We all know that trust is the currency for all effective relationships. It’s always been that way from the day the humans first set foot on the planet. Trust is why our hunter-gatherer ancestors created communities. Trust is why city walls were built, to allow those we trust inside and keep those we distrust outside. Trust is what powers the global economy. Trust also explains why some companies are more innovative and successful while others fail. Trust is the most powerful thing that exists within the doctor-patient relationship.
But how do we build, rebuild, and sustain trust?
For years now, I’ve been fascinated by the subject of trust and cooperation and have read and researched it extensively. My interest and passion come from my desire to connect better with people and to help them develop and grow. And to be frank, I wasn’t very good at it when I started my research.
Below, I share 7 ways to build, rebuild, and sustain trust within your work relationships (such as your patients, customers, coworkers) and your personal relationships (family, friends, strangers, etc.). As a physician, they help me cultivate trust with my patients and support staff. However, they work for anyone and in any relationship.
It takes C.O.U.R.A.G.E. to trust
One of the best definitions of trust I’ve found comes from author Charles Feltman. He defines trust as choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions. When you look at that definition, you quickly see that trust is a choice. I wholeheartedly agree with that idea but will add that such a choice is facilitated by a feeling — the feeling that you trust a person.
In his book, The Thin Book of Trust, Feltman says, “When you trust someone, what you make vulnerable can range from concrete things such as money, a job, a promotion, or a particular goal, to less tangible things like a belief you hold, a cherished way of doing things, your “good name,” or even your sense of happiness and well being. Whatever you choose to make vulnerable to the other’s actions, you do so because you believe their actions will support it or, at the very least, will not harm it.”
To trust is to be vulnerable. Trust is a choice you make to be vulnerable to betrayal, not in hopes of getting betrayed but in hopes of attaining a fuller and richer life in the process. And it takes tremendous courage to be vulnerable because when we trust, we give up control of something very valuable to us.
To help people remember these essential elements of trust, I have created a helpful acronym, C.O.U.R.A.G.E. This acronym is particularly helpful because it reminds us that it takes a lot of courage to trust someone.
- Caring
- Openness
- Understanding
- Reliability
- Autonomy
- Genuineness
- Expertise
1. Caring: Love and care for people
“Everyone should look out not only for his own interests but also for the interests of others.” Paul of Tarsus.
Caring is loving. As we teach children, caring is sharing. When people feel that you truly care about them and their interests, they trust you more.
To care is to be concerned about the interests of others as well as our own. It is to love others as we love ourselves. Of all the elements of trust, care is the most foundational. A person can have all the remaining elements of trust but if we perceive that they don’t care about us, our trust in them will be at best limited. Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” We are wired to trust people we perceive care for us and have our interests at heart. This is a protective mechanism that has served us well throughout human history. How do you care for people? For the sake of brevity, I refer you to an article I’ve written titled 5 traits of a person who cares. That would be a good start. To that, I would add, non-judgment and generosity. As Brene Brown explains, non-judgment means refraining from judging self or others. “I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment.” Generosity means you extend “the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others”. This means you assume the best of others.
But people will never open up enough to allow us to care for them if they don’t believe that we would keep their secrets confidential. They have to believe that when they open the door and let us into the darker and most vulnerable parts of their lives, we would protect that information and their honor. They have to know that information will be safe with us. If a person cannot trust you to keep their secret, they won’t share it with you. It’s that simple. Because of that, confidentiality is essential for effective care.
In a working relationship, how do you take care of your employees?
When Simon Sinek was on CBS to promote his book, Leaders Eat Last, Charlie Rose asked him, “What’s the most important thing for a leader to understand and be?” Sinek responded without missing a beat, saying, “Fundamentally, a leader is like a parent. Just like a parent, we put the lives of our children before our own. We want them to grow up, become confident, and go on to achieve more than we could for ourselves. Leadership is exactly the same. Leaders are the ones who are willing to risk when it matters, their own interests so that others may abound.”
In a Facebook post, Sinek says the following: “Being a good leader is just like being a good parent. They are one and the same. Leadership is a human activity. And just like leadership, being a parent is more than a 9 to 5 job. The joy of parenting doesn’t come from the work of being a parent, it comes from seeing our children do things that delight us and make us feel proud. Leadership is exactly the same. The more we are inspired by the amazingness of our people, of our kids, the more we can inspire them.” I agree with Sinek. To care for our people at work, we need to have the unconditional love and commitment to them that characterizes the parent-child relationship. We need to seek to help them live and enjoy their lives to the fullest (both at work and at home). As Sinek often rightly notes, we have just one life–there is no way to easily separate our work lives from our personal lives. With that in mind, here are some ways experts recommend an employer can take care of his employees.
- Provide a safe and clean workplace
- Support personal and professional growth
- Recognize hard work (recognize high performance)
- Pay fairly
- Offer competitive benefits
- Offer to help
- Get to know your employees–build relationships, listen and understand them.
- Schedule social time
- Stand by your employees
- Demonstrate your trust
- Create an environment for flow to happen in their work
In a broader sense, to care is to help people meet their fundamental human needs. Seen that way, trust is all about caring. Trust automatically happens when people perceive that we care for them.
Activity: Intentionally build strong, caring relationships and mentor/coach them to grow and achieve their potential. Be a person who CARES: Show Compassion, Acceptance (without judgment), Respectful partnership, Empathic listening and evocation, and Service. Note that according to Carl Rogers, acceptance includes the following elements: 1) recognizing and prizing the absolute inherent worth of every person, 2) Affirmation, 3) Accurate Empathy, 4) Autonomy.
