that conversation. I run away from that conversation generally, or used to, and so I think that's really one of the most valuable pieces of this framework is that it sets us up to actually have powerful conversations, crucial conversations about building or rebuilding or even maintaining trust, about building or rebuilding or even maintaining trust.
Speaker 2:One of the takeaways when I do trust workshops is in the four quadrants take a look and think of someone that you currently don't trust and where would you point to? And now, knowing what you do about the model, what would you like to do differently? Secondly, take a look and have a bit of a self-reflection. In all of these domains, in all of these four areas, how am I showing up and is there anything that I want to pay attention to or tweak or adjust to build more relationships based on trust in my life? We encourage our listeners to think about it from that perspective as you percolate over this. In future episodes we will absolutely use this framework and do deeper dives on the trust issues that we frequently see and hear about with the clients that we work with in organizations. Any other closing comments? Charles?
Speaker 1:No, that's beautiful With that, Hila. Thank you very much for this conversation today. Thank you, Charles, Bye-bye.
Speaker 2:On behalf of both Charles and myself, we want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Penner. Hillary Rideout of Inside Out Branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing for us, and our theme music was composed by Jonas Smith. If you have any questions or comments for us about the podcast, if you have a trust-related situation that you'd like us to take up in one of our episodes, we'd love to hear from you at trust, at trustonpurposeorg.
Speaker 1:And we'd also like to thank you, our listeners. Take care and keep building trust on purpose Until next time.
Speaker 2:Until next time.
