What I'm Reading... about Trust

I'm certainly not the first one to write about Charles Feltman's Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer For Building Trust at Work. Feltman initially released it in 2008, but I (and likely most of the world) had missed it, mired in the stress and chaos of the financial crisis. But with his second edition release last summer, suddenly I was hearing about it from everyone. I personally learned of the book through my People & Culture group (thank you Rita Simpson), but Brené Brown and countless other authors are now referencing Feltman's work. So, I set out to read his truly thin, 84-page book earlier this year.

My Prior Thoughts on Trust

Prior to hearing about this book, I was really only familiar of another book on the topic, and even to say I was familiar with it would be quite a stretch. The other book was The Speed of Trust Stephen M.R. Covey and I had simply heard its premise summarized by someone as, essentially, "learn to build trust with people over the long-term, and when one of you need help from the other, with the trust-building already done, then you can move fast." My apologies to Mr. Covey if that doesn't sum up his book well, but that was my third person understanding of it. That summary thought about trust is not bad advice to be sure; it reminded me of the RADAR acronym shared with me by Austin recruiting legend Hank Stringer years ago: "Relationships Ahead of Demand Accelerate Results." But all of those ideas that had entered my brain over the years focused on the effect of trust; I didn't have a framework with which to assess why we trust.

This explaining of the individual aspects of trust is where Feltman's Thin Book of Trust really shines.

I'm embarrassed to say that, prior to reading his book, I probably thought about trust in a pretty simplistic way: I TRUST this person. I DON'T TRUST that other person. I'm NOT SURE if I trust that person. I trust this other person A LOT. I don't trust that person AT ALL.

Of course, I understood trust had to be earned... and that I need to expect others' trust in me is earned, and not automatically given. I shouldn't expect others to immediately trust me, either.

All of those straightforward concepts could be true, but the understanding of what makes up trust itself could still be unclear. Why do I trust someone? Or why do they not trust me? Is it possible to FULLY trust anyone?

My kids used to protest, particularly when they were younger (in a moment where their parents were (possibly) being too controlling, or in a moment where they were (possibly) being unreasonable), that "you don't TRUST me!!!!" I distinctly remember hesitating in my response. Because at one level, they were absolutely correct -- I didn't quite trust them as a 3 year old to chop up their food with a chef's knife, or whatever the matter was at hand. But they didn't seem to be thinking of trust in that way. It seemed to be bubbling up out of multiple frustrations, and they were using the "trust" card as a broad statement about my thoughts of them -- and the inference was that if I said "no, I don't trust you", there would be some kind of break in the relationship, some kind of drastic change over a food-chopping argument that they think might reveal some new truth to their 3 year old self about their parents who brought them into the world.

Honestly, until I read Feltman's book, I definitely thought of trust similarly -- as a binary, all-or-nothing proposition. Yes, the degrees of one's trust could go up and down, but there was a no-man's land on the bottom end that I assumed was hard to recover from. Even if I didn't often have that tendency is my own relationships, I probably feared this direction in others' thoughts of me.

Feltman's Four Distinctions of Trust

Enter Charles Feltman. His book is built on the belief that there are four distinctions of trust, which I'll briefly unpack further below. Although the context for his writing is the professional setting, I think you'll find that you can apply his principles to other relationships as well.

I can't emphasize too much how important this idea of distinctions, or components, of trust was to me, in some ways even more enlightening to me than the distinctions themselves. This implies that if I'm struggling to trust someone, or they are struggling to trust me, there are ways to excavate the hole and find the meteors that made the crater. There are things to look for and to address. One's level of trust doesn't have to be an ambiguous sense or feeling that they constantly work to confirm or correct, and that it is an all-or-nothing proposition. There are reasons why we all show ourselves to be trustworthy, or not, in a given situation or in a given relationship.

