19/01/2024
Building Trust Levels
How do we trust someone?
Trust is explained as the belief one has in the reliability, capability and truth of something or someone. When we are young, we learn to trust people closest to us such as family members, teachers or caregivers and we do this as children by establishing an emotional profile of the person. We learn to regard someone as emotionally reliable or emotionally unpredictable or unavailable.
We also learn at a young age socially by cognitive profiling of different individuals, or informants, depending on how familiar we are with the individual and we form a global impression of the individual using information from past inaccuracies, ignorance, uncertainty, behaviours and we feed this cognitive information into the profile to access whether we find them trustworthy or not.
However, there is growing evidence that trust is required in organisations and as organisations are multilevel systems, like many other constructs “trust” needs to be assessed at individual, team, and organisational levels. An individual’s trust of another individual or entity, will depend on relationships and depending on what is put in and what is received from the relationship will determine the level of trust created.
Within team’s trust levels are found to be low, and unless there is a good team leader to build team trust, teams may remain with little or no trust between team members. Research finds that servant leadership in teams improve team level affect trust, while transformational leadership increase cognitive trust.
When working in teams it is crucial for the team leader to be able to flex their leadership styles to manage conflict and the “us and them” or “in-group and out group” dynamics that arise within teams.
For the organisation the extent to which HR are willing to go to show the commitment and support for employees, the more likely the employees with trust the organisation. The principle of equity and reciprocity has been frequently applied to interorganisational trust and organisational identification (how individuals link themselves to elements in a social scene with the organisation) has also been linked to overall organisational trust.
So how do we build trust?
Individually we understand how we learn, assess and decide to trust someone. However, understanding the three levels of trust, i.e individual, team and organisational, this sheds some light on how we trust each other at work. There are also other variables essential to building trust in the workplace with each other and within teams which can be leveraged and used to help rebuild trust, some may already know them.
The C’s of trust, Competence, Caring and Consistency or in psychology Character, Competence and Caring. As you can see the C’s of trust can overlap and be displayed in three, four or five elements and for me I include the fifth, Communication.
👉🏻Competence: the ability or demonstrated skills to complete tasks and improve job performance.
👉🏻Caring: the ability to display empathy, kindness, and concern towards others.
👉🏻Consistency: the ability to maintain a level of performance that does not vary.
👉🏻Communication: the ability to effectively share and receive information, enabling relationship building.
👉🏻Character: the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.
The four key trust elements, competence, caring, consistency and communication are where we need to take the time to develop further. By doing this we can build on our own character, which is also known as one’s own authenticity. It is by being authentic that makes the difference in how one leads their employees and teams also in their leadership qualities and abilities to build trust.
