“The missions ran on trust…because the astronauts who sat in those heavy metal eggcups jammed on the top of rockets trusted those of us on the ground. That trust tied the entire team into a common effort.”
– Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director for Gemini & Apollo programs
Last week we explored why focusing on growing and showing trustworthiness is the best way to inspire trust. This week we’ll dig deeper into what exactly trust is. As humans, we trust a myriad of people and things every day in dozens of different circumstances, but can we define it?
Throughout the academic research on trust, there are many definitions; however, each one includes these three elements in some form:
- A willingness to be vulnerable to someone else
- A situation that is important to the trustor
- An inability to monitor or control the trustee
In any context where these three elements are present, trust exists. Remove any one of them and trust evaporates. Basically, that’s any important situation where you’re vulnerable and not in control. Turns out trust is scary.
Trust always involves risk. Doesn’t matter if it’s astronauts and mission control, parents and babysitters, students and teachers, or bosses and employees. Trust always exposes you to possible danger.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of a person with whom you want to build trust. It could be your spouse, your boss, an employee, a teammember, your son or daughter, a client or customer, maybe a friend. What is at stake for her? In his eyes, are you worth the risk?
For Reflection: How can you help mitigate the risk it would take to trust you?
Update: 18,756 words
If you’re on it, you’ll recognize that’s the same number as last week. There are plenty of really good reasons why I failed to add a single word to the manuscript this week. Some of them are really good and, to be honest, I really want to share them with you to justify myself, but I won’t.
Because they don’t matter.
What matters is I let my daily discipline of manuscript writing slip. No matter how many good things get in the way of writing, I can always make time to put a few words down every day. They don’t even need to be good words. But I need to show up…and I will.