Care. Feltman's first distinction is care, which he defines as "the assessment that you have the other person’s interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take actions, and that your intentions toward them are positive." He focuses on care as foundational; it reminds me of John Maxwell's maxim that people "don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." In Feltman's treatment of care, the opposite of not caring about someone is at best transactional ("hey, we know both our departments' managers hate each other, but I'm going to grit my death and push through this project, then we can go our separate ways...") or at worse blatantly self-centered ("true, this is super valuable to the company and I'm the only one who can do this, but I can't work on this two week project, I'm not sure it will help me get promoted.)"

If you don't care about me, and you've said as much publicly or privately, that's going to be a barrier we have to deal with before we jump in together to work on a cross-functional project. Imagine a project that's consuming massive company resources in the hopes of resulting in something amazing. It doesn't matter how incredible the output could be, the project could be a horrible experience with the end result never materializing if we can't improve on the lack of care in our relationship to build the trust needed to together make the project successful.

Initially, I felt like his distinction of care should have been applied more broadly, such as how much someone cares about the task or project at hand. But as I continued through the book, that concept probably lines up more with a combination of his trust distinctions of reliability and competence.

Sincerity. It takes Feltman quite a few words to describe this distinction of trust, which he defines as follows: "Sincerity is the assessment that you are honest and act with integrity; that you say what you mean and mean what you say; you can be believed and taken seriously. It also means when you express an opinion it is valid, useful, and is backed up by sound thinking and evidence. Finally, it means that your actions will align with your words."

As he further unpacked sincerity, I found his reference to internal congruence and external congruence helpful as well. Are you being internally congruent, meaning are you being honest with yourself; are you actually committed to the things you are saying you are committed to? Are you also being externally congruent, in his words "being honest and straighforward with others"? He also helpfully points out that while as leaders we want to be seen as sincere, we don't always do the thought work needed to reflect on how our actions align with our words (or not). There's a lot in this section for leaders of organizations or teams to ponder.

Reliability. I really dug into this distinction whole-heartedly. I've often referred to a failure of reliability (or at least, its manifestations) as various pet peeves of mine in a professional setting -- maybe a lack of responsiveness by email, a failure to follow-up at the time promised, or a failure to complete a major task or project on time with little communication along the way. I believe Feltman would agree that these are all examples of a lack of reliability, but his definition is simply that reliability is "the assessment that you fulfill the commitments you make, that you keep your promises."

There is so much to be said here, it probably warrants a separate article at some point. But Feltman does a fabulous job of identifying the issue as heavily bound up with communication issues. Are your requests you make of others clear? Just because they are clear in your mind, maybe you literally didn't say the right words to make it clear to the other person. If someone has requested something of you, did you clarify the request and clearly commit to (or revoke) that request?

Competence. The fourth distinction of competence, as defined by Feltman, is exactly what it sounds like: "Competence is the assessment that you have the ability to do what you are doing or propose to do." If I've hired a company to hang lights on my house in the holiday season (the best outsource ever, by the way), if the only guy they send out is on his first day on the job, I should be concerned about everything. Will the job get even get done? And if so, will it be done properly? Will it look good? Or should I expect a National Lampoon-esque misadventure to result?

Feltman says often an expectation gap exists -- maybe the "brightness effect" of someone's role or position will confer a degree of competence on them that others will ultimately fail to see fulfilled. Our assessment of another's competence is based on a set of standards and assumptions we have, and he presses us to make sure we are using reasonable standards. He also stresses the importance of being honest when you don't know something, and when you need help. This is something I know many leaders stress to early-career employees, but are we regularly humble enough to admit to ourselves and others when we need help?

The book ultimately closes with chapters focused on how to confront trust issues, the physiology behind trust, as well as discussions on trust in the context of a team and how to put the principles of his book into practice.

In Closing

There's so much that can be done with the insight that these distinctions provide. So next time you experience an issue surrounding trust, do a bit of internal pondering on these distinctions. Which one(s) specifically are the struggle? How can you make progress?

Of course, reading more about trust won't get any of us to state of perfection or perfect trustworthiness. For any concept of a person or being actually worthy of absolute trust, I personally only find that through my religious faith beliefs.

But for life on earth with imperfect humans, this is best thing I've read on the topic. Thank you, Charles Feltman!

What have you read recently about trust? I'd love to hear about it in the comments below!