BOOK: Building Trust

Last time I blogged about Stephen Covey's The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (see www.speedoftrust.com). I have a few other books about trust on my bookshelf, including:

• Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, by Dennis & Michelle Reina
  
• The Trusted Leader, by Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau, and ...
  
• Building Trust: in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life by Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores

This time I'd I like to share some of the thoughts from Solomon and Flores' book Building Trust: in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life. I bought it on the recommendation of David Anderson in his blog-entry You are what you read!. That blog-entry also mentions The Trusted Leader, as well as Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity by Francis Fukuyama (which David felt was the most important book he'd seen on the topic so far).

Anyway, since we started exploring what trust is and what it means, here are some excerpt's from the introduction of "Building Trust: in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life, by Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores (italicized comments appearing in square brackets outside of quotation marks are mine):

"Building trust begins with an honest understanding of trust, but it also requires everyday routines and practices. Without the practices, that understanding comes to nothing." [what happens if I replace "trust" with "agility" in this sentence]

"Trust is the essential precondition upon which all real success depends. The key to trust is action, and, in particular, commitment: commitments made and commitments honored."

"The problem of trust has clearly emerged as the problem in human relationships and organizations. What makes most companies falter-leaving aside market forces, bad products, and incompetent management-is the lack of trust."

"Trusting is something we make, we create, we build, we maintain, we sustain with our promise, our commitments, our emotions, and our sense of our own integrity. "

"Trust is not merely reliability, predictability, or what is sometimes understood as trustworthiness. It is always the relationship within which trust is based and which trust itself helps create."

"The freedom provided by trust is the freedom to to engage in projects that one could not or would not undertake on one's own. The freedom provided by trust is the freedom to approach and engage with strangers whom one may in fact never lay eyes on. The freedom provided by trust is the freedom to think for oneself and speak up with one's ideas. It includes as its consequence (not its cost) the freedom to be questioned and criticized -- and the right to be recognized and (if deserving) rewarded."

"Trust is a matter of making and keeping commitments, and the problem is the failure to cultivate commitment making.

"Trust involves sincerity, authenticity, integrity, virtue, and honor. It is a matter of conscientious integrity."

"Authentic trust is going into the unknown together."

"The worst enemies of trust are cynicism, selfishness, and a naïve conception of life in which one expects more than one is willing to give. Resentment, distrust, and inauthenticity are the result."

"Self-trust is the most basic and most often neglected from of trust. Distrust is often a projection of missing self-trust."

"Trust goes hand in hand with truth. Lying is always a breach of trust. What is wrong with lying, in turn, is that it breaches trust. ...telling the truth establishes trust and lying destroys it."

"Authentic trust can never be taken for granted, but must be continuously cultivated through commitments and truthfulness. True leadership, whatever else it may be, can be based on nothing less."

"cordial hypocrisy: the strong tendency of people in organizations, because of loyalty or fear, to pretend there is trust when there is none, being polite in the name of harmony when cynicism and distrust are active poisons, eating away at the very existence of organizations [or relationships]."

"How we think about trust ... makes trust possible, difficult, or even impossible. Trust (like love and freedom) involves any number of self-promoting and self-defeating prophecies."

"Trust(ing), not trustworthiness, is the issue. The existential question is how to trust, not just who can be trusted. (Trust is not only earned; it must be given.)

Trust is a matter of reciprocal relationships, not of predictions, risk and reliance.

Trust is transformative. It is not a matter of trusting or being trusted so much as it is a matter of changing each other and the relationship through trust."

"The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann stresses that trust is a way of dealing with complexity in an increasingly complex society. There is a deep truth to this. The paradigm of trust is not found in the simplicity of a familiar relationship. Rather, it exists in the new complexity of the world and the global economy. Trust not only lets us increase complexity in our lives (and thus simplify them at the same time); it also changes our lives in dramatic ways, allowing us to explore in new directions, to experiment and express ourselves in our relationships in ways that would otherwise be unthinkable. And it allows us to grow and change and mellow and deepen in all the ways that merely provincial trust and distrust distort and prohibit."

"Trust is not always a good thing. Trust can be foolish, naive, gullible, and blind. And trust ought never to be taken for granted. That is why we insist the issue is building trust -- that is, creating trust, maintaining trust, restoring trust once it has been lost or betrayed. We want to suggest that this requires a radical revision of our conception of trust. Our thesis, to put it simply, is that trusting is something that we individually do; it is something we make, we create, we build, we maintain, we sustain with our promises, our commitments, our emotions, and our sense of our own integrity.

Trust is not, contrary to what some authors have written, a medium, an atmosphere, a 'lubricant,' social 'glue,' a lucky break for one society or another, or some mysterious social 'stuff.' Trust is an option, a choice. It is an active part of our lives, not something that is there from the beginning, or that can be taken for granted. It involves skills and commitment, not just good luck or mutual understanding.

The focus of trust -- or what we will call authentic trust -- is not just the hoped for outcome of this or that event or transaction. Trust is not merely reliability, predictability, or what is sometimes understood as trustworthiness. It is always the relationship within which trust is based and which trust itself helps create. Authentic trust does not necessitate the exclusion of distrust. To the contrary, it embraces the possibilities of distrust and betrayal as an essential part of trust. To be somewhat grim in our initial characterization of trust, it entails the possibility of betrayal.

The loss of trust is not mere disappointment. That is why trust is often evident only in the event of a breakdown. Like love, trust often becomes most palpable in the breach. (“You don't miss your water till the well runs dry.”) Building trust means coming to terms with the possibility of breach and betrayal."

"Trust, like love, may seem to fail us, but truly, we fail at trust or love. But then we get more sophisticated. We learn that trust, like love, is an emotional skill. It requires judgment. It requires vigilant attention. It requires conscientious action. It involves all of the intricate reciprocities of a human relation­ship (even in cases in which it remains “unrequited”)."

"Trust. like love, is an emotional skill, an ongoing dynamic aspect of relationships. We don't just fall in love, we decide to love. So, too, we do not simply find ourselves trusting, after months or perhaps years of comfortable familiarity. We make decisions to trust. We make promises and tacit communication. We see them through. We come to have expectations of others, and we respond to the fulfillment or frustration of those expectations. Trust isn't something we 'have,' or a medium or an atmosphere withing which we operate. Trust is something we do, something we make. Our mutual choices of trust determine nothing less than the kinds of beings we are and the kinds of lives we will live together."

Note some of the similarities and differences between the above, and what Stephen R. Covey writes in The Speed of Trust. Next time I'll give a few more resources on trust!