2. Openness: Be transparent and Accountable.
When you practice openness and accountability, people trust you. When people feel that you are open and have nothing to hide, they trust you more.
Open communication, radical transparency, setting clear expectations, and communicating them are all essential elements of a culture of trust. Most of the time, the secrecy we maintain serves neither us nor those we are in a relationship with.
Activity: Be transparent, practice open communication, and be accountable to the people. Be forthright, straightforward, and upfront with people. Give straight answers. Share information freely.
3. Understanding: Make people feel heard, understood, felt, and known by you.
Understanding here refers to using empathy to put yourself in another person’s shoes (perspective-taking), listening to them with full attention and nonjudgmental acceptance, for the sole purpose of understanding the speaker from their point of reference, not yours.
When people feel heard, understood, felt, and known by you, they trust you more. Note here that the other person has to perceive or feel it. Their perception is all that matters.
To help people feel understood, make time to connect and listen to them with the sole purpose of understanding them. Get to know the whole person. In the words of author and leadership expert Stephen Covey, seek first to understand, then to be understood. When you take the time to understand people, they feel safe to make themselves vulnerable to you because they believe that you understand them. A lot of times, we don’t trust how others will treat us and what we value not because we think they don’t care but because we think they haven’t taken the time to know us.
A good way to get to understand people is to practice empathic listening. Mirroring and labeling their emotions are very good ways to build rapport and help others feel understood. For a good book on empathic listening, mirroring, and labeling, Chris Voss’s book, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it is a good resource.
Activity: Invest the time to truly listen to people (without judgment) so that they feel heard, understood, felt, and known by you.
4. Reliability: Make and Keep Promises
When you make and keep promises, people see you as dependable and reliable. When people perceive you as reliable or consistent, they trust you more.
Activity: Be reliable. Keep your promises. Do what you say you will do. Be dependable. Let your yes be yes and no be no.
5. Autonomy: Grow people and give them freedom and voice
When people feel that you are not trying to take away their autonomy, they trust you more.
Give people as much autonomy as possible. We feel safe and can trust someone more when s/he makes us feel that our autonomy is not threatened. We sense this when people honor our boundaries. At work, we sense this when leadership shows us that they trust us by giving us more autonomy and voice in how we do our work. Trust first. Trust begets trust.
Involve people in decisions that affect them. If you manage people, either on the job or in a family, getting them involved very early in coming up with solutions to things that impact them affirms their autonomy. It builds trust as well as makes it easy for them to support such decisions than those made from above and passed down to them.
On the job, the neuroeconomist and author of the Trust Factor, Paul J. Zak’s research shows that training extensively and delegating generously increases trust and performance.
Activity: Here are a few things to do to build trust within a workplace setting:
- Honor people’s boundaries
- Train extensively and delegate generously
- Set challenging and attainable goals but allow team members to choose how to complete projects. Set expectations and let them choose how to get there. Avoid micromanagement.
- Allow team members to choose their own job descriptions, or at least play a big part in choosing their own job descriptions. At Google, people choose their own job titles.
6. Genuineness: Have a genuine and authentic character
“Authenticity requires a certain measure of vulnerability, transparency, and integrity.”–Janet Louise Stephenson
When people feel that you are genuine, they trust you more.
Genuineness is a matter of character. A genuine person is authentic, honest, truthful, and sincere in the way they live and in their relationships with other people. Genuineness is crucial to trust-building. Without genuineness, people just can’t trust you.
And, It’s not like genuine people are perfect. They are not. They make mistakes like everyone else. The difference is that when they err, they own up to it, apologize, and take responsibility to fix it.
See The 7 Habits of Truly Genuine People by Guy Winch, Ph.D.
Activity: Be genuine and vulnerable. Genuine people are authentic and vulnerable.
7. Expertise: Be competent
“Trust is confidence born of the character and competence of an individual or organization.” S.M. Covey
When people feel that you know what you are talking about, they trust you more. An important determinant of whether people will trust a leader is the leader’s level of expertise or competence. How well-informed and knowledgeable is the leader in the industry they are working in? What kinds of results has he produced?
Gain expertise and competence in the area you want people to trust you in. Do words like experienced, expert, and excellent come to mind when other people think about you and the area of trust? Are you able to produce results?
If I wanted to have heart surgery, I would want an experienced and competent heart surgeon. Why? Because that’s whom I want to trust my heart to!
People trust us more when they are convinced we are competent in the area they need to trust us in as shown by past results and experience. As medical providers, we know this first hand. People trust us with their lives every day because of the experience and competence we have acquired through medical school, residency, and board certification. Without that experience, no one should trust us with their health.
Trust is usually specific, not general. For example, just because I trust an experienced surgeon with my heart doesn’t mean I trust him to be my pilot.
The lesson here is that if we want people to trust us in a specific area, we need to demonstrate competence to them in that area.
Activity: Diligently work to develop competence/expertise in the area that serves your people’s needs and present yourself in a way that helps them perceive your competence.
I believe that as you do the things above, people will feel safe enough to make the things they value vulnerable to your actions. Until we start doing these things that enable people to feel safe, they would not trust us, and they shouldn’t.
A version of this article was first published on Doximity.com. See the link below.
Link to Dr. Acha’s original article published on Doximity.com.
About the Author
